[Reader-list] Karl Marx, Evangelical? By Case Wagenvoord Countercurrents.org

[Venugopalan K M]

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Karl Marx, Evangelical?

*By Case Wagenvoord*

20 July, 2009
*Countercurrents.org*

Ennui is gripping the left. It sits paralyzed, holding its breath, as it
waits for its Messiah, Barack Obama, to step into a phone booth, shed his
suit and leap out as Super Lefty who flies the country into the elysian
fields of progressive glory.

It’s not going to happen for two reasons: Obama’s a centrist and phone
booths are no more.

But, the left still waits, hoping, discussing, analyzing, lamenting, and
grousing while the shadow of economic misery spreads across the land.

It is time Karl Marx went evangelical. That’s where the action is. There you
have the spirit and the passion without which a revolution is simply all
talk and no action. In other words, the Left has to climb down from its
ivory tower and not only join the sweating throngs in their basement and
storefront churches; it’s got to lead the goddamn revivals.

Their appeal must be to the gut, not the brain. As Drew Weston points out in
his book, The Political Brain:

Rationalizations are the post hoc smoke that billows from emotional fires.
In our study, only after (emphasis his) partisans had come to emotionally
biased judgments did we see any activation in the circuits usually
associated with reasoning, suggesting that they had begun to develop
rationalizations for their emotional biases.

Murray Dobbin[1] did piece on America’s radical rabbi, Michael Lerner, who
believes the left is cursed by the dead albatross of secular fundamentalism,
and advocates a more spiritual approach. However, as Dobbin points out,
“Spiritualism seems to fly in the face of the kind of rationalism that has
been at the core of socialist and social democratic theory for nearly two
centuries.”

Yet, for all his talk of spiritualism, Dobbin and Learner still seems mired
in a rationalist tar pit. Dobbin speaks of “engaging” people when the talk
should be of inspiring and inflaming them. Lerner advocates a “politics of
meaning” that “fosters ethically, spiritually, ecologically, and
psychologically sensitive and caring human beings who can maintain
long-term, living personal and social relationships.”

It’s a nice thought, but it lacks passion and poetry. Why not speak of the
Workers Paradise as the Kingdom of God on Earth where they beat their swords
into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and where:

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the
kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child
shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down
together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The sucking child shall
play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on
the adder's den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for
the earth shall be full of the knowledge of The Lord as the waters cover the
sea. (Isaiah 11:6-9 RSV)

Dobbin asks, “Why do further millions identify with right-wing evangelical
religion rather than the call for secular social justice?”

The “Religious Right” is a media invention, and Progressives, me included,
have fallen into to this trap by heaping scorn on the very group that could
well be the vanguard of a revolutionary movement. Consequently, the field
has been left open to a handful of televangelists who are to Christianity
what Jack the Ripper was to feminism. They preach hate and, consequently,
fundamentalists have wasted their time on meaningless culture wars over gay
marriage and evolution instead of putting their focus on the message of
social justice found in the teachings of Jesus. .

These are people looking for meaning and community in their lives. They have
rejected our fantasyland of go-go consumerism and are looking for more. All
they need be shown is that their meaning lies not in the Book of Revelation
but in Marx. Latin America is light years ahead of us with their Liberation
Theology that blends Christianity and Marxism.

There is another reason to send Karl to the nearest bible college. A
long-standing ruse of our oligarchs has been to split the dispossessed
classes along racial and ethnic lines. They well understand that the poor
will suffer in silence as long as there is another group they can look down
on. This is why southern oligarchs maintained a rift between poor blacks and
poor whites with their Jim Crow laws and why Republicans sputter so about
“illegal” immigrants..

In spite of this, there is one common thread that unites poor Euromericans,
Afromericans and Hispanomericans, and that is their fundamentalist faith. If
the left could tap into that, we would be a power to be reckoned with. Sure,
we’d have to lose our ideological prissiness, but that could be a plus.

Dobbin nails it when he reams Canada’s socialist party for failing to
develop a radical vision for the future. Instead of addressing people’s need
for a broader meaning, it “reduces that vision to a package of disconnected,
minor reforms that doesn’t offend the media power brokers. Of course, it
doesn’t’ inspire anyone either….”

As Weston likes to ask, “Who remembers Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a plan’
speech?”

*Case Wagenvoord *is a citizen who reads. He has a BA in Political Science
and an MA in Liberal Studies. He blogs at *http://belacquajones.blogspot.com
* <http://belacquajones.blogspot.com/> and welcomes comments at*
Wagenvoord at msn.com*.




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