THE Marxist left’s relationship to religious belief is a complicated one. Our materialism precludes the superstitions of faith while a militant anti-clericalism informs our politics. 

The active role of the church in some of history’s worst atrocities is well documented. In May, the Free Church of Scotland refused to apologise for receiving millions of pounds from slavery.

Social reformer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass demanded it “send back the money” when he toured Scotland in 1846.

But Marx understood the allure of an opiate which offers a spiritual consolation denied us by capitalism’s blunt declaration of a “war of all against all,” the “rat race” Jimmy Reid so eloquently denounced.

So, are Scots losing our religion? The 2022 census records a tipping point. Just over half the population say they have no religion, up from 36.7 per cent in 2011. 

Sectarian tensions, in particular anti-Catholic bigotry, have scarred communities for decades. Up until the 1950s, the Tories enjoyed majority electoral support in Scotland largely based on the loyalties of a Protestant working class whose ethnic identity eclipsed class solidarity. Should the left embrace this apparent drift from the fetishised comforts of scripture?

In Soil and Soul, Alastair McIntosh recounts the tale of how the residents of Eigg became the first community to clear the laird from his estate. 

It’s a story McIntosh weaves through with what he describes as “revolutionary love” and a “veneration” of nature. A Celtic spirituality that sees the land as a living synthesis of the people, myth and magic underpinned the narrative of the islanders’ campaign.

The activist academic and US presidential candidate Cornel West recently visited the Palestinian solidarity camp at Edinburgh University. West is a man of faith and action. 

He excoriates the three “evils” of US imperialism: free-market capitalism, aggressive militarism and escalating authoritarianism. 

He draws parallels between the “gospels of love” and Judaism’s prophetic “love of justice.” As West and others have noted, the tragedy of the Palestinian people is traceable to zionism’s hegemonic appropriation of a Jewish identity which once drew the diaspora to revolutionary politics, the early trade union movement and US civil rights activism.

The Morning Star has reported on the “ticking time bomb” of mental ill health among young people. In Sedated, James Davies correlates the 500 per cent increase in adults taking psychiatric drugs since 1980 to a modern capitalism that privileges the exchange value of everything over uncommodified human experience. 

The neoliberal order idolises extreme individualism, with religion often acting as an analgesic, a buffer against a culture where greed, competition and consumption brand their ideological imprint on us from birth.

Of course, secular activists do not require the guidance of parables to light the way towards transformational social change. Though the left defends the right to freedom of faith, we look forward to a society where the bromides of belief wither away, and where the depoliticisation of our collective discontent cultivated by Big Pharma give way to an understanding of a shared human condition distorted by alienation and poverty. 

As with religious affiliation, nationalist sentiment appeals to an “imagined community.”

July 4 is likely to bring unwelcome electoral tidings to a Scottish National Party for whom the promised land of independence will sweep injustice away, or at least to the other side of a newly mapped border. 

Eric Hobsbawm described nationalism as requiring “too much belief in what is patently untrue.” Such illusions are themselves acts of faith. 

But the gospel according to Martin Luther King, Bob Marley or Aretha Franklin contrasts sharply with the economic and social conservatism of Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes.

In the struggle to emancipate humanity from capital’s iron heel, the atheist left might look to allies among the faithful for solidarity.

Our liberation from “soulless conditions” will be spiritual as well as material.