Deleted member 148213
OOC:
This proposal of accommodation with the Orthodox Church is completely ASB for the Soviet Union in the 1920s. I don't know how much ASB matters in this sort of collaborative scenario, but there is no way party members would seriously support a line like that, given the circumstances they were in and beliefs they held.
The CPSU is a Marxist party, and even if one personally considers it to have deviated from Marxism in a certain area or not, they never stopped thinking of themselves as Marxists. Marx took a functionalist attitude towards religion, namely he thought that it was a phenomenon that occurred in response to the social conditions of feudalism or capitalism. It performed a function in society of helping people deal with the reality of their alienation & oppression in this life. Under communism, Marx believed that religion would finally disappear because its function would no longer be needed (oppression & alienation would have been overcome).
Marx's position is in contrast to Feuerbach's & the liberals, whose ideas he both developed out of and came to criticize. Feuerbach believed that religion & God were basically just projections of the human spirit, God's commands just projections of humanity's self-will (I am abbreviating significantly here- books have been written on these philosophies of course). He & the other liberals (like Voltairean/Encyclopedist types) believed that religion was basically an oppressive force and humanity could only achieve its potential by removing its fetters. Marx criticized this slightly- in short, he believed that humanity cannot "think" its way to liberation, simply removing religion from society does absolutely nothing to change the material reality of exploitative & inhuman productive relations. So the liberal view is not correct because to improve humanity, we, in Marx's view must not simply change our ideas but rather our material reality & relations.
Lenin makes similar comments where he expresses a functionalist theory of religion's role in society. I think in connection to how socialist movements of a Marxist affiliation should relate to workers who remain religious and priests who express sympathy to the workers' movement. You can look them up if you want to get one perspective on how an obviously very influential Bolshevik thought about all of this in his own words.
Of course, all of this is predicated on the view that religion is palpably false. Hence, why an explanation in terms of the human person or the social structures of human society for religion is necessary. If Christianity (or Islam, etc.) is true, then obviously one critical part of religion does not need such an explanation (that is, God's existence- the behavior of religion in society could still be susceptible to a totally materialist analysis). But to take such a view would be to break with Marxism as defined and practiced by a party like the CPSU, and with the philosophical traditions before Marxism that it grew out of. For such a thing, if it is even possible, you would need a POD in the 1500s or 1600s. Working as we are in the 1920s with the existing CPSU and Soviet Union, a complete alliance between Orthodoxy and the communist state is not possible (and I haven't even touched on the church's position yet!). Why would a party that thinks religion is basically a lie that performs a reactionary function in human society that is destined to fade as communism advances seriously consider an active partnership with the church? The only options are a secular state which ignores religion until its activities get in the way of the party's goals (believing that religion is a fading force), or an openly atheist state which seeks to eliminate religious consciousness in its population even before total communism is achieved. Note that these two modes are exactly what the USSR oscillated between until its demise.
As for the Orthodox church itself, it is vehemently opposed to communism, and not just because Marx said religion is false. Let's be real here: regardless of the veracity of Orthodoxy, the Orthodox church allied itself with the feudal elite hundreds of years ago and its leaders (the patriarch etc.) are all very wealthy landowners and allies of the autocratic system that developed late in Russian feudalism. The Communist party has overthrown and executed the Tsar and wants to seize all of the church's incredible assets for collective control and ownership of some kind. This is a direct challenge to the wealth and power of the Orthodox church. The top Orthodox clergy are not going to just turn around and say "actually yeah, we were totally wrong about the autocracy, it was actually terrible and we're sorry for misleading the Russian people. We'll now sell all of our land and live like paupers in true apostolic spirit under the inspired direction of the party, who we were calling evil just yesterday".
So in short, not only would the Communist Party have to change, but the Orthodox church would have to change. Communists would have to repudiate Marxist orthodoxy on a pretty basic and settled area, and the Orthodox church has the even more difficult task of reconciling the legacy of its millennium-old alliance with the Russian feudal elite that it used to Christianize Russia. An institutional Christianity allied to feudalism is never going to accommodate itself with a progressive movement.
