Washington, USA - Good news for Americans of faith who aren't happy with the Democratic or Republican parties. The Communist Party USA has created a new Religion Commission to reach out to "welcome people of faith into the party."
Wait. Wasn't it Marx who said this? "Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand." And wasn't it Lenin who said this? "Religion is the opium of the people." Isn't communism by definition anti-religion?
This isn't your great-grandfather's Communist Party, apparently. "Some of the greatest leaders in our history have been men and women of faith, and our party has been proud to work with them," Tim Yeager, Religion Commission chairman, Chicago trade unionist and Episcopalian, said in a statement.
As Yeager notes, the party's constitution states that membership is open to "any person living in the United States, 18 years of age or over, regardless of race, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, or religious belief..."
Yes, there are religious Communists. Robert Mugabe, for example, the brutal Marxist dictator and president of Zimbabwe is a Roman Catholic. OK, bad example. There was Thomas J. Hagerty, the Marxist Catholic priest from New Mexico who co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblys) and once said, "The Ballot Box is simply a capitalist concession. Dropping pieces of paper into a hole in a box never did achieve emancipation of the working class, and in my opinion it never will." Another bad example.
Religious communism could be a tough sell, even in America.
By the way, the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party USA should not be confused with the much smaller Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, which called George W. Bush a "Christian Fascist" and whose chairman, Bob Avarkian, is author of the book "Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World."
I guess that means the more traditional godless Communists are now the fundamentalists.