FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Religion & Revolution

Rant Number 387 3 March 2010

‘Religion is the opium of the people’, hissed Karl Marx. ‘Bolshevism is the bastard child of Christianity’, foamed Adolf Hitler. It is funny – you’d expect socialism-advocating, chubby-shabby film director Michael Moore would side with Marx but his Capitalism: A Love Story implicitly supports the Fuhrer’s view...

Moore’s Capitalism has enjoyable stunts. Like the director stretching a ‘Crime Scene – Do Not Cross’ police tape round Wall Street banks. Or turning up in an armoured track at that notorious ‘vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity’ – Goldman Sachs – demanding the famous bail-out money back. Jolly, knockabout stuff. But what interests the priest is that Moore, a Roman Catholic, invokes Christianity as a religion par excellence anti-capitalist. Thus two Catholic priests and a bishop resolutely finger America’s economic system as equivalent to worship of the Golden Calf. ‘Capitalism is radical evil’, a priest asserts. Moreover, the film includes clips from Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, extrapolating from Christ’s many condemnations of riches, but putting in his mouth the very opposite. Simple but pretty devastating critique. The climax shows Christ crucified, against the background of a bubbling stock exchange - huh! Crude, but – I say it grudgingly - viscerally effective.

The Vatican will have reservations. Christ attacked many things & people, not just the rich. ‘The poor’ on his lips meant also the pious, not just the propertyless. The Cross’ universal, cosmic significance goes beyond the merely social and political. (Che Guevara as Christ is tripe.) But it is true that the Church initially went in for a type of communism – hence Hitler’s bolshevism jibe. The Jerusalem Christians pooled all they had in common. And when Ananias and his wife Sapphira cheated on the community, God, at St Peter’s behest, struck them dead. (Acts, ch.5&6) Hmmm...St Peter must be nodding, methinks. Otherwise Wall Street would be strewn with bodies.

Christ the socialist? Peculiar, given that his Church historically has often sided with the rich and the powerful. To discover a revolutionary, ‘Bolshevik’ Church you really have to look at the heretics. Peasants’ revolts in the Middle Ages were supported by radical clerics like John Ball in England and Thomas Munzer in Germany. Ball was a wandering priest who preached the aboriginal social equality of all children of God. ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ he demanded. Naturally, he ended up in jail. Wat Tyler, the leader of the rebels, released him from prison & Ball marched with the peasants to London. Alas, the people were defeated and Ball was hanged at St Albans.

Munzer was a theologian who had initially backed Martin Luther. But when the oppressed peasants rose up Luther got scared and lined up with the German princes. Munzer did not. Unlike Luther, he never preached quiet debate and peaceful progress - Marx’s religious ‘opium’. His language was uncompromising. In the name of the gospel, he urged revolutionary violence: ‘Does not Christ say “I came not to bring peace but the sword?’ His parables say: “Bring hither mine enemies...and slay them before me?” Those who stand in the way of God’s revelation must be destroyed mercilessly. We must uproot the weeds in God’s vineyard at harvest time...Moses says: “You shall not have mercy unto the idolaters”.

Incendiary, eh? Unfortunately, the Bolshevik Church strayed from orthodoxy. According to Engels, Marx’s capitalist chum, Munzer fell into heresy. He garbled the sacrament of the Eucharist, denied Scripture as ultimate authority and rejected transcendence. Instead, he preached Heaven on earth. That is why, I surmise, he allied himself to the Anabaptist sect. A bunch so revolutionary that they advocated the total abolition of private property and practiced polygamy. So extreme they were that they accomplished the impossible – both Catholics and Protestants joined forced to exterminate them. The Anabaptists were hunted down everywhere, like wild beasts. Thousands were slain by the Princes. Munzer too eventually ended up on the scaffold. The people went back to slumber - the opium had triumphed.

Corporate America will not hang Michael Moore. Capitalism: A Love Affair is no threat. Only a movie. A pinprick, at the most. By a funny fat man who is himself a millionaire. And none of the earnest priests in the film looks quite like becoming another Ball or Munzer. The Western Church seems content to bumble along, gently declining, while Christian civilisation crumbles away and the new barbarians are at the gates – no, correction, they are inside the gates.

Moore’s thinking is not very coherent. He lambasts capitalism but falls into swoons of delight over President Barack Obama. The man who, personal attractiveness aside, is right at the head of the system of government which upholds the free market, corporate America, banks, the lot. No Bolshevik he! Not even a socialist. Just another capitalist with a pretty face.

Above all, Moore shuts his eyes to a crucial cultural fact. One expounded by the German sociologist Max Weber in his classic The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. It is the Calvinist ethics that has assisted the rise of capitalism. It encouraged large numbers of people to engage in trade, develop their own enterprises and enjoy the accumulation of wealth for investment. And the late Samuel Huntington is right in his enlightening book on American identity, Who are we? America is different from the rest of the world. That difference is its Protestant culture, values and religiosity. Its Protestantism is not that of Ball and Munzer but that of Luther and Calvin. A religion and culture which stress the Protestant virtues of initiative, self-reliance, hard work and ambition. Hence socialism, even it was desirable, is a no-no. Because it militates against the spirit of America.

Yet, I am grateful to our chubby one. A Christian religious argument for revolt, never mind how half-baked, appeals to the priest. Why should the Islamists have all the radical clerics, all the fatwas, all the insurrectionary fervour? Christians have them too. Maybe it is time to take another look at the heritage of worthy clerics like Ball and Munzer. Confronted with the ruins of what used to be Christendom, with the wilful eradication of truth and beauty from the world, with Mammon’s arrogance and violence, maybe, maybe it is time to make a last stand. The time has come for resistance, for rebellion, for revolt.

My kind of time.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli