[FRA:] Max Horkheimer on Religion

[James Rovira]

Ralph --

There's a historical element to Ken's response to you that you
shouldn't overlook (regardless of your opinion of the relationship
between religion and historical materialism today).

The first thing I think we need to do to speak clearly about this is
abandon the word "religion" in favor of the word "Protestantism."

You need to understand that the -same rhetoric- used by historical
materialists today (and since the 19th cent) to describe religion was
used by  Protestants to describe Catholicism in centuries previous --
and even into the 19th century.  Catholicism was "superstition."  To
cite one example, there were some Protestants in England who devoted
their time to refuting cases of demon possession -by careful
observation-, and this was contemporaneous to the time of the Salem
witch trials.  The proliferation of Catholicism was blamed for the
spread of exorcisms.  These very same Protestants did believe in the
devil and that, in theory, demon possession was possible, but they
still devoted most of their time to debunking cases of demon
possession by careful observation.  Historical materialist methods --
the historical materialist impulse itself -- is a very Protestant
phenomenon which directed itself against the Protestantism from which
it came.

It's not a coincidence that authors like Hume were from Scotland or
Bacon, Newton, and Locke from England -- authors who had a strong
influence upon the European continent, especially -Germany-.  Who
awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumbers?  What got the ball rolling?
This historical connection exists, and runs fairly deep, even to the
point of shared moral judgments (it's not hard to see Marx's rage
against mistreatment of the lower classes reflected in the Hebrew
Scriptures).

In the end, philosophically, any form of materialism is utterly
incompatible with any form of religion, and I think for that reason
"horseshit" is a reasonable response.  Especially these days, when
critical theorists like Zizek are trying to produce some kind of
materialist Christianity (see the journal Angelaki).  Horseshit needs
to become a technical term.   But we need to understand the reason
these connections keep coming up and what's motivating them, if we
want to be -historical- in our approach.

Jim R