Religion as Brands

Jean-Claude Usunier, and Jörg Stolz (Eds). Religions as Brands. New Perspectives on the Marketization of Religion and Spirituality. Ashgate Publishing, forthcoming 2013.
Jean-Claude Usunier ((University of Lausanne, Switzerland)
Just consider the following quotes at almost 80 years distance:
“The church cannot engage in marketing. The church cannot put itself on a pedestal, create itself, praise itself… One cannot serve God while at the same time covering oneself by serving the devil and the world.” Barth (1930).
“We shouldn’t be surprised then that religion – whether in the form of a film or a church – is being marketed in the current commercialized culture. In order to be heard above the noise of the rest of society, religion, too, must participate in order to survive.” Einstein (2008).


There can be no doubt: marketing and branding have started to transform religions. Despite ferocious critiques, we have seen the emergence of televangelists (e.g. Oral Roberts, Jim Bakker), celebrity pastors (e.g. Rick Warren), stars of compassion (e.g. Mother Teresa), church commercials, religious “product lines”, mega-churches, branded religious sites (e.g. Lourdes), religious best-sellers (e.g. the Left Behind series), and blockbusters (e.g. The Passion of the Christ). Marketing and branding have not spared non-Christian religions. Think of the success of the Kabbalah centres, veiled Barbie dolls, Mecca cola, the Buddha as a decorative item, or the marketing of the Dalai Lama. At the same time, observers have noted that shopping and consuming may take on religious traits. After all, branding makes products into something “out of the ordinary”, “mythical”, and sometimes even “sacred”. Brand communities have formed around such products as Jeep, Star Trek, or Harley Davidson. And Apple fans have not only venerated their Macs, they have also deeply believed in the transformative power of the savior of their brand: Steve Jobs. Are then religions becoming brands while brands are becoming religions?

When religious organizations try to market and brand their products, they, however, meet the limitations of religious marketing and branding. The first limitation is the vulnerability of transcendent claims. Religious and spiritual products are linked to some sort of transcendent claim. Explicitly or implicitly, they promise some sort of “salvation good”. Problems may arise when religious organizations try to be too specific in their claims, opening themselves up to criticism. Thus, Jehovah’s Witnesses have been criticized for their erroneous predictions of the end of the world, Scientology and various spiritual techniques have been under attack concerning the effectiveness of their therapies, and young world creationists are ridiculed for their beliefs. These problems occur when the claims of religious organizations concerning salvation goods are too specific and thus falsifiable; it does not occur when the claims are general and non-falsifiable. In the latter case, religious organizations find themselves in the company of secular organizations that also market and brand their products with all kinds of rather far-fetched unverifiable promises and claims.
Since religious organizations are mostly non-profit organizations or voluntary associations, it is often very difficult to control the stability and quality of the “product”. The way a religious service in the reformed church is performed in one village may differ greatly from the way it is performed in another. Denominational names may be stable, but the “product” underneath may differ drastically.

Another obstacle is related to limited acceptance by the general public due to a number of converging reasons. First, religious organizations are considered non-profit organizations relying chiefly on donations; the public may therefore adopt a critical view if the donated funds are used to promote the “public image” of the organization. Second, religious goods, especially salvation goods, are perceived as non-sellable; promoting them can therefore be seen as a form of desacralisation, of breaking a taboo. Third, the public is increasingly critical when organizations are seen to be trying to “manipulate” people. A related limitation is the acceptability by the group members themselves. A great many religious organizations also face internal opposition to marketing and branding. Members and staff of churches may see marketing as the exact opposite of their beliefs and religious practice. Marketing may be thought to go against the central religious message, or to soften or alter it.
Finally, a further limit to religious marketing and branding lies in the fact that religious organizations may lack the necessary skills to do marketing. Marketing is normally not taught in theological seminaries or in other religious group schools and universities.

