On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 09:37:52 -0500 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
writes:
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> >I've always described myself as an atheist by birthright, and the
> >immense amount of Christian and other "spiritual" material to which
> any
> >student of renaissance & 18th-c literature is exposed never for a
> minute
> >led me to reconsider that birthright. "Spirituality" baffles me --
> and
> >the most likely explanation for its continued grip on so many seems
> to
> >me to be that it is at bottom spoiled solidarity. Even as an empty
> >verbal formula it tends to dry up and blow away within a mass
> movement,
> >then flourish again in when mass struggle declines.
>
> Religion isn't a mass movement?
I think his point was that religious enthusiasm thrives during periods of political quiescence. Thus it was no accident that the whole "born again" movement got going in the US following the decline of mass movements like the antiwar, civil rights, and student movements. E.P. Thompson in his *The Making of the English Working Class* made a rather similar point. Outbreaks of religious revivalism among English workers generally occurred during periods when there was relatively little limited resistance by workers against capital.
Jim F.
>
> Doug
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>
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