Communism is inherently anti-religious. Communist constitutions are not worth the paper they are written on. Communism and religion cannot share space because they compete for the same role, that of guardian of morals and social norms (among other things). That's why there never was a communist state that didn't persecute religion.
with people forgetting that Christian socialism is something very strong in the period.
You're not reading.
First off - The bolded word is not a rebuttal. The same thing can actually be applied with a lot of non-communist constitutions as well. Heck, it can even be applied to the most developed democracies. So this is not a good rebuttal.
I understand what you are trying to say but let me rephrase the statement because we need to destroy certain things being implied here. Communism and religion cannot share the same space because they do not compete for the same role. Communism is not about promoting morality. Communism is also not a religion.
However,
OTL communist states do see organized religion as a threat for a variety of reasons, hence the persecution of religious organizations and the devoutly religious,
but it's definitely not because the state and organized religion compete for the same role. It's a long story so I'm not exactly going to explain it. It also differ vary in content and intensity per country and time period.
Sure, communist parties themselves may say anti-religion stuff from time to time in its internal documents and such but many Communist Party-ruled states OTL are countries that at least try to pretend that they are still liberal democratic states, under popular fronts led by the communist parties, at first, like the entire Warsaw Pact, hence the existence of puppet political parties within ruling fronts rather than going full-blown single party-state model. Heck,
the People's Republic of China is itself a product of that attempt, at least during the beginning. (There's a reason it's called "the People's Republic" rather than the "Socialist Republic", yeah,
there's a difference between the two within Marxian stageist theory)
So it's very unlikely that there's going to be a governmental decree or anything of sort that just simply bans religious practice because "religion bad".
Communists do want to keep appearances.
But more importantly....
this is NOT a discussion whether communism is inherently anti-religious or not. You're trying to make a rebuttal over something that I didn't even say or implied.
It's taking or cherry picking a sentence without understanding the full context of why I said why I said and then make a rebuttal over that single sentence alone.
The real discussion and my real complaint is the question as to how ridiculous is it that OTL communist states that try their best to legitimize their presence with written constitutions with human rights provisions including provisions for religious freedom will write something like persecuting religion
directly because it's "anti-treason" and "counterrevolutionary" idea, which
@Mitridates the Great 's idea.
It doesn't work like that.
After all, the persecution of religion within the Communist bloc does not happen because religion is considered a fundamentally "anti-treason" and "counterrevolutionary" idea.
If that's the case, East Germany will simply ban its version of the Christian Democrats.
North Korea will do the same to its own version of puppet religious socialist parties/organizations.
China can simply ban Islam as a whole rather than go the roundabout ways of doing stuff in Xinjiang due to "extremism" and stuff and also apply the same persecution to Xinjiang Muslims to the other Chinese Muslims like the Hui, etc.
There are other examples available.
Fundamentally speaking, religious belief is something that can still exists in the milieu between capitalism and full communism, but it's an open question and debate whether atheism is something that needs to be militantly enforced to an extreme point or if you can just go with the flow and hope that religion disappears as the country modernizes and secularizes.
It's not a clean cut thing.
But Marxist-Leninist states did made their choice in the matter.
Thus, religious persecution need to be justified via other reasons
rather than saying that religion is counterrevolutionary. Because, believe it or not, communists do sometimes care about legality.
So, no Counter-Revolutionary Ideas Act with religion in it and that kind of bull.
It will just be the usual package historically, nothing fancy.
So that's why I'm arguing that the idea above is not only a stereotypical idea, it's also a false one.