Contributions in the Religions as Brands volume show that modernization processes, the transformation of forms of religious groups, and generalized competition between religious and secular goods have led to a situation that makes both religious consuming and religious marketing increasingly probable. They analyze the changing expectations of individuals towards religious organizations and the increase in choosing and combining different forms of religion and spirituality. They also discuss recent claims that shopping and consuming might be modern forms of religion and spirituality and look at both general and specific forms of religious branding and marketing and also discuss the influence of societal and cultural context.

A first group of papers in this volume looks at the demand-side of religious and spiritual consuming or the influence of religiosity on demand.

Jean-Claude Usunier explores how the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS, 1995, one of the 18 trade agreements in the World Trade Organization) promotes the global commoditization of religions. GATS legally opens the way for free trade in religious services worldwide. Usunier further questions in detail whether marketing concepts and practices apply to religion and gives a positive, though nuanced, answer.

Jochen Hirschle argues that consumption competes on both the level of imaginations and the level of social action with religious institutions. In the empirical part of his paper, he tests this hypothesis by analyzing the development of income, consumption-related leisure activities and church attendance using a sample of young German Catholics. It is precisely in these confines, on the borderline between economic/secular and non-economic/sacred realities, that late-modern spiritual consumers try to reconfigure meaning.

Haytham Siala investigates the impact that religious factors have on a Muslim consumer’s perception of brand loyalty. Specifically, the study focuses on the attitudinal and affective form of brand loyalty and how the concept of Takaful can become a ‘catalyst’ to inducing religious brand loyalty in devout religious customers. An empirical investigation conducted on a sample of Muslim consumers tests whether the extent of religious commitment can instill attitudinal brand loyalty towards a car insurer selling religiously-conforming insurance services. There is a positive relationship between the exogenous religious constructs and the endogenous attitudinal brand loyalty, price tolerance and word-of-mouth constructs.

Elizabeth Stickel-Minton examines how religious affiliation grouping influences consumer behavior. She assesses the predictive ability of three different religious grouping systems supported in the literature: simple (Catholic, Protestant, Jew, none), fundamental (liberal, moderate, fundamentalist), and denominational. Her findings suggest that the segmentation of religious affiliation may have blurred results in previous studies.

Roger Finke and Christopher P. Scheitle show that the pluralism of religious suppliers is a product of the pluralism of religious preferences and the number of potential adherents within an environment. This pluralism of suppliers, in turn, produces a pluralism of religious consumers. They then distinguish between expected pluralism and observed pluralism, and argue that a relationship between pluralism and participation will be expected only when a meaningful gap between these two variables exists.

A second group of papers investigates the supply side, i.e. the applicability of marketing/branding concepts and practices to religious organizations.

Olivier Favre studies the ICF (International Christian Fellowship), a Swiss evangelical movement established as a Church since 1996, as an important example of religious marketing consistent with a modern urban environment. From its start, the organization has aimed to attract young adults by developing appropriate marketing tools, sustained by a radical growth strategy. Favre shows that the insistence on marketing by ICF leads to interesting “blurring” phenomena.

Thomas Wagner analyses the musical worship experiences of congregation members of the Australian and London branches of Hillsong Church, an Australia based inter- and trans-national Pentecostal church that brands itself through its distinctive musical offerings. Through interviews with the musicians and technicians as well as “lay” members of the church, Wagner seeks to comprehend the complex interplay of pragmatic production decisions, the understandings of locality among the musicians and members of Hillsong, and how these understandings inform the experience of the Hillsong brand.

Hanifa Touag investigates traditional Muslim healing rites—roqya—by Salafists in France and Belgium. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with both practitioners and patients, Touag describes, how the roqya rite has been able to impose itself on a “market of healing”. The adoption of the rite is shown to combine secular and spiritual attributes and functions.

Markus Hero shows that the concept of entrepreneurship applies extremely well to the field of alternative spirituality. Drawing in an original way on neo institutionalist theory, Hero focuses on spiritual small businesses that tailor their health services by propagating religious connections to human identity, the body and its health as a discursive way of generating trust.


