COMMUNISM AND CHRISTIANITY-CAN THERE BE SOME MEETING POINT?



Communism and Christianity are at loggerheads at almost all over the world. Origin of this conflict can be traced to the post revolution era in erstwhile USSR. Christian Church in Russia was seen to be part of the wrong doings of Tsarist regime. Bolshevik and Communist regimes that followed persecuted the Church, which led to mutual hatred .Church found the Marxian doctrine “Religion is opium to Man “to be an attack on the Church-nay all religions. But the preceding statements by Karl Marx are to the effect that religion is the soul of a soulless and conscience of the conscienceless mankind .As it happens in all heated debates half truths that are sensational gets more attention than facts and hence the later part of Marxian statement got wide publicity and the earlier part got camouflaged .Communist parties in most part of the world had leaders who were Atheists and this further reinforced the perception. Added to this, decay of Christianity in the middle ages which had a far high magnitude in Europe prompted those who were disappointed with their religion to flock to the new ideology at that point of time. Net result of all this was that the Christians and Communists developed mutual suspicion, animosity and enmity. There came a situation where the unwritten doctrine “if you are a Christian, you cannot be a Communist and vice versa”
This remains the perception of a large number of people on both sides of the fence. Theoreticians of either side have not tried to understand the other side, if at all there have been some studies, the purpose was to repudiate the other side, not to understand the differing viewpoint.
Some of the areas where there is common ground are:
1. Prevention of exploitation which is universal; the rich vs. Poor-at Macro and micro levels i.e. International to the village levels.
2. Disarmament and moves against arms race.
3. Bridging the gap between the poor and the rich
4. Resistance to the unipolar world order the Western block is trying to create.
I am sure there must be other areas too which can make the world a better place.
The Church as a power structure may have problems in directly involving in many of the issues as many a times Church by itself has to be tolerant to many of the social evils .Same is the case with political parties who have adopted rightist principles as part of their ideology. On the realpolitic sphere, the rightist political parties may not want to confront certain vested interests.