OCR Leadership
May 1st, 2025

Our Membership Constitution states:

While communists do not believe in Gods, we must respect people’s religious beliefs. Respect does not mean we do not criticize aspects of people’s beliefs and cultures that impede liberation, but, so long as these are not part of reactionary movements, we act to transform these beliefs through a protracted process of unity-struggle-unity.

What this means is that to be a member of the OCR, you cannot subscribe to the belief system of an organized religion or believe in the existence of specific supernatural beings for which there is no scientific proof. Doing so would be in contradiction with the communist world outlook. To believe in Communism as an ideology and believe in Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, etc. would mean practicing eclectics, having two goods in stock, having two ideologies that are in contradiction with each other. Moreover, allegiance to a God or Gods and a religion would conflict with being part of a democratic centralist organization, wherein our allegiance is to the masses, the revolutionary principles, objectives, and strategy of our Organization, and the organizational structures that serve them.

For us to allow people to join the OCR without rupturing with that eclectics, without consciously choosing to reject a religious worldview in favor of the communist worldview, would be liberalism, and would corrode the ideological unity necessary for a communist organization. As our Membership Constitution states, “Recruitment into the OCR is a process of ideological remolding and political training; to join the OCR, you need to become a communist.” Where applicable, that process includes breaking with religious ideology. We clarify our position here in part because during most recruitment processes, perspective OCR members have tended to think of religious belief as a personal preference rather than an ideological question just like any other (such as bourgeois-democratic thinking, postmodernism, revolutionary nationalism, feminism, etc.—all ideologies that may or may not align with aspects of the revolutionary struggle but are not the same as communism).

Our position on religion and OCR membership does not mean that believers in religious worldviews cannot make important contributions to the revolutionary struggle and be comrades of—but not in—the OCR. Nor does it mean that OCR members cannot participate in healthy aspects of the social life and culture tied to religions, whether that is through family and social connections, as part of integrating with the masses and having a social life, or for the purpose of carrying out political work among the masses, just that we have to do so as nonbelievers. In fact, we have recruited several people whose journey to becoming a communist started by growing up within or joining progressive religious traditions. We have found such people to often have a firmer and deeper commitment to ridding the world of injustice and standing with the masses than individuals from nonreligious backgrounds, precisely because their religious tradition instilled in them moral principles over pragmatic or fickle commitments—moral principles that were reinforced through ritualized (in the good sense of the term) practice and a humanist social life and culture. We hope to recruit many more such people, as the strengths they bring in can be a bulwark against many negative, anti-social trends in American culture. Nevertheless, such recruits still need to move beyond the religious belief at the core of their progressive religious traditions and the non-communist ways it has trained them to relate to self and the masses (usually martyr and savior mentalities).

Where there is ambiguity in our position on religion and OCR membership concerns where to draw the line between religious belief as an ideology in contradiction with the communist worldview and spiritualites and aspects of religious belief that are not necessarily in contradiction with materialist dialectics. For starters, we recognize systems of religious and spiritual belief as syntheses of human knowledge and wisdom, stamped by the social conditions in which they arose, that need to be critically sifted through for what we can appropriate from them. In this respect, we must reject conceptions of historical materialism that treat religious beliefs as expressions of ignorance, unilaterally superseded by knowledge in the form of empirical science as a consequence of the development of the productive forces. For example, many ancient religious cultures had sophisticated and impressively accurate knowledge of the cosmos, without the use of telescopes and other tools of empirical measurement that modern astronomers require. Beyond the pictures they paint of reality, there is often much to learn from the philosophies behind religions, which can sometimes be far more dialectical than much of what passes for materialist analysis, and some specific aspects of religious and spiritual knowledge systems may be beneficial to incorporate into a dialectical materialist understanding of the universe.

Furthermore, regardless of the idealism at the core of religious belief, religious belief turns into a material force by virtue of guiding centuries of social practice. So to write off religion as pure idealism would be missing its materiality in human culture and social relations, a materiality we must sift through for its positive and negative aspects. To put it another way, Jesus might not have been the son of God, but lots of people have tried to live by (their interpretation of) his example, for better or worse.

Another reason to reject any forms of materialist, scientific arrogance that claim we have nothing to learn from religious and spiritual knowledge is the fact that scientific inquiry in recent decades has (1) shown us how much we do not understand about life and the universe, and (2) suggested the presence of energetic forces that religious and spiritual knowledge systems have offered intriguing interpretations of for many millennia. On the latter, a few examples should give us pause. The science of epigenetics proposes a kind of subconscious force acting on our biology by modifying gene behavior, and biologists are increasingly recognizing a purposiveness to evolution in contrast to Darwinian emphasis on natural selection through accident and necessity (see the recently published collection of essays Evolution “On Purpose”: Teleonomy in Living Systems). Recipients of organ transplants have reported changes in tastes and behavior (suddenly starting to smoke a specific brand of cigarettes, for example) and even the possibility of knowledge coming from their deceased organ donor. Researchers at the University of Virginia have taken up the study of incidences of “past life experiences” in young children who display familiarity with a deceased person’s life history despite having no way of consciously learning that life history. These and other examples suggest that if we arrogantly stick to a supposedly “scientific” materialism and refuse to acknowledge there are some things about matter and energy that religious and spiritual systems have understood better than Western science up until now, we will become out of touch with reality and scientific inquiry. And we have not even touched theoretical physics.

In light of some of the latest directions in scientific inquiry and the validity (if not empirical proof) of some spiritually-based explanations of reality, being a communist and being a member of the OCR need not mean a rejection of the existence of energetic forces that empirical science cannot explain. In other words, a little bit of ambiguous spirituality, of acknowledging there are energetic forces in the universe we do not have an explanation for, is compatible with being a member of the OCR, so long as it does not move us away from a dialectical materialist understanding of reality or turn into a codified religious belief. In fact, if we are to be practitioners of materialist dialectics and not mechanical materialism, the communist movement will need to explore spiritual and empirically scientific explanations for such energetic forces, avoiding drawing definitive conclusions until a correct synthesis can be arrived at.