Seems like Christianity is more of a right-wing force these days

  • Greenleaf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    In the United States? Basically none. There are still quite a few “liberal” Protestant churches, but they pretty much stay out of politics entirely. They will do good stuff like help the poor and be accepting of LGBTQ people, but they don’t go beyond that. But nothing that could be called a “movement”. There was this one church in either Atlanta or Detroit, I don’t remember, where they were starting to formulate a very Marxist-sounding doctrine focused on debt forgiveness… but that was literally just one church and they collapsed when there was a scandal among the three pastors that led it involving harassment.

    What has helped Christianity endure for 2,000 years is how malleable it is. You can make “Christianity” about anything. Under feudalism it was useful to the nobility for legitimizing their power over the serfs and for keeping the serfs in line. The theological basis for Christianity comes down to what’s in the Bible and what “church tradition” teaches… and those two bases can be made to say whatever you want it to. It’s well known how very little the Bible says about trans people, for example. Or how the only thing the Bible says about abortion is how to perform one. And for people raised in evangelicalism, it’s actually shocking to realize just how little the Bible condemns premarital sex (it basically doesn’t) when it’s such a foundational pillar of growing up in the church. Today in the US, white evangelical Christianity (and really white Catholicism too, now that white catholic minorities like the Irish and Italians have been fully integrated) exist simply to prop up white supremacy and settler colonialism.

    So you have this incredibly malleable religion that easily serves power via the base-superstructure relationship. Of course, that means one day Christianity could be a force for good - under communism at least. But as long as we live under a capitalist base Christianity will pretty much only reflect that.

    But if you’re interested in trying something yourself, you can try reading up on Karl Barth. IIRC he tried to incorporate dialectics and German philosophy into Christianity. I got into him for a minute before I deconverted, I think there’s stuff there that’s Marxist-friendly, even if that wasn’t Barth’s intention.

    • sewer_rat_420 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      What Jesus said and did is mostly pretty dope. The early church was dope to and fully organized around mutual aid. But then it quickly became authoritarian/apostolic. Even in a ‘leftist’ church the precedent always seems to be respecting authority above all else