Philippe Simonnot, in his contribution on the Temple of Jerusalem discusses the “business model” of Jewish monotheism as a Unique Selling Proposition, a classical advertising copy strategy. Simonnot shows that, despite a shared tendency of all religions to want to be sole and exclusive suppliers, monotheism is better placed than polytheism because, as a matter of principle, it gives to a single God.

The contribution by Jason Dean on “non-fortuitous limits to the brand metaphor in the popularizing of ‘justly balanced Islam’” also looks at social, political, symbolic, and legal rivalries in the competition among churches. Dean shows that a Bourdieusian, sociological model of rivalry is more appropriate for describing religious competition than a Beckerian, economic model.
Finally, Steve Bruce presents a critique of the market-of-religions paradigm and explains why he rejects the rational choice theory of religion, before outlining in an original way the circumstances in which such an economic approach to religion would be viable. As we read Bruce, his view on secularization is in no way incompatible with the religious marketing and branding that is presented in other papers in this book.

All papers in the book show new perspectives on the marketization of religion and spirituality. We hope that they will—in their combination—help to encourage future research and thinking in our overlapping disciplinary fields.

Barth, K. (1930). Quousque tandem. Zwischen den Zeiten, 8, 1-6.
Einstein, M. (2008). Brands of Faith. Marketing religion in a commercial age. London: Routledge.

Political Theology and Islamic Studies Symposium: Legitimacy, Revolution and State Formation in Sunnī Poltical Theology

Mohammad H. Fadel is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, which he joined in January 2006. Professor Fadel wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on legal process in medieval Islamic law while at the University of Chicago. Professor Fadel has published numerous articles in Islamic legal history and Islam and liberalism, including “Back to the Future: The paradoxical Revival of Aspirations for an Islamic State,” 14(1) Review of Constitutional Studies (2009)” and “Islamic Politics and Secular Politics: Can They Co-Exist?”, 25(1) Journal of Law & Religion (2009). For a full list of articles see: http://www.law.utoronto.ca/faculty-staff/full-time-faculty/mohammad-fadel.

Can a people, after having duly consented to the formation of its government, remove that government using procedures not authorized by law? To put the question differently: can the formal legitimacy that a people provides a government preclude that people from exercising its sovereign power to strip those holding formal legitimacy of power, even though those in power have not violated the express terms of their compact with the people? These are the paradoxical questions that are at the heart of the political crisis in Egypt where duly elected president, exercising powers pursuant to a duly enacted constitution, was overthrown by the “people” who acted outside the formal rules “the people” had enacted for removing or otherwise disciplining its president.

This paradox is ultimately rooted in the problem of constitutent power: what does it mean to say the people constitute the polity when the polity itself defines the people? Martin Loughlin, in a provocative essay on constituent power, argues against two common modes of understanding constituent power and its relationship to constitutional law. The first is “normativism,” which, he argues, reduces constituent power to “the autonomy of legal ordering,” and thus renders constituent power redundant. The second, decisionism, reduces the constitutional order to the sovereign’s will, and erroneously renders legal normativity redundant. Loughlin posits instead what he calls “relationalism”: constituent power is a synthesis of will and legal normativism. In his words, “For relationalists, the concept [of constituent power] expresses a relationship of right: it is the manifestation of political right (droit politique or jus politicum), expressing the open, provisional, and dynamic dimensions to constitutional ordering.” Constitutional ordering is always “open, provisional and dynamic” because the sovereign is not embodied in the person of a divinely-appointed monarch, for example, but is an idea, i.e., “the people.” Accordingly, the sovereign can only be manifested by persons who claim to act on its behalf. Implicit in the relational understanding of constituent power is that legitimacy can only be fully achieved, if ever, at some indeterminate time in the future. The legitimacy of the sovereign’s representative, moreover, is always subject to contestation. Constitutional ordering therefore always contains within it the potential for revolutionary action: whenever it can be claimed that the people’s formal representatives have betrayed their imagined principal, the “people” can act to overthrow that representative and establish a new constitutional order.

