Religion and politics

 When I said that I was starting this blog, a couple of friends encouraged me to write about religion and socialist politics. I am pretty unusual on the hard left of British politics in having a religious commitment (I'm a practicing Catholic, in fact a Lay Dominican). I've written a book about Christianity and Marxism and helped curate a series of interviews about socialist politics and Christian faith. The interaction between politics and religion is a great interest of mine, forming a large part of the academic work that keeps me occupied away from the blogosphere. So I do intend to make this a theme in the blog.

I guess this raises for me the question why I didn't mention religion in the opening post. In political life in the real world I am generally cautious about making my religious affiliation known to people early on, since there are so many preconceptions about what religious people are like and how their faith affects their politics. Better, I think, for people to get to know me as a comrade and understand my politics in their own terms before learning about the faith which certainly does, albeit not in a straightforward way, inspire those politics.

So I suppose in my initial post I was simply applying on this blog the approach I take in the wider world. Don't get me wrong, incidentally, there are plenty of good reasons people are wary of religious institutions and those of us who belong to them. The damage done, particularly but not exclusively in the domain of human sexuality, by religious ideas and practices has been immense, and people have been hurt. However, the left as a whole is sometimes in danger of generalising from partial experience, and of failing to attend to the complexities of belonging and inhabiting a tradition. In the UK context, there is also the danger of importing a US culture war framework from a society where religion has a social power it lacks in our own.

Dawn Foster, who died tragically young recently, wrote about the need for the left to not write off religious people. She was right, as she so often was. In adopting an attitude of uniform hostility to religion, socialists lose potential comrades and orientate themselves in an unsubtle fashion towards what, even in our secularised society, is one of the most pervasive forms of consciousness amongst working class, and other, people. Socialists in the Marxist tradition usually think that it is important to get an understanding of the way cultural phenomena function ideologically, the ways they can serve political progress as well as reaction, the ways they are embedded in the lives of communities and condition the ways people see the world. But in reality this is often short-circuited in the case of religion. Leftists who would offer a nuanced account of, say, contemporary art cannot repeat the favour for religion. We need to do better.

So anyway, I will write from time to time about politics and religion. Those with no stomach for that sort of thing can simply skip those posts and read about economics or the Labour Party.