WI: early and mid communists advocate religious freedom?

For trying to bar people from being religious or trying to punish them for believing or participating in religion really is an amateur hour mistake once you think about it. I mean, for any social reformer, just because your personal trajectory has involved setting religion to one side, and perhaps even energetically declaring yourself an atheist, doesn't mean you need to pressure other people to do the same and/or insist they follow your timetable.

It would have been so much better to take the position, we're no longer going to let people be discriminated against on the basis of religion, and we're certainly not going to allow such discrimination to be an aspect of governmental policy.

I know there were anti-cleric movements in Latin America in the 1800s. And I think it's rumored that the Casa Rosada in Argentina was a compromise among factions, although I also understand there were varying stories as to why the building was created with beautiful pink architecture. So given the time, maybe it's a little more understandable of why communists made this mistake. But what if they hadn't.

What if early communists had advocated religious freedom?
 
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I think you mean "mid" communists in the style of Lenin and such. Early communists, like Marx, did not regard religion itself as evil but merely a mechanism with which the lower-classes turned too as a spiritual means of dealing with the ills of capitalism. Remember in mind that when he wrote "opiate of the masses*" is what in a time when opium was a commonly proscribed pain killer. As far as Marx was concerned, religion would disappear in a communist society not because it was suppressed but because with the capitalism no longer inflicting ills upon the world it was no longer needed.

Or are we talking about pre-Marxist communists? In which case I can not comment because I am unfamiliar with them.

*Really, the full quote makes this quite apparent: "Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
 
WI: early and mid communists were advocates of religious freedom?

Yes, I suppose I'm thinking of mid communists such as Lenin and the other Russian revolutionaries. I'm also thinking a little earlier such as the union movement in the United States, say, in the 1880s, who were accused of being anarchists, atheists, advocates of free love, secret advocates of Judaism, and everything else under the sun. And in some cases, sure, all of the above and more was true. But in many cases, the union activists were deeply religious persons themselves, were thoroughly regular family people or single adults, and other than the union work even rather boring people. Well, no human being is really boring once you get to know them. Let's just say the kind of person with whom you might enjoy having a pint or a cup of tea with.

And because they wanted to negotiate as relative equals or even just negotiate at all were viewed as trying to subvert legitimate authority.

I guess activists are usually viewed suspicious and whatever grain of truth is greatly multiplied, almost in relief, as if we now have bona fides to be against them.

So, to answer my own question, maybe it wouldn't made that much difference, but I think it would have made some, especially since religious freedom is the more modern position and it would have been anticipating this.

And thanks for filling out the Marx quote and putting it in context. So, it was a time when opium was viewed as a more neutral substance. Something which is clear where he says, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, . . . "

PS This is a category spanning topic. I put it in the After 1900 category because I'm more interested in the effects.
 
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"...when society, by taking possession of all means of production and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage in which they are now held by these means of production which they themselves have produced but which confront them as an irresistible alien force, when therefore man no longer merely proposes, but also disposes — only then will the last alien force which is still reflected in religion vanish; and with it will also vanish the religious reflection itself, for the simple reason that then there will be nothing left to reflect.

"Herr Dühring, however, cannot wait until religion dies this, its natural, death. He proceeds in more deep-rooted fashion. He out-Bismarcks Bismarck; he decrees sharper May laws [127] not merely against Catholicism, but against all religion whatsoever; he incites his gendarmes of the future against religion, and thereby helps it to martyrdom and a prolonged lease of life..." https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch27.htm
 
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