God-Building

Anatoly Lunacharsky was aligned with the Vperedist wing of the Bolshevik faction. Although he would later rejoin the Bolsheviks and indeed become People's Commissariat for Education after October 1917, he was originally closely associated with Vladimir Lenin's rival, his brother-in-law Alexander Bogdanov. In his two volume work Religion and Socialism (1908–11), Lunacharsky propounded his theory of bogostroitel'stvo (богостроительство, 'God-Building'):

Scientific socialism, is the most religious of all religions, and the true Social Democrat is the most deeply religious of all human beings.[2]

He proposed a new religious sentiment which would be accommodating to the world-view of communism by creating a new religion that was compatible with science and not based on any supernatural beliefs.

Lunacharsky claimed that, while traditional religion was false and was used for the purposes of exploitation, it still cultivated emotion, moral values, desires, and other aspects of life that were important to human society.[3]^: 20 He believed that these aspects should be transformed into positive humanistic values of a new communist morality, instead of destroying religion outright when it served as the psychological and moral basis for millions of people. In his idea, God would gradually be replaced with a new vision of humanity, and through doing so socialism would achieve great success.

He and his supporters argued that Marxism was too mechanically deterministic with regard to human beings and that it alone would not be able to inspire masses of people. They further posited that symbolism and ritual served a necessary social and psychological role. Regarding the social value of religion, Lunacharsky wrote:[1]

From the socialist point of view, the attitude of the proletarian movement toward religious organizations is built on the basis of their positions in the class struggle. Socialism looks at religious movements from the point of view of the common good, as well as physical, moral and mental development, which implies the following:

1. Socialism is fighting against religious superstitions and prejudices based on empirical knowledge of objective and subjective science.

2. Socialism is fighting against the religious intellectuals serving the bourgeoisie, just as with the secular intellectuals supporting the bourgeoisie.

3. Socialism is alien to militant atheism, based on opposing prejudice and violence against people.

4. Socialist freedom also implies freedom of religion and an independent search for the truth for every person.

5. Socialism cannot dogmatically hold any one position on the statements “God is” or “There is no God”, and takes a position of agnosticism or “open possibilities”.

6. Socialism unites secular and religious ideological groups in the struggle for the proletariat. Any action aiming to merge socialism with religious fanaticism, or militant atheism, are actions aimed at splitting the proletarian class and have the formula of “divide and rule”, which plays into the hands of bourgeois dictatorship.

Ludwig Feuerbach's 'religion of humanity', on which this was inspired, held that God would be replaced by man as an object of worship. It did not mean that single individuals would be worshipped, but rather the entire potential of the human race and all its achievements would be the object of worship. Instead of projecting human values onto the heavens and submitting people to their own illusory creation, these values would be worshipped in humanity as a whole, which possessed them collectively. This religion would bring people to value themselves and to find common purpose, community and universal meaning in themselves as a collective.

Along with Feuerbach, they also received inspiration from Richard Avenarius' Naturfilisof, Ernst Mach's Empirio-criticism, as well as from Friedrich Nietzsche. Lunacharsky was also particularly interested in the Greek Mystery Schools, especially the Eleusinian Mysteries. Lunacharsky viewed the Eleusinian Mysteries as a model for how communal ritual could be used as a vehicle for the teaching of moral concepts.[1]

They understood the term religion to mean a link between human beings as individuals, a link between human beings and communities, and a link between human beings and societies in the past as well as future. Lunacharsky wrote, "For the sake of the great struggle for life... it is necessary for humanity to almost organically merge into an integral unity. Not a mechanical or chemical... but a psychic, consciously emotional linking-together... is in fact a religious emotion."[3]^: 93 He argued that atheism in itself is pessimistic, because life becomes meaningless, and that in order to solve this one needed to turn to the pleasure of a religion to give meaning. Atheism didn't provide people with the meaning in their lives that religion did and once religion was taken away, people would feel empty unless something was put in its place. In its place, Lunacharsky proposed they should place humanity as a transcendent entity.

Lunacharsky wished to change the commandment to love God above everything:[3]^: 94

You must love and deify matter above everything else, [love and deify] the corporal nature or the life of your body as the primary cause of things, as existence without a beginning or end, which has been and forever will be... God is humanity in its highest potential. But there is no humanity in the highest potential... Let us then love the potentials of mankind, our potentials, and represent them in a garland of glory in order to love them ever more.

