Religion and Politics; There is Good News and Bad News

• Published in: New politics Vol. X; no. 4; p. 45
• Main Author: Cox, Harvey
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York New Politics 01.01.2006
• Subjects: Politics; Religion
• ISSN: 0028-6494

In India, the Bharata Janata Party, whose program was to "Hinduize" India was turned out of office, but retains a large following of the country's poor. In Pakistan, radical Islamic madrasas multiply while the public school system languishes. In China, the Maoist myth is dead, no longer believed even by Communist Party leaders. Since nature, culture, and politics, all abhor a vacuum, the big question now is what will replace it? The main contenders seem to be either the religion of consumer/capitalism (with its own myths and rituals) or some characteristically Chinese form of Christianity, or maybe a mixture of the two. In Latin America, which lived with and under 500 years of Catholic corporatism, evangelical Protestantism (mainly in its Pentecostal expression) is spreading like a prairie fire. The Catholic Church is hemorrhaging at the rate of tens of thousands per day. In Israel, pioneered by left-leaning, anti-religious Zionists, a growing ultra-orthodox movement, strongly allied with the American religious right, insists on pushing the "Jewish state" (which is actually a multi-religious state with a 20 percent Palestinian Muslim and Christian minority) toward a "Torah state." Inspired by the theology of the late Rabbi Abraham Kook, this "messianic Zionism" insists that Israelis have a divine mandate to cling to every square inch of the eretz Israel, and some look forward to the time when the Temple will be rebuilt. The other Marxist thinker who needs to be heeded now if we are to understand our historical moment is, of course, Ernst Bloch. A brilliant historian and theoretician, Bloch also reused to embrace metaphysical atheism, which he considered "bourgeois," and argued that the left must understand the power of myth, ritual and dream. Bloch settled in East Germany after World War II in the fond hope that the kind of humanistic Marxism he advocated might find a home there. It was not an impossible dream. The lower and middle ranks of the SED in the German Democratic Republic were filled with admirers of Bloch. However, after Bloch decamped for Tubingen when he saw, to his dismay, how things were developing in the DDR, his admirers had to bite their lips, at least in public. Then after the Russian and East German destruction of Dubcek's "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia in 1968, Bloch became even more persona non grata and the DDR spiraled even further into Walther Ulbricht's derivative version of Stalinism. Given the demise of other plausible Marxist interpretations of religion, it may be time to retrieve his legacy. There is much organizing to do. And a lot is happening, albeit not widely reported in an American press charmed by TV evangelists Focus on the Family. The progressive Evangelical, Jim Wallis, heads a national religiously based program to combat poverty, not with charity but with justice. His book, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It was on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. Wallis draws huge crowds at evangelical colleges all over America, and students and faculty greet his attacks on the religious right with standing ovations. Rabbi Michael Lerner has assembled over 500 "spiritual progressives" year after year, and has just published a book entitled The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From The Religious Right. In October, 2005, leaders of several religious groups, joined by many lay people, met in Cambridge, MA to organize the "Inter-Religious Network to End the Nuclear Weapons Threat." Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Buddhists, and Protestants of several different denominations attended. A national program will be launched early next year.