Southern Christianity, Socialism, and Power Building
A Revolutionary's Thoughts on Christ in Dixieland


Written by John Henry, while watching the birds sing.

The Quakers provide a really important angle for American liberation studies, if you want to put it that way. But I don’t think they can be transplanted into the South. If you’re looking to use Christianity as a vehicle to empower people with socialist thought—in that Eugene Debs, socialism-is-Christianity-in-practice energy—the Quakers offer a strong framework, especially being some of the first abolitionists, and their use of Christianity to advocate against slavery. They just lack the propaganda apparatus that other groups have.

The Southern Baptist tradition, by contrast, is a huge enemy of whatever we’re trying to do with that vehicle. There’s a brand of Christianity focused on money—prosperity gospel—and it’s the antithesis of what we want to build. Many would argue that because prosperity gospel is so effective at propagandizing, converting, and entrenching itself in American culture, trying to use Christianity at this stage to connect the common person to socialist liberation is a losing battle. I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

In the South, if you’re trying to gain power, you have to take the Christian route to some degree. Even just saying, I’m a Christian. I have a connection with Jesus—that’s typically the bare minimum. You are going to struggle in your day to day without being able to do this, but to really weaponize it, you have to advance into a pragmatic power-building framework.

“A prince, therefore, need not necessarily have all the good qualities I mentioned above, but he should certainly appear to have them… He should appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, and upright, and should even be so in reality; but he must keep his mind so disposed that, in case of need, he can turn to the contrary.”

The Prince, Machiavelli

Say we’re a DSA chapter in a red county, a small city with a lot of churches. We have no choice but to work with some of them. They run the homeless shelters. They run every piece of mutual aid we don’t. So we build a coalition, and we use their language. Not every church will join; not every church is capable of that rhetoric, even if we propagandize toward it.

Building that coalition isn’t overnight work. You have to break into the narrative. The first thing I’m looking at: the Seventh-day Adventists run a food pantry one day a week. We don’t have a food pantry—we do a food share one day a week. Black churches have historically been the institutional backbone of Black working-class resistance, from abolition to civil rights (Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., keyword Reverend!). A socialist organizing in the South must understand the distinct history of Black Christianity and avoid the white left’s tendency to treat all churches as equivalent. What can we do with these organizations (because that is fundamentally what a church is) to build a relationship, as we would with any other organization? We can use the historical materialist context of the role specific denominations have played within liberation struggle to point towards which groups have the best chances of aligning with our cause.

A lot of people on the left would say no immediately. We can’t support that false consciousness. We can’t support that idealism, that atheist opium-of-the-masses dogmatism. But I don’t think that’s correct. We have to be realistic and pragmatic about gaining power. Right now we lack the organizational capacity to run a food pantry; they have it. Working with them gives us a boost. Over a few years, maybe we slowly replace what the churches do with our own infrastructure. But at this stage, we can’t. That’s the balancing act. Real politics.

I’m not saying we let the churches lead or control our platform. I’m saying we have to build the relationship. When churches see that you are serious about feeding people and challenging the powers that be, they will either align or reveal themselves as obstacles.

If you have a coalition—three churches from three denominations working together, even if it’s just a food-sharing operation for the homeless—then when you run for office or one of your people takes action, you have social clout. Damn, those are the people that work with those churches. I have a friend who goes there. My grandma went there. I go there myself. That appeal is worth more than the dogmatic we-need-to-stay-atheist thinking that infects the left.

Ask the average person here if they believe in God, and they’ll say yes. Then they won’t have much thought beyond that. They haven’t dug deep. They’re probably not deeply connected to any church or denomination—only older people are, and older people vote heavily. But they all say they believe. So you have that initial connection. Intellectually, you know these people don’t really understand what they believe. So you go and say: We need to protect our green spaces because God gave us Eden. Jesus taught care for the poor and the downtrodden, so we need to do this. You know they don’t believe much beyond a childhood trip to church. Instead of trying to deprogram them, you work within that baseline, make the easier connection, and propagandize that way.

