Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Christian values, but no renouncing worldly wealth!

Philosophically, Communists are materialists, that is, we 
believe that matter is primary, that as human beings evolved they 
created the concept of God (or gods) to help them make sense of 
the world around them.

So, matter came first, ideas (idealism) came later. But it puts 
us seriously behind the eight ball.

I mean, how can we compete with these idealists? Take the Mormon 
Church, for example. It is growing at an exponential rate, and 
yet, even among religious outfits, the Mormons' views are rightly 
considered particularly daft. So how are they getting all these 
recruits?

Easy. They are signing up (baptising) dead people. They have a 
huge staff engaged on compiling lists of the dead, from old 
cemeteries, parish records, electoral rolls, what have you.

Then they gather eager young Mormons together and "baptise" all 
these dead people by proxy into the Mormon Church. And the beauty 
of it is that, being dead, the new recruits cannot object to 
being enrolled in a Church they never bothered to join while they 
were alive.

Now how can we compete with that sort of thing? Sure, we could 
stage a proxy ceremony and sign up, say, all the diggers who fell 
at Eureka on the principle that if the CPA had been around in 
1854 they would probably have joined it. But what would be the 
point?

As materialists, the idea of signing up dead people is just too 
far removed from reality to be tenable. Common sense would tell 
us we were being inane.

A Communist party is a party of activists, and if there is one 
thing you can say for certain about dead people, they are not all 
that active.

But some idealists (in the philosophical sense) who are not yet 
dead are definitely active. The recent Federal election showed 
that very clearly.

US-style evangelical Christians, in the form of the Assemblies of 
God, entered their own political party (the Family First Party) 
to strengthen the conservative side of politics.

These self-proclaimed custodians and protectors of what they are 
pleased to call "family values", are socially very dangerous. 
Comprised of self-righteous zealots and bigots, they pursue 
policies that are in fact cruel and inhumane.

A Queensland National Party MP was rebuked by his Party's leader 
for having the temerity to allude to Family First as "the lunatic 
Religious Right". The MP was perfectly correct in his assessment, 
but the Nats and the Libs (like Bush's Republicans in the US) 
want the Religious Right as their political ally.

Hence criticism of Family first is verboten; their polarising of 
Australian politics along religious lines must be denied and 
ignored; their narrow, bigoted and anti-human concerns must be 
camouflaged and misrepresented.

When questioned during the Federal election about their close 
association with a church-based party of this type, Liberal Party 
spokespersons were wont to declare that the Family First members 
that they had dealt with were all "decent" or even "nice" people, 
committed to "Christian values".

Spokesmen for Libs and Nats alike were quick to declare they 
shared those same "Christian values". Regrettably, perhaps, they 
did not specify whether that meant adopting the principle of "do 
unto others as you would have them do unto you" or renouncing all 
worldly wealth or what.

Significantly, the values actually espoused by evangelical 
Christians are totally compatible with the accumulation of wealth 
through capitalist business practices. Jesus, with his concern 
for the poor and downtrodden, would surely have viewed such 
activities in his name with alarm.

Libs, in bed with the most rapacious big business interests, and 
Nats representing big squatters and agri-business interests find 
this kind of religion very easy to live with.

One quickly notices that "family values" and "Christian values" 
are used interchangeably, which would appear to indicate a belief 
that Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and other non-Christians 
(including atheists, of course) lack "family values".

But what is that meaningless expression "family values" meant to 
convey, anyway? If Family First (and the Libs and Nats) were 
really concerned about families, you would think their first 
concern would be trying to make life easier for people with 
families.

Instead, the first concern of Family First is trying to prevent 
women from controlling their own reproduction: in other words, 
banning abortion.

A Family First leader, interviewed on the ABC on election night, 
said their aim was to get members into Parliament who had "a 
Judeo-Christian ethic". By which one hopes she did not mean "an 
eye for an eye" or the stoning of women taken in adultery.

Mind you, if Family First does get a presence in Parliament in 
the future, we can confidently expect their MPs to press for 
legislative changes to make divorce harder to obtain (under the 
guise of "protecting families", no doubt). A Liberal/National 
Party government dependent on their support would also not be 
backward in proposing cuts to single parents' benefits (to 
discourage sin, presumably).

All of which should mean plenty of scope for us to recruit new 
members, new fighters for the working people's cause — and all 
without having to sign up any dead people!