Wry, thanks for clarifying some term usage here. Communalistic is perhaps a better explanation of the early Church and how their parishoners lived and worked. It could also explain some of the various ascetics who helped market Christianity in the early years, i.e. missions and monks.

Communism is an economic philosophy that deals with the means of production and class struggle. Communism is much more modern than agrarian, commune-style living that preceeded all economic ideas, especially capitalism.

The Church did, however, make its ideology much more consistent with capitalism around the time of the Renaissance. Previously, the Church was quite hostile toward the economic practice of capitalism, and this is documented and most historians (even Church historians) agree on this. Some of the early problems dealt with international trade and commerce, i.e. the slave trade.

Regardless of state controls on religion in "marxist" states, the people (from a sociological standpoint) were generally very religious, very faithful. Of course the Party wanted people to give up religion and its practices but the Party member, in most of these states, constituted a small minority of the overall population. Also, from a sociological standpoint, most Soviets in that "marxist" state simply ignored much of what the Party dictated. This is documented as well.


The whole discussion on religion and "marxist" states came about when somebody said that capitalism is more in-step with Christianity. Me and some others challenged that assertion by pointing out that communal life was a focal point of the early Christian Church (and you can't really say the early Christians were Catholics although the Catholics would claim them. I prefer to call early Christians just that, early Christians, simply because it took about 800-900 years after Christ for Catholicism to fully develop in Europe). We also challenged the assertion because core Christian beliefs are rather contradictory with capitalist ideology. That is, if one were to take Christ's ethical teachings and then put those next to capitalist ideology anyone could discern some friction between the two. And I think we touched on this earlier, that capitalism is economics and ethics is outside the realm of the business world, or....uh something like that.

On a final note, perhaps you should re-read the Manifesto because while Marx was hostile to organized religion, one cannot find much in the book about faith and its role among humanity. One must ask why Marx was hostile toward organized religion and any study on the state of the Church of England or the Lutheran Church during Marx's lifestyle, one could simply realize that those organizations deserved criticism. The rank-and-file Christian of the era also deserved criticism and that is where Marx (and others) delivered.