This is the experience of many many years, all the way back to the French Revolution- remember that the conservative upper clergy (abbots and bishops who owned enormous amounts of land and had essentially zero contact with the masses of France), were terrified at the prospect of the lower clergy, the common parish priests, who were basically all of peasant or middle class extraction, voting as a part of the first estate. It was actually the alliance between the votes of the lower clergy and the third estate which led to the national convention, with the upper clergy and nobles in protest. During the following years of the French Revolution, the radical impulse of the lower clergy was smashed by the experience of the bourgeois revolution as well as by the efforts of the conservative hierarchy. As long as the alliance between the hierarchy of a church and the feudal or capitalist class persists, the hierarchy will work as hard as it can on its own side to make effective cooperation between religion and workers' movements impossible.
I know less about the case of Orthodoxy, but in the Catholic Church the first pope to have an non-aristocratic background since the 1400s(!) was John Paul I. Since then, they have all been common people, if not proletarians. Some people, like American conservatives make a fuss whenever, for instance, Pope Francis says something mildly critical about the social relations of modern late capitalism, but precisely because the capitalist class in the West no longer relies on institutional Christianity for its legitimation (outside of exceptional cases like conservative evangelicals in parts of the US), even as this criticism grows more pointed, it is less and less relevant. Ironic.
TLDR: An alliance between the Orthodox church and the Communist Party is ASB because their interests are directly opposed in 1920s USSR. There is no obvious way that this difficulty could be resolved outside of ASB by people within the church & party operating within the constraints of their stations and beliefs. Party members who supported such a uncomfortable & fruitless partnership would probably be asked to leave the party.
Edit: It would also be really great for OP to clarify what exactly the rules on ASB are-on one hand, I'm pretty sure that saying "friends, aliens have come to the Soviet Union to give us fusion reactors to power communism" would be out of the question, but on the other hand, we are all acting with at least a little bit of a-historical foreknowledge as to the things that happened later in the Soviet Union. In between those two extremes though, it isn't totally clear where the boundaries of what is acceptable lie.
This proposal of accommodation with the Orthodox Church is completely ASB for the Soviet Union in the 1920s. I don't know how much ASB matters in this sort of collaborative scenario, but there is no way party members would seriously support a line like that, given the circumstances they were in and beliefs they held.
The CPSU is a Marxist party, and even if one personally considers it to have deviated from Marxism in a certain area or not, they never stopped thinking of themselves as Marxists. Marx took a functionalist attitude towards religion, namely he thought that it was a phenomenon that occurred in response to the social conditions of feudalism or capitalism. It performed a function in society of helping people deal with the reality of their alienation & oppression in this life. Under communism, Marx believed that religion would finally disappear because its function would no longer be needed (oppression & alienation would have been overcome).
Marx's position is in contrast to Feuerbach's & the liberals, whose ideas he both developed out of and came to criticize. Feuerbach believed that religion & God were basically just projections of the human spirit, God's commands just projections of humanity's self-will (I am abbreviating significantly here- books have been written on these philosophies of course). He & the other liberals (like Voltairean/Encyclopedist types) believed that religion was basically an oppressive force and humanity could only achieve its potential by removing its fetters. Marx criticized this slightly- in short, he believed that humanity cannot "think" its way to liberation, simply removing religion from society does absolutely nothing to change the material reality of exploitative & inhuman productive relations. So the liberal view is not correct because to improve humanity, we, in Marx's view must not simply change our ideas but rather our material reality & relations.
Lenin makes similar comments where he expresses a functionalist theory of religion's role in society. I think in connection to how socialist movements of a Marxist affiliation should relate to workers who remain religious and priests who express sympathy to the workers' movement. You can look them up if you want to get one perspective on how an obviously very influential Bolshevik thought about all of this in his own words.
