By Brian Nuckols

The U.S. Left doesn't know what to do with God. Twenty-five percent of the country skips meals to pay bills while too many leftists debate whether prayer is counterrevolutionary. The Right, meanwhile, transforms Jesus into a hedge fund manager who despises food stamps. But another tradition existed once: religious organizations (and leaders) that read sacred texts as immediate political demands rather than afterlife consolation.

Sixty-two percent of U.S. residents under 30 now hold favorable views of socialism, according to a 2025 Cato/YouGov survey—the highest level ever recorded. Simultaneously, 29% of all people in the United States identify as religiously unaffiliated, with young adults showing the highest rates of religious disaffiliation in U.S. history. These are the famous “nones,” as in “none of the above.” This is a generation seeking economic justice but finding only secular frameworks to articulate that longing. Religious socialism provides both without requiring choice between material transformation and spiritual depth.

Writing from exile in Oxford, Polish Communist Leszek Kolakowski  argued that impossible goals must be articulated precisely because they remain impossible. Revolutionary movements require what he called "mental counterparts" to material struggle—not mystification but the symbolic architecture that sustains hope through inevitable defeats.

Karl Marx knew this, which makes his famous opium observation more complex than Internet atheists assume.

The Opium Was Medicine

Everyone quotes "opium of the people" without finishing Marx's sentence: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions." In 1844, opium meant medicine, although its addictive qualities were recognized. Marx diagnosed religion as both a symptom of suffering and a response to it. The problem wasn't that people reached for transcendent meaning but that capitalism forced them to seek it outside material life. When Marx condemns capital, he channels the prophet Amos raging against those who "sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals."

For over a century in the West, religious socialism meant almost exclusively Christian socialism—from the Anglican Christian Socialists of Victorian England to the Social Gospel movement in the United States—with important but smaller contributions from Jewish socialist traditions such as the Bund. This historical narrowness makes today's multi-faith socialist organizing particularly significant, suggesting not just tactical coalition but deeper recognition that capitalism's contradictions resonate across spiritual traditions.

Marx Had a Point About Religion Being Dangerous

We can't skip past the fact that Marx spent considerable energy explaining why religion usually served reaction rather than revolution. He expected religion to wither as material conditions improved. Liberation psychology suggests a different path: humans need meaning alongside material security. The question isn't whether people will have frameworks of ultimate significance but whether those frameworks serve liberation or domination, collective transformation or individual consolation.

The choice isn't between religious false consciousness and secular truth but between despair that accepts existing conditions as permanent and what Cornel West calls "tragic hope"—hope that acknowledges defeat without surrendering to it. Religious socialism chooses hope not as feeling but as discipline, what Jonathan Lear calls "radical hope" for possibilities we cannot yet imagine but must proclaim to make them possible.

The Kingdom of Heaven on Earth must be announced while unattainable. It is not the people's opium but their dynamite—an explosive force that shatters the possible and creates space for more. That force has had an impact in the United States and in Latin America.

Liberation Theology Changes Everything

When Gustavo Gutiérrez coined "liberation theology" in 1971, he wasn't adding religion to revolution or vice versa but recognizing what already existed: base communities throughout Latin America reading the Bible as resistance manual.

Liberation psychology emerged from identical conditions. Ignacio Martín-Baró, a Jesuit priest and psychologist murdered by U.S.-trained Salvadoran troops in 1989, developed psychology from the "underside of history." Traditional psychology asked how to adjust people to existing society. Liberation psychology asked how to transform society to meet human needs.

Dorothy Day understood what Marx diagnosed: religion becomes opium when it encourages acceptance of suffering as God's will rather than human choice. She transformed Catholic charity into Catholic resistance by connecting individual works of mercy with social transformation. 

The Religious Battle Against Slavery

The resistance of enslaved people generated the theological framework that animated John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, not the reverse. When Shields Green, the fugitive who joined Brown's uprising, declared, "I believe I'll go down with the old man", he spoke from two centuries of Black religious tradition that understood martyrdom as political testimony. The spirituals that Green sang while ascending the gallows had sustained Denmark Vesey's 1822 uprising, Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion, and countless acts of daily resistance that remained invisible to white observers but created the ideological infrastructure for organized revolt.

Harriet Tubman embodied this synthesis between spiritual authority and armed resistance throughout her nineteen expeditions along the Underground Railroad. When she declared "I always told God, I'm going to hold steady on you, and you've got to see me through," she articulated what liberation theology would later theorize as praxis: action guided by transcendent commitment that transforms individual courage into collective movement. Tubman's success across a decade of operations stemmed from religious vision that sustained community across impossible odds. 

The African Methodist Episcopal Church provided organizational infrastructure for Vesey's Charleston uprising while Turner's Southampton revolt emerged from Baptist prayer meetings where enslaved people developed prophetic interpretations of Exodus that demanded immediate liberation rather than afterlife consolation. These movements understood that spiritual conviction could sustain resistance when material conditions made victory impossible, but only when that conviction connected individual suffering to collective transformation rather than personal salvation.

Black churches emerged from this tradition of resistance rather than accommodation. Long before white Christian socialists discovered the "social gospel," African American congregations understood salvation as requiring material liberation because they experienced bondage as spiritual warfare demanding theological response. When Frederick Douglass observed that enslaved people's Christianity differed fundamentally from their masters' religion precisely because it demanded justice rather than submission, he identified what would become the central insight of Black liberation theology: authentic faith inevitably challenges systems that reduce human beings to property.

