[lbo-talk] Church meeting rooms (and I don't mean unitarian) Re: Rationality of the Masses

Jeffrey Fisher jeff.jfisher at gmail.com
Sun Jun 19 22:11:25 PDT 2005


On 6/19/05, Chuck0 <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> snitsnat wrote:
>
> > this is so true, it ain't funny. if you actually work in leftist orgs,
> > all you ever do is work with religious people: catholics, protestants,
> > you name it, were involved in everything from pro-choice organizing,
> > working with single mothers with a feminist org in town, labor
> > organizing, the plant closing legislation organizing that went on in the
> > eighties, anti-nuclear proliferation, antiwar during Gw1, antiwar now,
> >
> > ok, "all you ever do" is over the top, but what i mean is that leftist
> > reach out to religious groups all the time, via coalition building,
> > because they actively seek out groups with whom to work, etc.
> >
> > no one makes fun of religious people when you're organizing, protesting,
> > whatever. most people are very respectful and many people are vaguely
> > religious themselves, or celebrate christmas or major holidays, etc.
> > what could it possibly bother anyone to be in a roomful of religious
> > people.
>
> Fuck religious people. I'm tired of religion dominating our lives and I
> ain't going to give some soft Christians a free pass. If you believe in
> stupid shit like Santa Claus or Jesus, you ought to be confronted about
> it. And if these liberal Christians are so wonderful, why aren't they
> doing more to stop the fundamentalist extremists?
>

see, this is really the problem. i responded to chuck in the first place on this thread in its early incarnation (;-), and i should have let it go. i guess i thought that if you say stupid shit like, " If you believe in stupid shit like Santa Claus or Jesus, you ought to be confronted about it", you ought to be confronted about it. but in the end, it doesn't matter any more that i confront chuck than that chuck challenges every christian he meets to some pseudo-intellectual duel about the relative merits of belief in santa claus and belief in a christian god.

the truth is, as kelley and carrol rightly point out, many (if not most) people who do organizing in fact do work with religious people and often use churches for meeting places (we did when i was doing union organizing and miscellaneous social justice stuff around it in grad school). i can't even tell you how much stuff i used to get in new haven and chicago where groups were meeting in churches. so, in that respect, it belies chuck's question.

and i'm still trying to figure out exactly what chuck thinks "doing more to stop the fundamentalist extremists" means (or what giving "some soft christians a free pass" means, for that matter). but i'm not confronting him about it, since that clearly doesn't work. i'm just still trying to figure it out. he accepted yoshie's suggestion about education, except he said it's not enough, and that "direct action gets the goods". now, surely chuck shouldn't feel the need to convince me of anything. but i'd be happy to work on direct action in opposition to fundamentalist religion (or, let's say, in opposition to fundamentalist activity) if i had a better idea what the actions might look like and exactly what the goods might be.

j

-- I have come to the conclusion that revolutions aren't profitable.

- Kevin Kelly



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