Religion and the Working-Class

Religion casts things into binaries: everything belongs to one of two categories, to good or to evil, and its function seems, to this writer, to disguise one as the other – the battle between good and evil allows homophobes to put themselves on the side of the good and evangelical Christians in the USA aligning ‘good’ or ‘fighting against evil’ with white supremacists holding guns outside polling stations – and to use this to control how people behave and what they are allowed to see. The universal gods of religion include contempt for the other, belief in the non-existent, holy wars, the exaltation of childhood combined with the notion of original sin that makes the abuse of children easier to consider as a possibility, submission to authority, a denial of the physical and a focus on the internal landscape as a redirection technique from injustices and inequality in the external world. Focus on the internal; ignore the evidence of your eyes. Since the physical world is not eternal, we may disregard it and focus instead on the kingdom within “which moth and rust doth not corrupt and thieves cannot break through and steal”[1] … says the mouthpiece of the chief perpetrators of thievery. You’ll get your consolation for a life of suffering after you die.

 

These are wrapped up as desirables by institutions that are close to the state which nods on happily as the demands of religion and the demands of power tend to coalesce: both want a submissive population that are obsessed with the trivia of a belief in fairies and other such nonsense to the extent that they do not notice that the ‘benign’ fairy is merely a veil to hide the fact they are being routinely abused. 

 

Religion causes not only routinized submission but also contributes to any lack of engagement with the realm of ideas. If they can get you to believe in something that is so obviously false to even the cretinous, and it is not coincidental that religious indoctrination is best achieved in the child’s earliest years, then what else can it convince you of? That there is a natural order and that it is right and correct that the establishment’s chief family (chief robbers) should do no work at all and should profit handsomely from their lack of anything remotely resembling effort? That the love of country has any positive consequences? That there is not an officer class siphoning all the money upwards?

 

The demand for loyalty to people and institutions that do not reciprocate in any way comes with the related crimes of disloyalty: ‘treason’ and ‘heresy’. These notions have always been stirred up in the working class who have to, an extent, done the ruling class’s work for them. There is history to this. The radicals who campaigned for voting rights were often subject to violent assault by the people that they were arguing for; their leaders would regularly tried for high treason and either executed or transported into white slavery in the colonies.

 

In defence of the Bible, it was often the only reading material available and certainly the Old Testament is a cracking good read in the same manner as I’d imagine Game of Thrones is but without the same count of breasts: it’s a supernatural romp replete with murder, war, miracles and with the odd molestation thrown in. And it is possible that, for some children, the blockbuster nature of the Old Testament has led them eventually from the Good Book onto ‘great books.’ 

 

This happened to me. My mother was an Irish Catholic; my dad is from a Salvation Army family. The tradition still holds on the English side of the family: my cousin, Tim, is a minister for some evangelistic version of Christianity in rural Canada – on the Irish side, not quite so much. The only book I recall existing in my childhood home, aside from some schmaltz about ‘the funny things that children say’ was the Children’s Bible in 365 Stories that lived in the cupboard at the bottom of my bed and was not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, John or even God himself but was authored by one Mary Batchelor. I still remember how voraciously I ate the tales of specifically Moses who seemed to a fascinatingly compelling character. I even recall my sadness and disappointment at Moses’ exit from the story at the ripe old age of 120: a sadness that remained unmatched until the day I found out that the Smiths had split up eighteen or so years later. I took it literally. 

 

As Rose writes, “We are not born with a strategy of reading. In their first encounters with literature, the initial assumption of uneducated readers is that the stories must be true.”[2] And so it was with me. I bought the parting of the Red Sea, the burning bush, the tablets of stone, the pillar of salt (though I thought the punishment for looking behind you was a bit harsh). It was only Moses living to an age that seemed improbable that raised a now long-standing relationship with incredulity about what authority figures assert to you is true. The Bible wants you to believe in the unreal, to expect miracles everywhere as you stomp through life. A Welsh scholar from the 1800s, the pleasingly tautologically named, Robert Roberts, noted the effect of having only one source of information. “To disbelieve supernaturalism was then thought utter infidelity; it was flying in the face of providence – an obstinate hardening of the mind against all evidence.”[3] And having a man in the sky is not supernatural?

 

So, for all its absurd fabrications for some children, perhaps more notably now black and Asian rather than white, the Bible is a foundational text in their literacy as it was for me.

 

Distinguishing fact from fiction is an important skill. Being able to discern that you’re being lied to should be a foundation of any education system, and the Bible’s many absurdities give one an early dunking in this well. It is important therefore that children are given a range of texts to read so that they are not subject to being told the same story time and time again. Yes, read Genesis, but The Origin of Species should also be taught so that we might discern which one appears the more realistic of the two.

 

It is this inability to separate fact from fiction that has left the working class subject to the conscious delusions inherent in the latter. This has a tradition. When a very small child, I was forced to go to the Saturday morning pictures so that my mum could have a rest from and my brother as we were no doubt quite tiresome. I recall my frustration as I sat in the deeply Regal Cinema in Penge as the children conversed over and indeed with the film, shouting at the characters, warning them, ruining an experience that would have been rather better had it been more introspectively undertaken. Quite simply, they did not understand the conventions of watching a film that and that these are not the same as they are for pantomime.[4]

 

Why do working class kids need to read fiction? To develop empathy with the plight of characters who are not us in a way that non-fiction may not be able to do quite so well, yes. To soak up the idea that the human mind privileges story as a means of passing on and remembering information, maybe. To introduce them to new language and to new ways of describing their own emotional landscape, certainly. But chiefly, it is so that they know that fiction exists and that these stories have been made up by other humans who have managed to convince us to suspend our disbelief and that the creation of a story can be a way of affecting what people believe to be true. 

 


[1] Gerard Winstanley, Fire in the Bush in Selections, ed. L. Hamilton (1944), pp. 30-31.

[2] Jonathan Rose the Intellectual Life of the British Working-Class 2nd Edition (London: Yale University Press, 2010) p.94

[3] Robert Roberts, The Life and Opinions of Robert Roberts: a Wandering Scholar ed. J. H. Davies (Cardiff: William Lewis, 1923) p.46

[4] “Oh yes, they did!”

Added Fri, 11 Oct 2024 21:28

web site by island webservices