This religious framework sustained organized resistance through the collapse of Reconstruction and consolidation of Jim Crow, developing theological analysis that white religious socialism often missed. Where European traditions emphasized class solidarity, Black religious thought recognized racial oppression as spiritual warfare requiring both political resistance and theological reconstruction. From Ida B. Wells connecting anti-lynching campaigns to Christian witness through James Cone's development of Black liberation theology to contemporary womanist theologians like Kelly Brown Douglas and Delores Williams, this tradition consistently demonstrated how systematic dehumanization operates through spiritual as well as material mechanisms.

When Sojourner Truth declared, "If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again," she connected individual spiritual experience to collective transformation in ways that anticipated liberation theology by a century while establishing womanist theology's foundational insight: that gender and race intersect within systems of domination that require simultaneous spiritual and political resistance. Her theological vision informed later movements from what was originally the Highlander Folk School through Ella Baker's organizing philosophy to contemporary Black Lives Matter activists who explicitly connect spiritual practices to political resistance.

Martin Luther King's theological synthesis reached its fullest expression in his analysis of power and love as complementary rather than opposing forces. Where secular leftism often dismissed love as sentimentality that weakened political struggle, King understood that "power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic." His insight that "power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love" resolved the false choice between moral purity and political effectiveness that paralyzed white religious socialism.

This theological framework enabled King to articulate what became his most radical economic vision. His declaration in the early fifties hat "God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth while others live in abject deadening poverty" drew on centuries of Black religious resistance and provided a foundation for the original Poor People's Campaign. His assassination came after he moved beyond civil rights toward economic justice. 

Why This Matters for Today's Left

Contemporary leftists in the United States abandoned religious language, so the Right monopolizes it. Too many socialists dismiss spiritual needs as false consciousness, driving people with genuine spiritual hungers toward reactionary alternatives..

The rise of "conspirituality"—the toxic merger of wellness culture, New Age spirituality, and right-wing conspiracy theories—demonstrates what happens when the Left abandons the terrain of spiritual meaning. QAnon recruited yoga teachers, Reiki healers, and meditation practitioners by offering a narrative that combined spiritual awakening with political engagement, however distorted. When socialists dismiss all non-materialist frameworks as inherently reactionary, they cede transformative spiritual language to fascist movements that weaponize genuine desires for meaning, community, and transcendence.

The U.S. Left must recognize that millions identify as "spiritual but not religious"—seeking frameworks for meaning-making outside traditional religious institutions while remaining open to transcendent experience. These seekers often begin with legitimate critiques of pharmaceutical capitalism, industrial food systems, and alienating medical practice, only to be recruited into anti-vaccine conspiracies, sovereign citizen movements, and neo-fascist "awakening" narratives because no left alternative exists that honors their spiritual intuitions while providing materialist analysis.

Religious socialism must explicitly welcome these "spiritual but not religious" comrades—the energy workers, meditation practitioners, astrologers, and consciousness explorers who recognize capitalism's spiritual poverty but lack frameworks connecting their insights to collective liberation. Their practices of mindfulness, energy healing, and consciousness exploration aren't inherently reactionary; they become so only when captured by individualist frameworks that promise personal transcendence while ignoring systemic oppression. A socialism that integrates their understanding of consciousness, energy, and transformation while grounding these insights in material analysis could prevent their recruitment into conspiratorial thinking.

People need more than policy proposals. They require what Kolakowski calls utopia: vision of radical difference that makes present suffering meaningful rather than absurd. Religious socialism provides emotional technologies for sustaining impossible struggle across time. Weekly gatherings create rhythm beyond electoral cycles. Seasonal rituals mark time beyond quarterly profit reports. Songs and stories carry memory across generations when immediate victories seem impossible.

The DSA Religion and Socialism Working Group, founded in 1977 and recently revitalized, represents one attempt to bridge this gap. What makes this DSA group unique on the U.S. Left is our explicitly multi-faith composition—a departure from the historical pattern in the West, where religious socialism meant primarily Christian socialism with some strains of Judaism. Today's committee brings together Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and practitioners of other traditions in a shared commitment to economic justice, recognizing that diverse spiritual traditions converge on similar critiques of capitalism's dehumanizing effects.

Our work on migrant justice, climate justice, labor, LGBTQ and trans rights, and the new Poor People’s Campaign”]shows practical possibilities for religious-secular left cooperation. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discusses Catholic faith informing her socialism, when Rashida Tlaib connects Palestinian liberation to Islamic justice, when Jewish Voice for Peace reads Exodus as anti-Zionist text—they're not confused about materialism but recognizing that transcendent vision is a necessary component of historical transformation.

This multi-faith dimension of contemporary U.S. socialism suggests something profound: the critique of capitalism's reduction of human beings to economic units resonates across religious boundaries. Whether through Catholic social teaching's emphasis on human dignity, Islamic principles of economic justice, Jewish traditions of tikkun olam, or Buddhist critiques of attachment and greed, diverse spiritual traditions arrive at remarkably similar conclusions about the spiritual poverty of capitalism.

The crucial insight distinguishing religious socialism from fundamentalism is that the Kingdom of Heaven represents creation fulfilled rather than Eden restored, not nostalgia for the imagined past but commitment to an unprecedented future. 

AI Will Not Save Us

The algorithmic revolution threatens human dignity in ways that secular analysis alone cannot address. Artificial intelligence reduces consciousness to computational processes, relationships to data patterns, and creativity to probabilistic generation. We may need frameworks that insist on spiritual transcendence while engaging material conditions to resist this reductionism effectively.

The choice isn't between religious false consciousness and secular truth but between despair that accepts existing conditions as permanent and hope that acknowledges defeat without surrendering to it. Religious socialism chooses hope not as feeling but as discipline applied toward possibilities we cannot yet imagine but must proclaim to make them possible.

Brian Nuckols is a psychotherapist and journalist. He’s a socialist organizer and member of PGH DSA.

Image credit: Alison McKellar / Flickr