 

Loughlin’s relational conception of constituent power sheds important light on the political writings of Sunnī jurists and theologians, assisting us to understand the seemingly paradoxical categories of the legitimate ruler (the caliph or more generically, al-ḥākim al-sharʿī) and the “legitimate” usurper (al-mutaghallib). Sunnī political thought can be easily mapped onto his categories of “normativism” and “decisionism.” Sunnī theories seem to posit the existence of either a legitimate caliph, to whom obedience is owed precisely because his rule is in accordance, both procedurally and substantively, with the normative requirements of the law, or a victorious usurper (mutaghallib) who, despite his formal illegitimacy, nevertheless must be obeyed by virtue of his effective power in order to minimize civil strife (fitna). Western authors have generally been critical of Sunnī political thought, accusing it, in the first instance, of affirming a utopian conception of politics which, by virtue of its impracticability,[1] devolved into little more than “might equals right.”[2] To put it in Loughlin’s terms, Islamic political thought began with a commitment to “normativism” and ended up in pure “decisionism.”

Loughlin’s relational conception of constituent power, however, helps us to transcend the binary of legitimate versus usurper that has limited our ability to read Sunnī political thought more productively. A more careful reading of Sunnī writings discloses that it is neither purely normativist nor decisionist, but rather it creates a dialectic between the normative demands of law and the will of the sovereign – the Muslim community as manifested through the actions of its agents (rulers). The dialectic between law and will is a product of the bedrock political principle of Sunnī political theology: that the political order is a manifestation of the deliberate choice (ikhtiyār) of the community, rather than the manifestation of divine fiat (naṣṣ) as posited by Shīʿa Islam.
While Sunnī theorists and jurists analogized the process of state formation to a contract, and conceived of public officials, including the caliph himself, as the agent of the Muslim community, the contract of the caliphate (ʿaqd al-khilāfa), unlike other contracts known to the law, was mandatory (wājib): the community had no choice but to organize itself into a political community. While formation of the state is a matter of choice, Muslims are not free to refuse politics. The 11^th century Shāfiʿī jurist, al-Māwardī, tells us that upon conclusion of this contract, among other things, individuals are divested of any power to pursue public claims, and are under an obligation to defend the legitimate ruler should he be challenged. A person who did not recognize the contract became a rebel (bāghī) who could be justly compelled through force of arms to obey the authority of the political community. [3] Indeed, one can say that this was precisely the understanding of the state that motivated the first caliph, Abū Bakr, to wage war against those Arabian tribes who remained Muslim following the Prophet Muḥammad’s death, but refused to submit to his political authority.[4] One might conclude, contrary to the claim that Islamic political thought was hopelessly utopian, that it was quite focused on generating normative grounds which would justify political violence.[5]
Two features of the contract of the caliphate as outlined in Sunnī political thought deserve highlighting. The first is that a successful candidate is supposed to embody a combination of antecedent qualities that can be objectively ascertained at the time he is elected, e.g., descent, maleness, integrity, and learning, and manifest other, functional qualifications, e.g., political sagacity, effective administration, and military prowess, that can only be demonstrated by performance of the powers given to the candidate after he is recognized as the legitimate ruler. This functional aspect of the contract of the caliphate is a logical entailment of the representational aspect of the caliphate: the caliph represents the Muslim community, and as their representative, acts for their rational good. It also creates a paradox: the contract is said to create a duty of obedience to the ruler and the regime that he establishes, but in an important sense, his claim to legitimacy is not complete until he can fulfill, in the future, the functional demands of state.
The second crucial feature is the inherent indeterminacy by which even the best-qualified candidate becomes a successful candidate. The Ashʿarī-Shāfiʿī tradition offered numerous answers to this question, without providing a principled resolution to the problem. The 12^th century theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) came down strongly in favor of a purely functional approach: a candidate becomes the caliph when, by virtue of the support of some or all electors, he enjoys enough effective social and moral power to discharge the tasks of the government.[6] His answer to this problem itself is indicative of a relational understanding of constituent power: while the consent of the community is crucial, it is not the consent of anyone who counts – what is required is the consent of what amounts to a social coalition with enough effective power to discharge the functions of government. The difficulty of assembling an effective governing coalition means that state formation is always a dangerous activity, one fraught with risk, the potential for violence and the possibility that things might go terribly awry.

