Earthly Powers by Michael Burleigh

Author:Michael Burleigh [Michael Burleigh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian History, Not Read
ISBN: 9780061741456
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In the solidaristic identification of the individual with the whole, they built the powerful organisations and communities which, like great religions, placed people under their spell. They gave them a view of the world, a country and a home. Here people did not only take part in politics: they also sang and drank, celebrated and made friendships. What was impossible elsewhere was possible here: you could be a human being.

In their prison cells, several socialist leaders reflected on the nature of utopia, a fashionable literary genre that also thrived among people staring at the walls of a cell. The most famous such product was Bebel’s Die Frau und der Sozialismus (1879), written during two stints in prison in 1872–4 and 1877–8. In addition to its egalitarian and statist economic musings, Bebel’s book imagined that in his future society idleness would be replaced by a fervour to work; many crimes would disappear; literary taste would be cleansed; and life would be happy and carefree. This anthropological optimism accounts for why his book became the socialist Bible.138

Some socialists made the connection between religion and socialism explicit. ‘Beloved fellow citizens!’ wrote a Marxist autodidact, ‘the tendencies of socialism contain the building blocks for a new religion…Until now, religion was a question for the proletariat. Now, by contrast, the question of the proletariat is becoming a religion.’

Outside such totalitarian environments it was usual to find more variegated allegiances based on apparent contradiction. In the Erzgebirge, where workers had pictures of Luther next to those of the Virgin Mary, they also had August Bebel beside the king of Saxony, leading a pastor to comment: ‘In the soul of the people, it is the same as it is on the wall; they bring together harmlessly things that are most opposed.’139 This was what respectively Martin Rade and Alfred Levenstein discovered in two small surveys of working-class religious beliefs and practices which they conducted in 1898 and 1912. Levenstein found that just over half of his miners, metal and textile workers did not believe in God (13 per cent said they did) but that only a handful had gone to the trouble of disaffiliating from the state Churches. Their party did not demand this and, besides, most of them did not want to offend other family members who were religious, or feared damage to their children’s future prospects. Pastor Rade discovered a near universal contempt for the Churches and scepticism towards parts of the Bible. By contrast, there was unanimous respect for Jesus as a ‘true workers’ friend’, with one claiming that were Jesus alive ‘today he would certainly be a Social Democrat, maybe even a leader and a Reichstag deputy’. In other words, Jesus was a proto-revolutionary or secular reformer.140

The claim that Social Democracy was a surrogate religion was made at the time by such opponents as the German Jesuit who in 1878 wrote: ‘Because Man must have a religion, socialism has become the religion of atheistic workers particularly in Protestant regions.’ Protestant critics accused the

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