Of course, all of this is predicated on the view that religion is palpably false. Hence, why an explanation in terms of the human person or the social structures of human society for religion is necessary. If Christianity (or Islam, etc.) is true, then obviously one critical part of religion does not need such an explanation (that is, God's existence- the behavior of religion in society could still be susceptible to a totally materialist analysis). But to take such a view would be to break with Marxism as defined and practiced by a party like the CPSU, and with the philosophical traditions before Marxism that it grew out of. For such a thing, if it is even possible, you would need a POD in the 1500s or 1600s. Working as we are in the 1920s with the existing CPSU and Soviet Union, a complete alliance between Orthodoxy and the communist state is not possible (and I haven't even touched on the church's position yet!). Why would a party that thinks religion is basically a lie that performs a reactionary function in human society that is destined to fade as communism advances seriously consider an active partnership with the church? The only options are a secular state which ignores religion until its activities get in the way of the party's goals (believing that religion is a fading force), or an openly atheist state which seeks to eliminate religious consciousness in its population even before total communism is achieved. Note that these two modes are exactly what the USSR oscillated between until its demise.
As for the Orthodox church itself, it is vehemently opposed to communism, and not just because Marx said religion is false. Let's be real here: regardless of the veracity of Orthodoxy, the Orthodox church allied itself with the feudal elite hundreds of years ago and its leaders (the patriarch etc.) are all very wealthy landowners and allies of the autocratic system that developed late in Russian feudalism. The Communist party has overthrown and executed the Tsar and wants to seize all of the church's incredible assets for collective control and ownership of some kind. This is a direct challenge to the wealth and power of the Orthodox church. The top Orthodox clergy are not going to just turn around and say "actually yeah, we were totally wrong about the autocracy, it was actually terrible and we're sorry for misleading the Russian people. We'll now sell all of our land and live like paupers in true apostolic spirit under the inspired direction of the party, who we were calling evil just yesterday".
So in short, not only would the Communist Party have to change, but the Orthodox church would have to change. Communists would have to repudiate Marxist orthodoxy on a pretty basic and settled area, and the Orthodox church has the even more difficult task of reconciling the legacy of its millennium-old alliance with the Russian feudal elite that it used to Christianize Russia. An institutional Christianity allied to feudalism is never going to accommodate itself with a progressive movement.
This is the experience of many many years, all the way back to the French Revolution- remember that the conservative upper clergy (abbots and bishops who owned enormous amounts of land and had essentially zero contact with the masses of France), were terrified at the prospect of the lower clergy, the common parish priests, who were basically all of peasant or middle class extraction, voting as a part of the first estate. It was actually the alliance between the votes of the lower clergy and the third estate which led to the national convention, with the upper clergy and nobles in protest. During the following years of the French Revolution, the radical impulse of the lower clergy was smashed by the experience of the bourgeois revolution as well as by the efforts of the conservative hierarchy. As long as the alliance between the hierarchy of a church and the feudal or capitalist class persists, the hierarchy will work as hard as it can on its own side to make effective cooperation between religion and workers' movements impossible.
I know less about the case of Orthodoxy, but in the Catholic Church the first pope to have an non-aristocratic background since the 1400s(!) was John Paul I. Since then, they have all been common people, if not proletarians. Some people, like American conservatives make a fuss whenever, for instance, Pope Francis says something mildly critical about the social relations of modern late capitalism, but precisely because the capitalist class in the West no longer relies on institutional Christianity for its legitimation (outside of exceptional cases like conservative evangelicals in parts of the US), even as this criticism grows more pointed, it is less and less relevant. Ironic.
TLDR: An alliance between the Orthodox church and the Communist Party is ASB because their interests are directly opposed in 1920s USSR. There is no obvious way that this difficulty could be resolved outside of ASB by people within the church & party operating within the constraints of their stations and beliefs. Party members who supported such a uncomfortable & fruitless partnership would probably be asked to leave the party.
Edit: It would also be really great for OP to clarify what exactly the rules on ASB are-on one hand, I'm pretty sure that saying "friends, aliens have come to the Soviet Union to give us fusion reactors to power communism" would be out of the question, but on the other hand, we are all acting with at least a little bit of a-historical foreknowledge as to the things that happened later in the Soviet Union. In between those two extremes though, it isn't totally clear where the boundaries of what is acceptable lie.
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