[lbo-talk] Re: working class?

[amadeus amadeus]

Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> wrote: 
> Yeah, those Catholics knew how to do religion right. They knew that
> religion is supposed to inspire awe, astonishment and the sense of 
> something
> bigger than life in people and understood the role of theatrics to 
> attain
> that goal. A very different animal from the feel-good-about-myself 
> variety
> that developed on this side of the pond.

I suspect that might be due to the fact that the Catholic
Church evolved under a feudal social order and has
retained some of the communitarian values of
that order, even while adapting to capitalism.
Protestantism was born of the revolt against
feudalism and the American variety has been,
almost from the beginning, suffused with capitalist
values and attitudes. feel-good varieties represent
a form of religiosity that is adapted to the consumer
society of late capitalism.

Yeah, part of that turn backwards to an older social order seems to increase as capitalism advances; in the same manner, U.S. southerners look fondly on the days of the Confederacy, before the inhumanity of capitalism and wage-labor had sunk in.
I guess this reveals something about the regressivism of late capitalism as it actually exists these days-- somehow we are left pining for Genesis through Revelations and its associated imagery, rather the Manifesto through Volume 3 and Diego Rivera murals. 

 
--adx

 

"Mary Poppins is alive and well in Argentina, she sends her regards."
- Rod McKuen, The Mud Kids

		
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