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Freedom to quit

A warning first of all: this is going to be a piece of writing in two halves, and you will definitely see the join. The first bit is about the impact of the social system of slavery; the second is about the power of religion to enslave. The bit that links them is about having the freedom to quit.

When Alex Hayley’s ‘Roots’ hit the small screen, I was a pupil at Churchfields Comprehensive School in Swindon and I could make no connection with the story. I remember some mimicking of the way one of the central characters said the word ‘Master’, and that he lost his foot, and that was about it. It seemed like a story from another planet.

Yet slavery was the forerunner of capitalism and probably the dominant economic model that shaped the world that we have inherited. To own another’s labour and to profit from the product of that labour; to be able to invest that profit in purchasing more labour… these were widespread economic relations. Those relationships have produced the UK as we know it; tea as a national drink, sugar and coffee in plenty, bananas for breakfast. In the last two centuries, and increasingly today, capitalism maintains these relationships, on a global scale if not an individual one. For many labourers on the coffee plantations of South America or the mines of Southern Africa, the difference between the slave-based production of coffee and the capitalist one is not in terms of conditions. They can be just as appalling. The only difference for the individual worker is the freedom to quit, in the hope of a better job somewhere else. And the slim chance that a new job might be with a producer with a fair-trade relationship with us consumers.

And of course not everyone has the freedom to walk away today. Debt holds probably many millions of workers in lives of bonded labour to their creditors, with astronomical levels of interest removing any prospect of clearing the debt:

[Bonded labourers] are non-beings, exiles of civilization, living a life worse than that of animals, for the animals are at least free to roam about as they like… This system, under which one person can be bonded to provide labour for another for years and years until an alleged debt is supposed to be wiped out, which never seems to happen during the lifetime of the bonded labourer, is totally incompatible with the new egalitarian socio-economic order which we have promised to build… (Justice PN Bhagwati, Indian Supreme Court, 1982).

Women trafficked into the UK are kept in conditions of near-slavery as prostitutes and domestic servants, with knowledge of their falsified immigration status as a means of control.

Freedom to quit is precious. And this is where the second half starts.

If freedom to quit is precious, it is all the more strange then that as human beings we tend to forget that we have control over our lives, and often act as if we had no such freedom. And religion, which we think of as meant to be about freeing people, can so easily degenerate into another form of control. I want to argue that the systematic distortion of religious messages over the years is a result of this tendency, and partly responsible for spreading it. From this point of view, religion is a potentially dangerous force, because of the claims it makes on the personal and public life of the individual. Indeed, religion as a means of control can be and has been astonishingly powerful in history, including Christian history. Socially managed in an authoritarian religious structure, the personal guilt of others becomes a tool for their enslavement, very much akin to the structures of debt bondage.

In such a system, the gift of satire and the ability to cast doubt on received teaching can come to be seen as sinful. The history books are full of laughing ‘blasphemers’ brought to judgement in the name of the purity of religion - Jesus was one of them. But in contrast to the few like Jesus who saw through the legalistic workings of power and privilege to a deeper truth about humanity, there are many slaves to religion, spending their little money on real or figurative religious relics that benefit only those who produce them; wasting their lives on guilt, in a system promoted and maintained by those at the top of the religious hierarchy who gain from it. Jesus had the freedom to quit such a system; he valued that freedom; he promoted it. And of course he was killed for it.

We who peddle religious thought and action, but who value the freedom to quit, have a duty incumbent on us then: to guard against and denounce religion when it gets to look more like superstition; to mock the duplicity and weakness of autocratic structures; to prevent religion taking captives. Those disciples who argued with Jesus come to be seen as models for us, as people who were taking on the free-thinking and critical viewpoint that he adopted and promoted. Judas Iscariot, seen in this way, comes out as a fiercely independent thinker, one who went to the wire in terms of his priority for the poor. But that’s another story.

Jesus mocked oppressive laws and those who promulgated them, going to his death as a result. Those who opposed slavery 200 years ago were acting as direct descendants of Jesus in upholding the right to freedom for the individual against such oppression. The struggle is not over today, either in terms of the economic systems that work so seamlessly to our advantage and to the enormous detriment of others, or in terms of the systems of religiosity and superstition that enslave individuals. It’s time to read the Good News again.
Andy Howes