What is our position on religion?

In short, we believe that individuals may hold whatever private religious beliefs they wish. However, we do not take an entirely hands-off approach and we support active struggle against reactionary religious dogma. We do not support a guaranteed right to freedom of religion.

ARA is a secular organisation. We do not take a stance on the literal metaphysical truth or untruth of core religious claims such as the existence of some sort of transcendental reality or the existence of a ‘god’ in abstract. This does not mean we do not take positions on religious affairs. Religion is a powerful social force which is one of the most effective means to mobilise people for a cause and providing an interpretation of religious doctrine that aligns with some ideology or another is an often-used strategy.

We oppose the idea that religion as a whole is a ‘private domain’ separate from politics, as the political itself incorporates all of human social existence and is therefore unlimited in scope. Liberal ideology holds that religion, ideology and the state cannot intrude on the individual due to the existence of so-called ‘natural rights’, with every individual having some ‘true self’ that exists separately from the social context they exist in and is not to be suppressed in favour of a collective identity. While this view may have had utility when it challenged feudal ideas of caste systems and the divine right of kings to rule, it is fundamentally untrue.

Ones beliefs, values and personality is entirely decided by factors outside their control set before they were born, from the physical structure of their brain to the culture they were raised in. Alteration to the brain from disease, surgery or injury causes fundamental changes to the personality of the individual. While the actual existence of consciousness itself is fundamentally incomprehensible (this is the hard problem of consciousness) and cannot be easily linked to the physical body and brain (the mind-body problem), we know that there is at least an extremely strong correlation between the state the physical body is in and the subjective experience of the mind. The self/ego is therefore an illusion, created by and acted upon by the external world even if the state of being/existing itself may be something else entirely. Even if a truly deterministic world does not exist due to some fundamental uncertainty at the base of reality, this does not lead to the existence of ‘free will’ but merely replaces a deterministic vision of reality with a probabilistic one. While free will may be a useful concept to make sense of the world at the immediate level and ensure social stability, it does not actually apply to reality.

If the individual is an illusion, then there is no true distinction between public and private life. This position should not however lead to the pseudo-socialist ideology of ‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ upheld by the Italian fascists, which rejects materialist analysis in favour of the triumph of the will. While our own position is ‘totalitarian’, this does not mean the totalitarianism of the nation-state is an end in itself. Natural laws are not the same as social laws, as what is desirable is not always the same as what is true. As humans we have the capacity to understand our situation through rational thought and we can actively strive to transcend our natural limits. Biological laws are not more ‘meaningful’ than social laws simply because they are deeper rooted and the state/nation does not have value in itself beyond how it relates to human social existence and the wider community of humanity. The state is a tool of class rule rather than a god and should be treated as such. The power of the state should not be judged from an abstract metaphysical ‘morality of power’, but from the perspective of class struggle. We support the strengthening of the proletarian state and the weakening of the bourgeois state. The collective power of the working class should be utterly without limits, unrestrained by all laws whether liberal individualist natural rights or some supposed ‘biological law’. At the same time we will defend the bourgeois rights of freedom of association, freedom of speech and so on when they protect the rights of the working class from oppression and weaken the power of the bourgeois state to suppress the revolutionary movement. We also understand that rights of the individual have an instrumental use, to provide a feedback mechanism to the state and guarantee the dictatorship of the proletariat.

We support religion when it aligns with our positions and believe that religious organisations will play an important role in mobilising the masses for the new democratic nationalist revolution. This shouldn’t be seen as simply cynically using and twisting religious doctrines for our own purposes. If one genuinely believes in their religion and at the same time aligns with our ideas, then our political approach should be seen as a vessel to push for their own religious or philosophical purpose. In this way we find a unity of purpose, as ultimately we are all struggling for the absolute unity and dignity of humanity. Our rejection of individualism can be seen as a secularised form of absolute submission to a divine will, with all things being within God. Communism itself is part of a series of revolutionary transformations of society, one of which was the advent of universalist religions, the most relevant being Christianity. This has been seen in early religious communism, which laid the groundwork for the utopian socialism that would eventually be developed into scientific socialism.

When it comes to the theological doctrines of a religion, we preference universalist doctrines that include within them a spirit of human equality over localist, caste-driven ideas that ascribe differing levels of metaphysical worth to individuals. We also are opposed to literalist, anti-scientific readings of religious scripture. The most immediate principle for deciding friends and enemies is whether or not a religion aligns with us on the core contradiction, which we hold to be imperialism. If a religion supports imperialism then it is to be struggled against. We target Evangelical Christianity here as the primary enemy, which is utterly and irredeemably reactionary. Almost every doctrine of Evangelicalism, from the prosperity gospel, the individualist understanding of direct revelation from Pentecostalism, its pathological obsession with backwards culture war stances, justification of the subjugation of women to support of apocalyptic Christian Zionism is absolutely reactionary. Evangelicalism, more than any other ideology, has the ability to mobilise masses for counter-revolutionary and imperialist terror. No other religion, no ideology of racial supremacy or reactionary movement in Australia comes close to the quantity and fervour of evangelicals.

Liberals often accuse Communism of being a religion. This is not entirely false, and also rather hypocritical. Liberalism, in its historical revolutionary form, existed in the civic religion of the nation, the doctrines of natural rights, the idea of the fundamental metaphysical worth of the human being. These saw their justification in the deistic faith of the American revolutionaries and Robespierre alongside forms of radical Protestantism. Communism contains the tendency towards universality embodied in these traditions, but understood through the framework of science and stripped of metaphysics. Whether or not Communism is an end in itself or merely a carrier of something ancient and transcendental is a question we leave to the individual to decide. Whereas the ideology is based on reason rather than metaphysics, the practical day-to-day existence of the revolutionary movement is based on the same sorts of ritual, codes of ethics, mythology, personal commitment and belief that takes on a semi-religious character.

Of course, everything is to be looked at on a case-by-case basis and holding reactionary religious beliefs does not necessarily make the individual holding said beliefs to be an enemy. We should aim towards understanding, if not supporting, the beliefs and rituals of all cultures and be self-aware in identifying subconscious, pseudo-religious ideas that may emerge within ourselves. While scientific socialism is an ideology based in reason, the motives of most individuals adhering to any worldview are grounded more in ritual, emotional appeal and social pressure than pure logic. Our task then is to combine faith with reason.