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| Two Christmas icons. (Photo via Midwestern Marx) |
Soni reports that the Indian workers were given words of inspiration and caution by Reverend Nelson Johnson in Greensboro, North Carolina. According to Soni, in the 1970s, Johnson was "comrades" with "members of a Communist workers' group" (170). Yet according to Johnson's online bio (he is still the director of the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro), he is a Christian (reverend), a U.S. Air Force veteran, and an advocate of "genuine participatory democracy."
Given that Communists have historically been denigrated as anti-American, anti-democratic, and anti-Christian, do you think it was a mistake for Johnson to work with such a group?
Is it possible to be a patriotic American Christian who supports Democracy and still be an ally of Communists?
Answer this question after you have read part four, chapter three and all the preceding chapters.
Analyzing the question from a historical angle, early Christian communities practiced a form of protean collectivization and preached largely against the acquisition of personal largess. In practice if not necessarily in principle, communism and Christianity as portrayed in the New Testament (notably in Acts and the Epistles) share values and share a sense of adherence to community values. Especially given that Johnson is a protestant reverend (ostensibly trying to come closer to the early church in practice than the more materialistic Catholic or Orthodox churches), it makes a certain amount of sense that there would be overlapping values between himself and a Communist workers' group and marks his decision to work with them as a non-paradoxical one. Further, just because Johnson is a patriotic American citizen and an advocate of true democracy does not mean that he sees the current state of America as perfect or ideal; far from it. Johnson may express his patriotism through a desire to see America made better and more equitable. In this way, he may share goals with Communist thinkers and empathize with their mission. This does not mean that he admires the irreligion of the majority of Communist thinkers and organizers, but it may mean that he sympathizes with their efforts to better the state of American labor, especially for Black and Brown people who are highly marginalized and highly exploited by the present capitalist system. Johnson represents the patriotic, democratically-minded American Christian who is able to see commonalities between their struggle and that of a group like a Communist workers' group. Although the overlap is not complete, the shared desire for social progress and advocacy for a less exploitative and plutocratic system is enough to assert that an individual like Johnson can certainly take up common cause with those espousing the Communist ideal.
ReplyDeleteThe book leaves out a lot. The protesters openly planned to bring weapons, and many did. They had explicitly laid out plans to militantly chase out the Nazi Party and KKK from the town. The police and justice system can be blamed for not preventing violence or prosecuting the men who killed fairly, but the book seems to frame the reverend as never wanting any violence at all when he had planned to fight. He portrayed himself on the same level as the workers to empathize with them here, but the book seems to imply that their situations are equivalent as well, despite the workers having no risk to their lives through violence by racist groups so far, and the fact that the CWP was and is a militant organization that only aided the black workers when they had no choice before abandoning them, including Reverend Johnson.
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