This possibility is front and center of the analysis provided by the traditionalist Ḥanbalī theologian and jurist, Abū Yaʿlā al-Farrāʾ. Al-Farrāʾ, a contemporary of al-Māwardī, propounds an elective procedure for the caliphate that is ultimately just as unrealistic as that of the Ashʿarī-Shāfiīʿīs, but in the opposite direction. For him, the caliphate can be legitimately established by free election, but only if a candidate enjoyed the support of the great mass (jumhūr) of the electors. In the absence of a candidate with universal (or nearly universal) support, the only means available to establish the state is through force (qahr).

Al-Farrāʾ, however, agrees with the Ashʿarī-Shāfʿī tradition insofar as both understand the caliph and, by extension, secondary public officials appointed by the caliph, as ideal public agents. The commitment of the Sunnī tradition to this representative ideal, when combined with the legitimate violence which the contract of the caliphate authorizes against the recalcitrant, provides another avenue to understand the position of the usurper (al-mutaghallib) in Sunnī constitutional thought.
Al-Māwardī, although he did not recognize force as a means to establish the caliphate, recognized the possibility that a rebel could seize power over a province and assert de facto control over it. De facto rule, which he called “governorship by conquest (wilāyat al-istīlāʾ),” had the potential to become a legal jurisdiction if the usurper recognized the authority of the caliph through an act of post hoc validation (taṣḥīḥ). By formally recognizing the authority of the caliph, the rebel/usurper becomes transformed, by operation of law, into a legitimate governor. The justification al-Māwardī gives for this seemingly magical transformation itself rests on the notion of representation: because public offices exist to further the well-being of the community, the fact that the usurper has agreed to recognize the legitimacy of the public order and to insure that the standards of legality are upheld, it would contravene the public good to continue to treat him as a rebel.
For Gibb, al-Māwardī’s willingness to validate post hoc the rule of the usurper, represented a dangerous deviation from the norm of legality and a dangerous step toward a position of “might equals right.” Using language that bordered on the hysterical, he accused Sunnī jurists of abandoning “the Law in favor of a secular absolutism.”[7] His interpretation of these developments, however, only makes sense if Islamic political thought is either normativist or decisionist. The relational conception of constituent power, however, offers a more plausible interpretation of the Sunnī figure of the usurper: for al-Māwardī and the Sunnī jurists who come after him, the usurper does not obtain legitimacy by virtue of conquest; rather, he obtains legitimacy by living up to the norm of the ideal public agent. For that reason, Sunnī jurists, even though they were prepared to recognize, post hoc, the legitimacy of the usurper’s jurisdiction, continued to insist on judging the legitimacy of his subsequent acts in light of the objective norms of the law, a position implicit in al-Māwardī’s insistence that the usurper, in order to obtain a legally valid office, must recognize the legitimacy of the existing public order, including its legal norms.

The qualified recognition of the usurper in Islamic political thought is not, therefore, or need not be, an unqualified endorsement of decisionism. It is better understood as a recognition of the incompleteness of formal legitimacy, and that legitimacy is a product of both fidelity to pre-existing legal norms and exercise of power in a fashion that is capable of achieving the political community’s rational good.

