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COMMUNISM AND CHRISTIANISM
* * * * * *
TO THE PURCHASER:
Lying Supernaturalism is going; robbing Capitalism is falling; saving
Laborism is rising, and leveling Unionism is coming.
This booklet, Communism and Christianism, is a contribution by Bishop
and Mrs. Wm. M. Brown, of Galion, Ohio, towards the furtherance of these
downward, upward and forward movements, the most fortunate events in the
whole history of mankind. We hope that you will read, mark, learn and
inwardly digest its extremely revolutionary, comprehensive and salutary
teachings concerning both religion and politics with the happy result of
becoming an apostle of its illuminating and inspiring interpretation of
the scientific gospel of Marx and Engels to wage slaves, the only gospel
which points the way to redemption from their body and soul destroying
slavery.
You may become a missionary of this gospel in your neighborhood, and as
such do more good than all its orthodox preachers, teachers, editors and
politicians together at no financial cost to yourself by ordering
booklets at our special rates: six copies, $1.00; twenty-five copies,
$3.00, prepaid, and selling them to workers at our retail price, 25
cents for one copy. As we make no profit and do no bookkeeping, cash
should accompany all orders.
To organizations working for bail, defense, liberation or unemployment
funds, Bishop and Mrs. Brown donate twenty-five copies for each
twenty-five ordered with remittance.
The Bradford-Brown Educational Company, Inc. Publishers--Galion, Ohio
Editions and Their Dates.
First Edition, 10,000 copies, October 11th, 1920.
Second Edition, 10,000 copies, revised and enlarged from 184 to 204
pages, February 15th, 1921.
Third Edition, 10,000 copies, March 2nd, 1921.
Fourth Edition, 10,000 copies (2,000 in cloth binding), revised and
enlarged from 204 to 224 pages, April 9, 1921.
[Illustration: Rt. Rev. William Montgomery Brown, D. D.
Fifth Bishop of Arkansas, Resigned; Member House of Bishops Protestant
Episcopal Church; Sometime Archdeacon of Ohio and Special Lecturer at
Bexley Hall, the Theological Seminary of Kenyon College. Now Episcopos
in partibus Bolshevikium et Infidelium.]
* * * * * *
COMMUNISM AND CHRISTIANISM
Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View
by
WILLIAM MONTGOMERY BROWN
Banish the Gods from the Skies and Capitalists from the Earth and make
the world safe for Industrial Communism.
The Bradford-Brown Educational Company, Inc. Publishers ... Galion, Ohio
Fortieth Thousand
DEDICATION
This booklet is gratefully dedicated to the Proletariat from whom Bishop
and Mrs. Brown are sprung, and to whose unrequited labors (not to the
good providence of a divinity) they owe their wealth, leisure and
opportunities.
PROLEGOMENA[A]
Religion is the opium of the people. The suppression of religion as
the happiness of the people is the revindication of its real
happiness. The invitation to abandon illusions regarding its
situation is an invitation to abandon a situation which has need of
illusions. Criticism of religion is therefore the germ of a
criticism of the vale of tears, of which religion is the holy
aspect.
--Marx.
Not only, indeed, is the struggle against religion intellectually
useful, but it cannot conscientiously be avoided, for religion is used
against the Socialist movement by the possessing class in every country.
But to abolish religion is not to abolish exploitation, because only one
of the enemy's guns will have been silenced. The workers have, above
all, to dislodge the capitalist class from power. The religious
question, and indeed all else, is secondary to this.
The test of admission to a Socialist Party must be neither more nor less
than acceptance of the following seven working principles and the policy
of Socialism as a class movement:
1. Society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of
the means of living (i. e., land, factories, railways, etc.) by the
capitalist or master class, and the consequent enslavement of the
working class, by whose labor alone wealth is produced.
2. In society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests,
manifesting itself as a class struggle, between those who possess
but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.
3. This antagonism can be abolished only by the emancipation of the
working class from the domination of the master class by the
conversion into the common property of society of the means of
production and distribution, and their democratic control by the
whole people.
4. As in the order of social evolution the working class is the
last to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class
will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of
race or sex.
5. This emancipation must be the work of the working class itself.
6. As the machinery of capitalist government, including the armed
forces of the nation, conserves the monopoly by the capitalist
class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must
organize consciously and politically for acquiring the powers of
government, national and local, in order that this machinery,
including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of
oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of
privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.[B]
7. As all political parties are but the expression of class
interests, and as the interest of the working class is
diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the
master-class, the party seeking working-class emancipation must be
hostile to every other party.
