Institutionalised Christianity has shrunk in significance since the demise of feudalist society. The State can no longer be legitimised by reference to the divine right to rule or natural laws; but must secure the loyalty of the people, whilst also creating favourable economic conditions for capitalist growth. Such demands are not entirely compatible. Neither traditional Christianity nor new religious movements legitimate state activity in the feudal sense; however, although capitalist industrialisation led to secularisation on the institutional level, religion still plays an indirect, and perhaps more subtle role in the justification of the State and the inequitable system it upholds.
Rather than addressing the issues of inequality and exploitation within the capitalist system, the misery that arises from such injustice; religion offers the easy option of ignorance the choice to ignore the systems structure and ones personal role in legitimising it, and find comfort in beliefs of future worlds where suffering is redeemed and evil-doers punished. Responsibility is delegated to God (which god? .. take your pick!); along with the power to facilitate change. Thus, the religious masses stand personally disempowered as they have given all their power to their God; and with responsibility also diffused apathy spreads like a disease.
Religion therefore signifies a protest of human beings against their wretched existence. Rather than looking to change the world they live in and take responsibility for their lives; rather than questioning social injustices they look to a higher power for redemption and explanation. Christianity has taken from the earth and given to heaven consequently the richer heaven became, the more wretched became the earth and humanity. God being everything reduced the real world and humankind to nothing. God being master, humanity becomes the slave. Thus too much cannot be expected from the material world for it is but a trial not to be questioned, afterall who are we to question God?!
Thus, the relationship between religion and class interest is as such; religion serves as a basis of social integration; securing the dominant class position and privilege of the ruling class, and justifying the enslavement and poverty which result from capitalist exploitation. Paradoxically, it unifies society by legitimating wealth and compensating for poverty; and also give expression to separate class interests. This is made easier by the fact that the ruling class controls the means of mental production (ie. Schools and their curriculum, the media). Therefore it can be ensured that the subordinate classes experience the world and their place in it through paradigms structured by the ruling class and their ideology.
Religion not only provides a scapegoat for the State, but also functions as an agency of social control through the institutionalisation of human sexuality within the system of economic production, ie. marriage. Engels connected the monogamous marriage with the emergence of private property: from the beginning it was naught but economic rationalism. Marriage is essentially a religious doctrine, consecrated by the Church; yet the concepts of ownership on which is it based reek of capitalist ideology. The contract itself is a property contract, with a lifetime warrantee and a free set of steak knives; which facilitates a convenient unit of organised and consumption within the system, ie. the nuclear family unit. This is indicative, historically and presently, of the close ties between Church and the State.
The importance of monogamy in industrial capitalism also lives with the subordination of instinctual gratification in the interests of rational enterprises. The distribution of asceticism and hedonism in industrial capitalism is influenced by class position, whereby the workers are compelled to discipline their body by the nature of their conditions of employment. Freud saw the contradiction between sexual happiness and the requirements of "stability" in civilian life (as we know it), and saw the discontent of advanced societies as being the outcome of sexual repression and punitive conscience. Puritanism rests on a fixed conception of life based on the idea that life is a curse imposed on humanity by the wrath of God. In order to redeem themselves people must report and repudiate every natural impulse. Thus through the connection between sexual repression, asceticism and capitalist production, it is seen that religion involved the institutionalised denial of life, especially instinctual gratification; and the repression of physiology through religious morality
Man (sic), imprisoned in an iron cage of errors,
Became a caricature of man (sic), sick, wretched,
ill-disposed towards himself, full of hatred for
The impulses of life, full of mistrust of all
That is beautiful and happy in life, a walking
Picture of misery (1)
Therefore, religion is the social cement of society as a whole whilst
providing a metaphysical rationalisation for State imposed injustices.
It acts as a function of social control; disempowering believers and diffusing
responsibility; and repressing physiology rather than encouraging the harmony
of physiological existence. Thus is the interests of humankind
BY NECTARIA
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