This analysis of Islamic political though casts some light on the problems of the Arab spring and the debates about whether the events of June 30, 2013 were a legitimate expression of the public will or a military coup: elections can produce a kind of prima facie claim to legitimacy – akin to the idea of the election of the caliphate – but if the electoral coalition is not sufficiently strong to create an effective public order, there is always the risk of a new revolution. From this perspective, June 30 was clearly a revolution. But constituent power is not only about the right to engage in revolution. It also requires establishing a new juridical and political order that can produce formal legitimacy. Two and a half years after Tunisia and Egypt both overthrew their dictators, it continues to be a matter of doubt whether the outlines of a new conception of political right have come any closer to realization, and thus the shores of a new formal regime of constitutional legitimacy still seem to lie beyond the horizon. In such circumstances Islamic political thought also teaches that continuous revolutions, while legitimate insofar as the people can never be divested of its constituent power, may not be wise, insofar as they are unlikely to lead to the formation of an effective governing coalition that can produce a new conception of political rightcapable achieving social justice, freedom and dignity, the ostensible goals of the Arab revolutions of 2011.

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[1] Noel J. Coulson, “Doctrine and Practice in Islamic Law,” 18(2) Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (1956), p. 223.

[2] See, for example, Gibb, H.A.R. Gibb, “Constitutional Organization,” in Law in the Middle East, ed.M. Khadduri and H. Liebesny, p. 19, 23 (1955); and, Malcolm Kerr, Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of Muḥammad ʻAbduh and Rashīd Riḍā (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966) p. 51. The late 19^th century and early 20^th century Muslim reformer, Rashīd Riḍā preceded western critics of Sunnī political thought, accusing traditionalist jurists of facilitating despotism in Islamic lands through their doctrines tolerating the usurper. Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā, al-Khilāfa (Cairo: al-Zahrāʼ li-l-Iʻlām al-ʻArabī, 1988), pp. 51-55.

[3] Significantly, rebels could also use limited violence against government forces without being subjected to ordinary tort remedies. For a general introduction to the rules governing rebellions in Islamic law, see Khaled Abou el Fadl, Rebellion and Violence in Islamic Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

[4] These early wars are known as “the apostasy wars (ḥurūb al-ridda).” Most tribes, however, were rebellious and had not in fact rejected Islam in any kind of theological sense (with the important exception of the Banū Ḥanīfa, who recognized a self-declared prophet from their tribe that Muslim tradition came to call Musaylima al-Kadhdhāb, Musaylima the Liar). Later Muslim jurists came to distinguish between those tribes who simply refused to recognize the political authority of Abū Bakr and those who renounced Islamic religious teachings in favor of the teachings of other prophets.

[5] Likewise, the caliph, once he appointed a successor, could not dismiss him without cause and appoint another.

[6] Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Faḍāʾiḥ al-Bāṭiniyya (Cairo: al-Dār al-Qawmiyya li-l’ṭibāʿa wa’l-nashr, 1964).

[7] Gibb, p. 23.

R.Boer:Why I am a Christian communist

Πηγή: Philosophers for Change

Often I am asked, in all manner of situations, what is your position? What is your belief? Christian communist, is my answer. I may be speaking with a group of Chinese students and specialists on Marxism, or a gathering of young anti-capitalist activists, or a room of trade-unionists, or a congress of hard-core Marxists, or indeed a group of religious believers. Inevitably, my answer produces a rain of questions. Christian and communist – are not the two poles apart? Are not communists and communist countries against religion, since it is the ‘opium of the people’? Are not Christians thoroughly opposed to ‘atheistic’ communism? More often than not the questions turn to the intricacies of theological matters, precisely where you would least expect it.

So I would like to indicate what the conjunction of these apparently incompatible terms means. To begin with, Christian communism has a long and colourful history, one that was clearly identified by Marxists such as Engels (1894-95 [1990]), Rosa Luxemburg (1970 [1905]) and Karl Kautsky (2007 [1908], 1976 [1895-97]-a, 1976 [1895-97]-b; 1977 [1922]), and then elaborated and enhanced by a range of critics since. It is a history of more than two millennia, one that obviously predates modern socialism. Its founding mythological statements are found in the New Testament book of Acts, in chapters 2 and 4, where the early Christian community had “all things in common”. Or more fully: “And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need” (Acts 2:44-45).

