———-
Hellraisers Journal – Monday April 25, 1910
Eugene Victor Debs on the Pious Pickets of Capitalism
From the Appeal to Reason of April 23, 1910:
—–
It may be set down as a rule that the gentry who constitute the self-appointed protectorate over the domain of religion and who charge socialists with being infidels and socialism with attacking religion are themselves hypocrites who are profiting by the ignorance and superstitions of the people and who use the cloak of religion to conceal their evil practices. Their pretended solicitude for socialism is a sham. What they really fear is not that religion will be destroyed, but that hypocrisy and false pretense will be discovered.
Those pious misfits who do not know what real religion is are one in raising the cry against socialism in the name of religion. Most of them have never read a chapter of socialist economics and are utterly ignorant of what socialism really means, or else, knowing what it means, deliberately misrepresent it to receive the “well done” and the stipend from their masters.
It is so much safer for the average clergyman to speak against socialism than for it, so far as his charge is concerned, his income and his position in society. Some of them are by reflex so imbued with the hostility for socialism of the capitalists who pay their salaries that they deem it their special duty to denounce socialism as an attack upon the church and a conspiracy against religion. Of course they speak in the name of religion, the religion of Jesus Christ, the homeless wanderer who sympathized and associated with the poor and lowly, and whose ministrations were among the despised sinners and outcasts.
These pious pickets of capitalism prostitute religion in the service of Mammon. Of all men on earth they are the least fit to speak in the name of religion. They have no religion or they would not serve in such a degenerate role.
They are full of cant and glibly parrot their creed, but of real religion, the spiritual influence which exalts man and consecrates him to the loving service of his fellow man, they are as destitute as the arctic region is of sunflowers. Christ knew them perfectly and denounced them as hypocrites.
It is false and slanderous to charge that socialism aims to destroy religion. The truth is that socialism proposes to destroy the conditions which make religion impossible.
It is the veriest sarcasm to talk about religion in the cannibalism of the present system in which men devour each other like hyenas and in which the millions who are robbed of what they produce sink into hopeless poverty while their sons are driven to crime and their daughters to prostitution.
Never until this brute struggle for existence is ended and our industrial life is organized on a basis of democratic mutualism will religion come to abide with men, not the religion of creeds written in books, but of deeds written in the hearts of men whose brethren are all mankind.
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SOURCE
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas)
-Apr 23, 1910
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/appeal-to-reason/100423-appealtoreason-w751.pdf
https://www.newspapers.com/image/66982575/
IMAGE
EVD, Ipl Ns p16, Jan 21, 1910
https://www.newspapers.com/image/35081410/
See also:
“Prostitution of Religion” by Eugene V. Debs
Published in Appeal to Reason
-whole no. 751 (April 23, 1910), p. 2
https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1910/100423-debs-prostitutionofreligion.pdf
-from:
Debs Internet Archive – 1877-1927
https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/
Announcement: The Eugene V. Debs Internet Archive in conjunction with Tim Davenport will be publishing a 6 volume collection of Eugene V. Debs writings. Haymarket Books will be the publishers of the 6 volumes. For weekly updates on this valuable historical project, please click here.
https://debsproject.org/
To order Vol’s I-III
The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs, Vol. I
Building Solidarity on the Tracks, 1877–1892
Edited by Tim Davenport and David Walters
-from Haymarket Book
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1232-the-selected-works-of-eugene-v-debs-vol-i
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1290-the-selected-works-of-eugene-v-debs-volume-ii
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1448-the-selected-works-of-eugene-v-debs-vol-iii
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We Will Sing One Song – Bucky Halker
Lyrics by Joe Hill
We will sing one song of the preacher, fat and sleek
He tells you of homes in the sky
He says, “Be generous, be lowly, and be meek
If you don’t you’ll sure get roasted when you die”