Christianity and Marxism

["soil_ride" <soilride@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I must say it is a great feeling to come back to this mailing list, I have
always enjoyed what has been posted and the updates on the events that are
shaping this world. Recently I have been reading about Latin America and some of
the posts concerning the Church helping workers and campesinos in these third
world countries... This is rather a long post, but I would just like to share
some thoughts I've had and some observations I have made....   Ever since I was
introduced to marxist thought and social analysis of the historical process, I
have been intrigued by the awe of it. It even goes further than just being
"intrigued". To quote a small passage from the biography of Guy Debord[by Anselm
Jappe]: "When I began reading Marx, I was surprised never to have heard his name
mentioned at school. When I began to understand Marx, I was no longer surprised
in the least."  
However, before being inspired by Marx and other marxists, I had been a
Christian and lived and grew up in a Christian environment. Although for many
years I held onto the belief of being a christian, I wanted to know why atheists
denied the existence of God, or faith. Observing the Christianity through
history and through its own actions, justifying "discoverers of the new world"
to colonize and assimilate the "new world" into their own...I had found conflict
with what I had believed and what I was reading about. In fact the actions of
the so called European Christians to me, seemed very much un-christian. Even in
Europe when the Church suppressed philosophical and scientific thought and
considered anyone who did "heretics", which was enough to give them a death
sentence.
America has demonstrated that Christianity played a large role in the
European-American bourgeios concept of dominating classess and have hardly
related it to the conditions of the day, especially in the third world. >From
the giant cathedrals of the Roman Catholic Church with statues of gold, and
robes of finest fabric and silk, to the rise of the Christian Coalition and
Televangelists gaining a huge accumulation of wealth and political power....a
christianity already, since its historic rise, embedded fully in the capitalist
"open free-enterprise". My problem isn't Christianity and christian thought
itself, but the problem of the bourgeios Christians that has already dominated
christian thought in a bourgeois world.
For a long time, I had denounced Christianity because of its seemingly refusal
to look at the world in three and four dimensions. But back then I didn't know
this either. I accepted this "bourgeios christianity" but felt I didn't "fit"
into its way of life, a nonconforming christian within the margins of
"christianity". However as I began to read Marx and become more introduced to
his writings, the more and more I agree with him. There was a small tiny
problem, and that was God. As I was tearing apart the contradictions between
Christianity and Christians, and the contradictions of religions, I was also
exploring and interested in humanity and in the liberation for a more and free
and open society in which all people can share a degree of freedom without being
exploited...
The right and the freedom to practice religion, in marxist societies, what are
we to make of them? For me, at this point in my thinking, I could not hold to
Christianity as I knew it and still understand the importance of marxist
criticism of religion and of capitalist society. I could not however make a
connection between Christianity and Marxism and this has been my biggest
problem. I broke ties off with christianity. I would have to write another whole
email as to where I went from this point on, in my philosophical
discourse...mostly in the area of existentialism and nihilism, but still holding
marxism and socialism very much in high regard.
It was only after reading a book of a different subject matter that forced me
back to rethinking christianity and marxism. Having only read the first ten
pages(and I still haven't gotten any further) of The Jesuits: The Society of
Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church by Malachi Martin, I had to
rethink Christianity once and for all. In fact, from just reading these first
pages, has been like rediscovering Karl Marx all over again. It simply blew my
mind, and I could not respond. This was my first introduction to theology,
especially of the famous "Theology of Liberation".  One of the main founders of
this "liberation theology" has been Gustavo Guttierez, who has writtened his
book on it entitled "A Theology of Liberation".
"It is important that numerous Christians, whose faith is clear and who are
committed to live the Christian life in its fullness, become involved in the
struggle for justice, freedom, and human dignity because of their love for their
disinherited, oppressed, and persecuted brothers and sisters. " How such words
have never been spoken of towards the majority of American Christians while
attending church services!
With my own words I can not fully express the whole ideas of the Christian
Liberation Theologians and especially for the Society of Jesus. So I shall post
some of what Malachi Martin has writtened:

"In place of a hierarchic Church, they are aiming at a church composed of small
and autonomous communities of people- "the people of God," as they are
collectively are known, or "the people's church"- all loosely associated only by
faith, but definetaly not by one central and centralizing authority such as the
papacy claims to be.
In place of the other worldy purpose of the traditional Church, the Society of
Jesus has substituted the here and now struggle for the liberation of one class
of men and women in our society today: those millions who suffer from social,
economic, and political injustice.
The way of speaking about that class struggle is an important and delicate
matter for the Jesuits. The new mission of the Society of Jesus-for it is
nothing less than that-suddenly places them in actual and in some instances,
willing alliance with Marxists in their class struggle. The aim of both is to
establish a sociopolitical system afffecting the economies of nations by a
thorough-going redistribution of earth's resources and goods; and, in the
proces, to alter the present governmental systems...   ...A brief cameo of three
[types of]Jesuits- a sociopolitical scientist, a devoted guerrilla, and a
formidable theologian teacher...
Such men were the dream and ideal of the true Liberation Theologians. For they
were the fighters, the cadres who took Liberation Theology from theory to what
they called praxis--The implementation of the people's revolution for economic
and political liberation. From that praxis, the Liberation Theologians insisted,
from "below among the people," would come all true theology to replace the old
theology once imposed autocratically "from above" by the hierarchy of the Roman
Church."  

Out of the three types of Jesuits, one stands out, that of James Francis Carney,
SJ, a "man who was the paragon of praxis".  If anyone is interested, James
Francis Carney wrote his autobiography while in Nicaruaga by candlelight waiting
to illegally enter his beloved Honduras and to join the armed struggle for
Honduras for its liberation.  It is called "To Be a Revolutionary" by J.
Guadalupe Carney, S.J.  His autiobiography, my own personal opinion, is superb. 
I personally place Carney as a Christian and Marxist revolutionary alongside
that of other revolutionaries such as Che Guevara   My point however is not to
make christians out of marxists or marxists out of christians...as Carney wrote:
  "To be a christian is to be a revolutionary.  If you are not a revolutionary,
you are not a christian."