Adamson, Walter L.
Gramsci, Catholicism and Secular Religion
The article considers Antonio Gramsci's views of religion, the relation of Marxism and religion, secularisation, and secular religion as an overcoming of traditional religions in order to probe his assessment, while he was in prison in the 1930s, of the concrete prospects for a Marxist overcoming of Christianity in the West and, specifically, of the Catholic Church in Italy. It shows that Gramsci had a well-developed and sophisticated historical analysis of secularisation in the West, which he presented in relation to a history of the Catholic Church understood as both a clerical organisation and a community of the faithful. It argues that this analysis led him to conclude that the Church had remained remarkably strong in interwar Italy and, thus, that the immediate prospects for the triumph of secular religion there were remote. However, it also explains why his historical analysis of secularisation left him relatively confident about the long-term prospects of a Marxist secular religion. The article argues that we cannot know if Gramsci would have concurred with the secular-religious strategy pursued by the postwar Italian Communist Party under Palmiro Togliatti and his successors, but it suggests that the very notion of a society based on a common religious worldview is no longer historically plausible.
| Language | eng |
| Names |
[autore] Adamson, Walter L. |
