--- On Sat, 7/18/09, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Leszek Kolakowski dies
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Saturday, July 18, 2009, 12:07 PM
> Matthias Wasser wrote:
> >
> > Is Christianity reactionary? (This isn't necessarily a
> rhetorical
> > question.)
>
> Not necessarily or even probably. The notion that there is
> a necessary
> relationshp between any given religion and a given politics
> is an
> idealist fallacy. Men & women shape their religion to
> fit their
> politics, which flow from their total life experience,
> rather than shape
> their politics according to religious dogma. Pracicve is
> prior to
> theory.
>
[WS:] I have to agree with Carrol on that. Christian doctrine (which BTW is a knockoff of Aristotelian philosophy for a significant part) is just literature, and as such can be linked to any kind of politics. Just as any other literature.
Having said that, however, the Roman Catholic Church is a reactionary institution that has been pursuing anti-labor policies since the proclamation of the encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. In fact Rerum Novarum was an effort to undermine socialist influence in labor organizing and split labor. Not to mention the unholy alliance between the Catholic hierarchy and fascist dictatorships in southern Europe and Latin America.
So it makes no sense to discuss Christianity or for that matter any religion in abstraction - this is a specific institutional and political force and as such, it is very reactionary.
Wojtek