This might sound simple enough, a commune of the type that appears repeatedly even today, and has done so many a century before now. Yet at times, such a humble effort has had revolutionary import. For instance, Thomas Müntzer, a leader of the Peasant Revolution in the German states in the early sixteenth century, made omnia sunt communia – all things in common – the slogan of the movement. Indeed, his full statement of the message of Christianity was: “It is an article of our creed, and one which we wish to realise, that all things are in common [omnia sunt communia], and should be distributed as occasion requires, according to the several necessities of all”. (Kautsky 1897, 130). I know of Christian communities today that live according to this biblical mandate, who see themselves as part of the long tradition of Christian communism.

However, let us go back to Thomas Müntzer’s statement, for there is a further section: “Any prince, count, or baron who, after being earnestly reminded of this truth, shall be unwilling to accept it, is to be beheaded or hanged” (Kautsky 1897, 130). I read this as a rather graphic call for revolution, which may take many forms but requires putting the ruling class out of its collective job. It is one thing to urge us to live communally, to have communal property, and to explore what a collective really means. But that is only one dimension; revolution is its other. If we focus only on the search for forms of communal life, then the danger is that we may end up becoming too comfortable within the current context. We may become either a cell that has adapted to the wider situation we began by opposing, or we may try to remove ourselves as much as possible from that situation. In either case, we give up on the revolutionary agenda, the desire and need to change the whole system itself.

Instead we become reformists, tinkering with little bits of the system in order to make it more liveable for the time being. I do not wish to suggest we give up on reform, but that it should always be understood in light of the larger revolutionary agenda. Only then do reforms make sense, for they constantly remind us of the need for revolution and ideally work towards that revolution.

So revolution is the other major component of the Christian communist tradition. Is this not what one would expect when the Christian message calls for metanoia, a complete change of direction at a social, economic and personal level? Too often has this call been read in recent years as a call for personal ‘repentance’, thereby neglecting the rich social dimensions of such a turn-around. Throughout the long two millennia of Christian history, one revolutionary movement after another has been inspired by this call, and by the Bible itself. Waldensians, the Apostolic Brothers around Gerardo Segarelli, Lollards, Taborites, the peasants with Thomas Müntzer, the Anabaptists in the northern Netherlands and at Münster, God-builders and God-seekers in the Russian Revolution, Christian materialists in the Chinese revolution, radical Christian socialists of the early twentieth century, guerrilla priests in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s … the list is long indeed. In fact, such a list brings me to another reason for being a Christian communist: it is not that the perfect revolution is still to come, but that there is a long history of such revolutions. That many of them made mistakes is obvious; that they also had many successes should also be obvious. In both cases we have much to learn from these earlier examples.

I would like to discuss briefly three other dimensions of Christian communism. To begin with, there is the tension between old and new with which that tradition struggles. I mean the tension between a radical break with the past that is entailed by the ideas of revolution (metanoia) and the reality that the past continues after the revolution in so many ways. Having won a revolution, do you destroy everything that has gone before and begin again? Many have taken this approach, thinking that all that has been overthrown is corrupt and tainted, that it has to be swept away for the sake of what is new. Or do you use the leftovers and rubble of the old in order to construct something very different? Do you attempt a dialectical transformation in which the best of what has gone before is taken up and thereby unleash a new level of human imagination and creativity? May I suggest that both elements should be kept together in a tension, in which the radical break and a sense of continuity are held in creative interaction with one another. For example, after the Russian Revolution some wished to destroy all that was left of the old order, while others wanted to keep the best of the past in order to construct socialism. This question also faces us with the tradition of Christian communist movements: each revolution believes that it is brand new, yet the very existence of a tradition of such revolutions means that there is something of the past that continues into the new present.