Lunacharsky saw Marxism as having religious components, including its faith in the inevitable victory of socialism, as well as its belief in science and material existence as producing all human relations. These elements could assist in the God-Building. Lunacharsky interpreted the events of the 1905 revolution as an expression of religious forces in the nation.[3]^: 94 The religion to be created would worship the social ideal of socialism in its deification of humanity.

Lunacharsky and his supporters rejected the divinity of Christ, but they deeply respect him and re-interpreted him as a revolutionary leader and the world's first Communist. The new religion would have prayer that would be addressed to progress, humanity, and human genius. Collective, rather than individual, prayer was stressed due to the wish to use the spiritual practice to support a common revolutionary action. This new religion would have temples and rituals, and theatre with symbolic plays to induce spiritual feelings. Lunacharsky believed that theatre and symbolism were important tools of psychological and sociological transformation, and the "struggle of the human soul" against oppression.[3]^: 94–5

Anatoly Lunacharsky's notion that religion was a complex phenomenon with many aspects stood in contrast to the views of other Soviet leaders in the early days of the USSR who thought that religion would disappear with the changing material conditions, under the Marxist presumption that religion and all ideology was simply a product of material conditions.

Vladimir Lenin was infuriated by this concept, and considered Lunacharsky's position to be extremely harmful, by supposedly transforming Marxism into a mild liberal reformism.[3]^: 20 He believed it obscured the fact that religion had been a tool of ideological exploitation, and that this idea was making a compromise with reactionary forces.[4]

Lenin's victory in the 1917 October Revolution led to the rejection of this school of thought, except in the case of Alexander Bogdanov.[5]

Lenin had strong views on religion going back many years:

Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation. Impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better life after death as impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man.[6]

Marx had rejected Feuerbach's idea of a religion of humanity as well; this example served Lenin's argument. Lenin would not compromise with religion even in this form, and he felt that it would ultimately degenerate into a betrayal of the Bolshevik cause.[3]^: 21 Lunacharsky himself gave in to the atheist view after the revolution, changing his views on Christ in later propaganda by calling him a mythical personality and not a historic figure.[3]^: 95

Lunacharsky's idea was adopted by a number of other leading Bolsheviks, including Maxim Gorky and Alexander Bogdanov.

Lunacharsky advocated criticizing clergymen for failing to keep biblical teaching and other strategies that relied on understanding religion in greater depth. While he urged moderation (not on principle but out of pragmatic concerns) and this would be ignored, the simplistic views on religion as a mere class phenomenon were discarded in favour of understanding it as a more complex phenomenon.

Ideas related to God-building did emerge in the years following.

Beginning in 1926, a Russian-Soviet writer and medical doctor, named V. Veresaev, argued in favour of developing beautiful and standardised rituals for important occasions such as giving names to infants, weddings and funerals. He argued that the state already possessed many rituals (parades, demonstrations, etc.), but that they were "depressingly untalented and miserable."[3]^: 92 He and many others argued that people were going to churches due to disappointment in the bureaucratic indifference and poor quality of Soviet state marriages or birth-registration. One Communist rural teacher who supported him claimed that he would not preach atheism to peasants because when one makes them atheists, one deprives them of all rituals along with the religion and gives nothing to replace them with. A Komsomol activist who supported him presented a case of a person whose wife had died, was buried through means of an emotionally cold and indifferent secular-communist ceremony, and the man, greatly depressed by it, consumed a full bottle of vodka while crying in tears. Lenin had claimed that religion was a kind of spiritual booze in that it acted like a drug for people, while this man had turned to booze in place of religion.[3]^: 92

Veresaev, however, was attacked by Marxist intellectuals and his ideas, like Lunacharsky's, were rejected. Veresaev warned that "life would become a bore and man would turn into an empty container' as a result, and that these people who opposed him were 'stooping people with protruding foreheads, short-sighted eyes and thick spectacles" who didn't appreciate beauty and had no need for rituals in their lives.[3]^: 92[7][8]

Lunacharsky's idea of 'God-building' would not be revived in any major way, however, until the 1960s.

The Russian Orthodox Church saw this whole new religion in the category of the false prophets that Christ had predicted, and related it to Satanism. Laskovaia, a Soviet author, pointed to a similarity in Lunacharsky's ideas with the Death of God concept of western theologians, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John A.T. Robinson.[3]^: 95