If you’re actually trying to gain power, that’s simply more effective than working backwards: One, God isn’t real. Two, here’s materialist thinking. Most atheists don’t even think in a materialist capacity—they still talk about human nature, an individualist liberal framework, not Marxist materialism. Why do all that extra work when you can just say, Jesus said care for the poor, so we’re socialists? This is not "watering down" socialism; it is the necessary work of creating a common sense where socialist ideas become intelligible and appealing to the masses. That’s what Eugene Debs was trying to do. I think it’s still a valuable tactic.

Furthermore, any territory we do not attempt to take will be taken by the right. Some socialists say there’s no point engaging because prosperity gospel is the main narrative. Maybe it’s the main narrative because there are no competing narratives. Because we’re not creating one. As soon as you create a competing narrative and gain a certain number of people, it becomes a battle of ideas within the hegemony.

“In the strategy of the long sword, if you are confronted by an enemy who is trying to cut you, you must cut him. In all things, do not let him set the rhythm.”

— The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi

We cannot let the reactionary forces set the rhythm. The capitalist uses religion as propaganda. A Marxist should understand that religion is downwind from the superstructure: the economic system and class society determine how religion is understood. The capitalist knows this and uses it. But we say, It’s against our theory. It’s not correct.

What the fuck does “correct” mean? What’s correct is what wins—within reason. We’re not talking about immoral tactics. We’re talking about applying propaganda to a state that already exists instead of saying, No point, waste of time, betraying the revolution. Those are all excuses for inaction.

So: if you’re a socialist in the deep south and you move like a militant atheist, you probably won’t get far.
Two, if you don’t know the local denominations, you’ve failed to educate yourself on what the masses believe.
Three, if you have little infrastructure but the churches have infrastructure, you get involved with what’s around you. You go to the food bank. You participate. You talk. Do a little reconnaissance. People go there—that’s an important service. And you can detach the religion, because plenty of people using that service aren’t church members; they’re just part of the masses.

On an individual level, it benefits socialists in the South to have a baseline understanding of Christianity, the denominations, how people interact with the religion, and what socialist principles can be pulled from it. I’m not saying you have to believe. I’m saying be pragmatic and educate yourself. You cannot declare yourself a revolutionary and expect the masses to follow. You must build power by engaging with the institutions, language, and beliefs that shape their lives.

Another way to put it: you teleport into Skyrim. Everyone worships the Nine Divines. You know it’s some video game bullshit. If you can’t be bothered to learn anything about the Nine Divines—read a tome, learn the lore of the world you’re in—you’re not going to get far interacting with the people who live there. Same thing with the real world. If you can sit down and read a bunch of Elder Scrolls lore books, motherfucker, you can read a few Bible verses to get inside the minds of the people you interact with every day. And when I say “believe,” I mean in their fullest, truest reality, this shit is real.

“Long before I ever heard of socialism, I was deeply impressed by the character of Jesus of Nazareth. He was the first socialist I ever knew.”

— The Canton Speech, Eugene V. Debs

Closing thoughts. Most of us came up in, during, or in the shadow of the new atheist movement—Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, militant atheism. What have we seen as a result?

Think back to American history—specifically for American socialists in an American context, especially in the South. In the 1800s, women had little social standing among the movers and shakers. A man’s world, deeply patriarchal, before women could even vote. And yet you had a spiritual and religious revival, the Second Great Awakening and its echoes, spearheaded predominantly by women. They channeled their voice through mediums, oracles, prophets—within that context, across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

There’s a contradiction worth sitting with. In the present age, you have a supposedly materialist faction of men using the language of materialism to push imperialist ends that align with capital. And over 150 years ago, you had women using the language of God and religion to push for their own rights—God says we should have rights. I’m a prophet. We can see how historically religion, even within our own country, has been both a vehicle for liberation and a weapon of oppression. Their religious language was, under those conditions, a weapon against the ruling class (the planter aristocracy & the capitalist bourgeoisie). It was not “false consciousness” in the sense of blinding them to their material interests; it was the only language available to articulate those interests.

That contradiction is interesting. That’s what I want to close with.


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