A further question concerns the obvious conservatism of many religions, including Christianity. They are all too ready to support and justify whatever tyrant happens to be in power, especially if that tyrant favours the religion in question. How does this relate to Christian communism, which is quite the opposite? Some argue that Christian communism is the core, the real truth of Christianity, and that the ones who develop a dirty little relationship with the powers that be are really compromising and betraying the truth of that religion. I would suggest that it is more complex than that. A religion like Christianity is actually caught between its revolutionary and reactionary sides, which has much to do with the tensions of its origins during the Roman Empire. As a result, throughout its history it has oscillated between those two options, with many variations in between. The catch is that either approach may be justified from the sacred texts and from the history. That is, they are both perfectly ‘legitimate’ in that sense. The outcome is that one must ultimately take sides in the struggle. It should be clear by now which side I prefer.

Finally, I suggest that one of the reasons why the Christian communist tradition continues to appeal to many people is because it offers what I call a process of translation between religion and politics. By translation I mean an interaction between two codes or languages, in which neither has superiority or is absolute. As anyone who has engaged in translation knows, no term is completely translatable. The fit is always partial, leaving something hanging over, outside the overlap of words. This means that the intersection of the two terms may well enhance each term in the process, enriching the meaning. Radical politics and religion seem to be quite translatable into one another: think of words like revolution and miracle (and metanoia), justice and obedience to the law of God, land reform and the land as God’s, the abolition of private property and money as the root of all evil, and so on. In fact, many of the key Christian communist terms have an inescapably radical political implication, one that may be expressed in political terms as well as religious terms. It is not for nothing that Marxists and other radicals have continually found themselves engaging with religion.

I have perhaps been a little too theoretical, but I wanted to indicate how Christian communism raises crucial issues in its appeal to me. Occasionally some have asked me whether I am not a pessimist, given the ‘failures’ of one communist movement after another? I respond by questioning what ‘failure’ means, for it seems to me that any revolution that is able to get past the period of inevitable counter-revolution has succeeded. Yet even the shorter-lived moments of left-wing radicalism indicate that the hope for something better persists. Above all, I am an optimist, for I keep meeting young people in different parts of the world who have no time for capitalism and all that it does, who are not interested in careers or making money, who constantly seek out new ways of living communally, and who do so with the greater, revolutionary agenda always in mind. Such young people give me great optimism for the future of Christian communism, which is part of the greater communist movement.

References:

Engels, Friedrich. 1894-95 [1990]. “On the History of Early Christianity.” In Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 27, 445-69. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Kautsky, Karl. 1897. Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation. Translated by J. L. Mulliken and E. G. Mulliken. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Original edition, London: Fisher and Unwin, 1897.

———. 1976 [1895-97]-a. Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus I: Kommunistische Bewegungen im Mittelalter. Berlin: Dietz.

———. 1976 [1895-97]-b. Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus II: Der Kommunismus in der deutschen Reformation. Berlin: Dietz.

———. 2007 [1908]. Foundations of Christianity. Translated by H. F. Mins. London: Socialist Resistance.

Kautsky, Karl, and Paul Lafargue. 1977 [1922]. Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus III: Die beiden ersten grossen Utopisten. Stuttgart: Dietz.

Luxemburg, Rosa. 1970 [1905]. “Socialism and the Churches.” In Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, edited by Mary-Alice Waters, 131-52. New York: Pathfinder Press.

[Thank you indeed Roland for this contribution]

The writer is a left-winger from Australia, based in the industrial city of Newcastle. His main interest concerns the intersections of Marxism and religion, having written a five-volume series called The Criticism of Heaven and Earth (Haymarket, 2009-13). He has recently completed a long study on Lenin and religion. He frequently visits Asia and will take up a position as professor at Renmin University of China (Beijing) in 2014.

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