Revolutionary Activists Speak Out Against Religion

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Tanya Burnett

NEW YORK—“We have reached an era where a leap to totalitarianism is possible,” said revolutionary activist Sunsara Taylor on Wednesday night at Cooper Union’s Wollman Auditorium.

Taylor’s statements came during a debate on the provocative topic of “Atheism, God, and Morality in a Time of Imperialism and Rising Fundamentalism,” which also included former New York Times Middle East correspondent Chris Hedges.

In front of an audience of more than 200 people, Taylor criticized the religious base in America, which she believes is the cause for war and economic inequality around the world, while Hedges expressed that radicalism on either end of the spectrum—whether atheist or Christian—will only lead to destruction.

Although it seemed like a balanced debate, the audience—on the other hand—was mostly comprised of atheist individuals like Taylor, most of who are active members of radical organizations such as the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Harlem Revolutionary Club.

With over 50 communist organizations currently active in the U.S, the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) is the most known out of such organizations. Its objectives are to speak out against U.S imperialism and urge people to liberate themselves through communist political revolution.

The party was formed in 1975 and led by elected National Chairman and primary spokesperson Bob Avakian. His most recent work Away With All Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World is one of the many books in which Avakian challenges religion, which he deems to be a strong force behind imperialism.

“What we want to do is forge a classless communist world, in which the power of the ruling class of white men is broken down. All we have in America, and other nations, in which the U.S. government has forced so-called democracy onto, is a handful of rich exploiters and we need to put power back into the hands of the people,” said co-founder of the RCP, Carl Dix.

Dix stated that the biggest obstacle to the “classless world” is religion. “Religion obscures reality,” he said.

Religion, as Dix put it, does not make people individually responsible for their actions. Christianity preaches that all of the corruption in the world can be attributed to the concept of original sin, which demonstrates that the human race is automatically inclined to be sinful due to the sin of giving into temptation committed by the biblical figures Adam and Eve.

“The problems in this world are created by people and the operation of exploitation, not by some mythical figure. We have the ability to change greed,” Dix said.

Clarence Williams, a member of the Harlem Revolutionary Club and author of the book Truth, agreed that religion impaired individual responsibility and self-empowerment.

As a man who grew up in a Pentecostal church, Williams stated that he always felt that “the church preached ignorance and complacency rather than knowledge and activism.”

This idea, however, was rejected by Hedges during his presentation at the debate. As he stood in front of the podium in the hot and humid auditorium, Hedges claimed that humans are innately irrational and the idea that humans can evolve morally—an idea held by many atheists—is false.

“Religion is an attempt to deal with the non-rational forces that make us human beings—love, grief, the search for meaning, death, annihilation, and so on,” he said.

Hedges also criticized the radical mindset of atheists, like Taylor, who rage
against religion and faith.

He stated: “Radical atheists have managed to replicate what the Christian Fundamentalists have said, but only in a secular language.”

Christian Fundamentalism is characterized as an aggressive and religious movement that seeks to combat what they regard to be the liberal takeover of the state, family and church. Christian Fundamentalists have also spread their influence in politics. They have formed alliances with conservative political forces and, with groups like Christian Coalition and Family Research Council helped the Republican Party to gain control of the White House, both houses of Congress, and a more conservative Supreme Court by the mid-1990s.

Evangelical Christians make up 20 percent of the population, but Distinguished Professor of Anthropology of the City University of New York (CUNY) and author of the book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey says that although their numbers are small, “the alliance between big business and conservative Christians backed by the neoconservatives steadily consolidated, eventually eradicating all liberal elements from the Republican Party, particularly after 1990, and turned it into the relatively homogenous right-wing electoral force of today.”

But before the conservative rise to power, leftist organizations were prominent and influential in political and economic affairs.

“Communist and social parties were gaining ground, if not taking power. Across much of Europe and even the U.S., popular forces were agitating for widespread reforms and state interventions,” Harvey stated.

According to Harvey, “In the U.S, the share of the national income taken by the top 1 percent of income earners fell from a pre-war high of 16 percent to less than 8 percent by the end of World War II, and stayed close to that level for nearly three decades.” But when “the stable share of an increasing pie” collapsed in the 1970s when real interest rates went negative among other things, the upper classes clamored to “protect themselves from political and economic annihilation.”

“Right now, we have a shrinking middle class, a growing lower class and a small stagnant upper class, which is back by Christian conservatives who continue to subtly enforce economic and social inequality for their sole benefit,” said Harlem Revolutionary Club activist Noche Lares.

Lares explained that the Republican Party, under the influence of Christian conservatives, is responsible for the war in Iraq and the crippling of the economies of developing countries.

“They have told [Americans] that they want to spread democracy and free markets, or they need to find terrorists. When all they’re really doing is implementing the same economic and social inequalities that they have instituted in America, but to a more severe degree.”