If a man supports the church, or in any respect allows religious ideas
to stand in the way of the foregoing seven essential principles of
socialism or the activity of a Party, he proves thereby that he does not
accept Socialism as fundamentally true and of the first importance, and
his place is outside.
No man can be consistently both a Socialist and a Christian. It must be
either the socialist or the religious principle that is supreme, for the
attempt to couple them equally betrays charlatanism or lack of thought.
There is, therefore, no need for a specifically anti-religious test.
So surely does the acceptance of Socialism lead to the exclusion of the
supernatural, that the Socialist has little need for such terms as
Atheist, Free-thinker, or even Materialist; for the word Socialist,
rightly understood, implies one who, on all such questions, takes his
stand on positive science, explaining all things by purely natural
causation, Socialism being not merely a politico-economic creed, but
also an integral part of a consistent world philosophy.
So long as the anarchy of modern competitive society exists, the
accompanying obscurity and confusion in social life will continue to
shelter superstition. This point is illustrated in the following
reference by Marx to the United States:
When we see in the very country of complete political emancipation
not only that religion exists, but retains its vigour, there is no
need, I hope, for other proofs in order to show that the existence
of religion is not incompatible with the full political maturity of
the State. But if religion exists it is because of a defective
social organization, of which it is necessary to seek the cause in
the very essence of the State.
Class domination is the essence of the modern State. It is based on
competitive anarchy and parasitism--the evidences of a defective social
organization. It still leaves room for religion, because it maintains
ignorance and confusion by its structure and contradictions, and because
religion is fostered as a handmaiden of class rule.
Nevertheless, the growth of the social forces of production within
modern society, and the better knowledge the workers obtain of their
true relations to each other and to Nature, loosen the chains of ghost
worship and mysticism from their limbs and lessen the power of religion
as a political weapon in the hands of the ruling class, while they form,
at the same time, the material and intellectual preparation for an
intelligently organized society. The matter has been put in a nutshell
by Marx in the chapter on "Commodities" in "Capital," volume I.
The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then
finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life
offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable
relations with regard to his fellow men and to nature.
The life process of society, which is based on the process of
material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it
is treated as production by freely associated men, and is
consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.
This, however, demands for society a certain material groundwork or
set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the
spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development.
It is, therefore, a profound truth that Socialism is the natural enemy
of religion. Through Socialism alone will the relations between men in
society, and their relations to Nature, become reasonable, orderly, and
completely intelligible, leaving no nook or cranny for superstition. The
entry of Socialism is, consequently, the exodus of religion.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] From the Official Manifesto by the Socialist Party of Great Britain,
showing the Antagonism between Socialism and Religion.
[B] This section has been slightly changed to make sure of guarding
against the advocacy of armed insurrection. Socialists throughout the
world want a peaceful evolution from capitalism into socialism; but
whether or not it will be so in the case of any country is, as Lenin
prophesies, to be determined by the dealings of its capitalists with its
laborers. In reply to an inquiry on this vexed subject by an English
author, Lenin said, in effect, that in England, as elsewhere, the
tactics of the capitalist class will determine the program of the labor
class.
THE INTERNATIONAL PARTY.
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Arise, ye wretched of the earth,
For justice thunders condemnation,
A better world's in birth.
No more tradition's chains shall bind us,
Arise, ye slaves! no more in thrall!
The earth shall rise on new foundations,
We have been naught, we shall be all.
We want no condescending saviors.
To rule us from a judgment hall.
We workers ask not for their favors,
Let us consult for all.
To make the thief disgorge his booty,
To free the spirit from its cell,
We must ourselves decide our duty,
We must decide and do it well.
The law oppresses us and tricks us,
Taxation drains the victim's blood;
The rich are free from obligations,
The laws the poor delude.
Too long we've languished in subjection,
Equality has other laws:
"No rights," says she, "without their duties.
No claims on equals without cause."
Toilers from shops and fields united,
The party we of all who work;
The earth belongs to us, the people,
No room here for the shirk.
How many on our flesh have fattened!
But if the noisome birds of prey
Shall vanish from the sky some morning,
The blessed sunlight still will stay.
CONTENTS
Page
PROLEGOMENA 5
PART I.
COMMUNISM: THE NATURALISTIC THIS-WORLDLY
GOSPEL FOR THE COMING AGE OF CLASSLESS EQUALITY
AND ECONOMIC FREEDOM 13