Revolution and religion – 500 Years of Peasant War: Communist fantasies

As is well known, Karl Marx described religion as the “opium of the people”. However, this sedative effect is only a facet of a contradictory phenomenon. Because the “religious misery is the expression of the real misery and … the protestation against the real misery”. As much as religion often makes unbearable conditions, more bearable, so much that suffer from them is loosely eloquent. “Criticism of religion” has a double sense: religion appears not only as an object, but also as a subject of criticism. Religious protest does not have to stop at the individual charges, but can take the shape of socially religious movements – as the example of the peasant uprising impressively shows 500 years ago. But what about the relationship between religion and revolution?

Revolutionary nonsense

Friedrich Engels in particular have repeatedly dealt with religions as social protest movements. In his text “Bruno Bauer and the early Christianity” of 1882, he mocks about the Christian “nonsense religion”. At the same time, however, he also opposes the “flat-rationalist point of view” of a criticism that Christianity wants to do through the proof of logical discrepancies and historical falsehoods in the biblical text. On top of that, the thesis that was spread in the religious criticism of the Enlightenment that fraudulent priests would seduce people is not able to explain the “religious need” after Christianity. However, it is just important to illuminate “how it came about that the people of the Roman Empire preferred this by slaves and oppressed preached nonsense”.

According to Engels, the Roman empire has leveled the political conditions and legal systems in its power area across the board and looted the subject areas equally by the collection of high taxes. This military rule had appeared to the masses as unchangeable, hopelessness rampant, especially since the old national gods had become questionable with the dissolution of the old social regulations. In this situation, many would have sought a “intellectual redemption as a substitute” for material and spiritual deprivations. But while the privileged different types of an elite philosophical art of living were attached, the uneducated, poor masses turned to Christianity, the redemption through the coming kingdom of God. Due to baptism, it was open to people from all layers and peoples and was therefore “the first possible world religion”.

Engels sees the core of early Christianity in its eschatological end -time awareness: the fundamental rejection of the existing order, the tense expectation for a decision battle between good and evil and the hope of the approaching kingdom of God. Especially in the “revelation of John”, an apocalyptic text from the New Testament, Engels finds “a desire to fight and a certainty of victory” that remind him of his own comrades. In fact, early Christianity has several “strange points of contact with the modern labor movement”: Both are mass movements of the poor and oppressed against the whole old world, both hope for an end of bondage and misery, both are pursued by the ruling powers of their time.

However, these parallels cannot cover the fundamental differences that angels developed as part of its historical argument. Due to their disparate interests, the layers of Christianity could not find a uniform political expression due to their disparate interests. Christianity should therefore be understood as a shift in the desire for social redesign from historical immanence into religious transcendence. Penalistry is socialism under the conditions of its historical impossibility.

The German peasant wars

Engels also dealt intensively with the age of the Reformation. Two years after the failed bourgeois revolution of 1848 in Germany, he published “The German Peasant War” in order to recover buried revolutionary traditional lines of German history. If Christianity was initially a movement of underdogs, it had been institutionally and ideological at the time of the peasant wars for over a millennium. The church had long since become a central pillar of power of the ruling order. This was also accompanied by a transformation of faith, as the philosopher Jacob Taubes indicates in his study “Western Eschatology”. The hopes for a realm of God that soon occurred were immediately faded after the first centuries, redemption was no longer understood as a general history of salvation, but as a spiritual fate of the individual soul.

However, the marginalized apocalyptic teachings disappear undergrade and continued to be an important ideological resource for the “Protestation against the real misery”. This becomes clear in numerous socially religious movements in the late Middle Ages, which were heretical in the eyes of the church, but were a renewed Christianity that was perverted by the church. The link was particularly explosive in view of the feudal class contrasts in view of the feudal class opposites with a social criticism in the name of poverty and community, based on the Jerusalem primary community. This request was expressed after radical equality, for example in the movement of the Bohemian Taborites, who wanted to set up anarcho communism (Norman Cohn), who wanted to set up an archo communism in the 15th century.

Penalistry is socialism under the conditions of its historical impossibility.

Against a historical historiography that takes the illusions of a past era at the word, Engels emphasizes that the arguments of the Reformation period were by no means purely theological andales. Since intellectual education was monopolized in church, the Christian religion had provided a universal framework for social disputes. At the same time, theological disputes for this reason were not special questions in a separate domain, but also always socio -political questions. As a result, all social interest groups in the Reformation age had to try to connect to theological sources of legitimation and find a corresponding symbolic expression. This applies equally to the Catholic-reactionary, the bourgeois reformation and the Plebejisch-Revolutionary camp, which Angels distinguishes in its presentation. But where the bourgeois block only wanted to reform the church constitution and pointed out the presumptuous clergy, the further driving plebejische elements about Thomas Müntzer also demanded equality and community. Their revolutionary efforts also had to adopt the form of the heresy.

The time core of Christianity

In Thomas Müntzer’s teaching, Engels saw no less than the “anticipation of communism through the imagination”, but the uprising movement “had shown an anticipation of modern bourgeois conditions” in reality. This addresses a tragic historical understanding of self -measurement by the protagonists. While the fantastic communist Müntzer awaited the kingdom of God on earth in continuity with biblical prophecy and interpreted his own situation in health -historical terms, we see in retrospect a very different social formation in the 16th century: the capitalist mode of production. However, the associated revolutionary revolution of all living conditions also brings with it a functional change in religion. In their eyes, this is more and more transformed by a presumed medium of social self -understanding in Müntzer’s time to an Atavism and a distinguishing sign of reactionary classes.

This historicization is based significantly on the development of the natural sciences and critical political economy. This not only dug up the water of religious worldviews, but above all increased the theoretical insight and practical design power in this side. Accordingly, the “capital” states that the “religious reflection of the real world can only disappear as soon as the relationships of practical life life to people present people every day. At the same time, the enormous development of the productive forces also changes the social content of liberation: A generalization of poverty after the biblical ideal is now considered “raw communism”.

Marx and Engels are therefore hostile to all attempts to continue the legacy of the socially religious protest movement in modern socialism, as was common in the early workers’ movement of the 1840s. As anachronistic as it would be to reject religion in general, it would be so anachronistic to stick to it under modern conditions. In this perspective, religion is acceptable exclusively in the form of a lifted heritage that belongs to the past.