If faith is an opiate, confession is methadone

or why Evangelicals and Muslims need to admit some guilt.

Karl Marx was wrong about the big things, but sometimes he captured details with perfection. Aphorisms were his specialty.

Writing around the mid-19th century, he saw competing forces, and bet on the wrong one. Germany and Italy were still pieces waiting to be puzzled out, without any certainty they’d fuse into nations. Russian and Slavic peoples were roped by one boundary then another, and Europe’s remaining “empire”, Austria-Hungary, was a polyglot mashup that made no sense. Across the Atlantic, the U.S. hurtled towards dissolution, an experiment in nation-building that seemed about to fail.

Meanwhile industrialization had taken root, and masses surged into cities for new, dirty, abusive work. Unions and government programs were figments of imagination, employers sought malleable workers like children, and conditions were miserable.

So Marx predicted that class, or economic station, would defeat nationalism, the gravity behind nation forming. History shows he was wrong. The 20th century was, first, a cauldron of European nationalist disaster, then, after the second World War, a period when international nationalism flowered.

Periodic challenges to the dominance of nationalism occurs. Globalization, led by multi-national corporations and international capital flows, seems about to swamp individual nations. But all politics are local, and nationalism rears up, again and again. Meanwhile class consciousness doesn’t even interest extremists, anymore.

If Marx didn’t get modern history, he nailed social psychology. That history repeats, first as tragedy, then farce, is a perfect observation. President Jackson’s Trail of Tears was tragic exclusion. President Trump’s immigration ban has a strong dose of farce. Another Marx comment, that religion is the opiate of the masses, also has truth in it.

Islamic extremists who kill are often young, alienated men from non-religious backgrounds. Many used drugs. Islam, with its simple monotheistic gravity, offers a cognitive fix. Instead of penitence, get martyrdom.

But if faith can be an opiate, confession is like methadone. It doesn’t get you high, but keeps you from becoming miserable.

The Catholic church, along with Freud, understood relieving guilt salves souls. Confession was a strange but useful method to bring people down to earth, without leaving them desperate. Other religions simply drown guilt with faith. Islam doesn’t confess guilt, but subdues it with the idea of submission. Evangelicals imagine that faith in Jesus is the only criteria for heaven, and ignore guilt. Anything that can drown human nature is an opiate.

12 step programs for addicts use the submission model, without naming any religion. But they also confess. As a Muslim submits to God’s will, the recovered addict submits to a higher being. But addiction is a rebellion. Like the Catholic is always a sinner, an addict is always an addict. The communitarian expression of shared guilt in 12-step programs keeps people honest.

Islamic extremists believe in God and ignore guilt. They find modernity shallow or immoral, perhaps, and have legitimate gripes with secular systems. But what drives them is the mad rush of shared belief in a higher cause, their bleak futures briefly illuminated.

Islam remains unreformed, leaving cultural constraints that drag down Arabic economic development. The juxtaposition of national accomplishments, between Arab and European nations, is a blow to Arab identity. Extremism is a quick fix, upending the apparent order. It’s Europe and U.S. secularism that’s all wrong, despite economic success. This takes self-deception to believe.

Salafist Muslims and Evangelicals don’t confess, just get high on faith. Recognizing one’s guilt brings you down. Human nature isn’t pure. We’re opportunistic, do mean things when angry, we’re inevitably jealous, selfish, and petty at times. But humanity isn’t more bad than good. We muddle through. For all our flaws, we share the road with weighty vehicles, at great speeds, each a personal missile, without much worry. Self preservation keeps us decent.

A little better than worse. That’s enough to tumble down evolution’s pipeline, achieving a better sort of life. Purity is a sham and a scam. What matters is a lighter shade of gray, not black or white thinking. No group has an answer; all can contribute, some more than others. Humility is common-sense. It’s not a high, but keeps us from getting too low. For them that need faith, whether religious or nationalist, it’s OK in small doses. But couple it with self-awareness. Be a patriot, but don’t pretend your country is superior.

The Islamic radical ignores how their past behavior caused them current misery. They didn’t have to rebel at school, join gangs, and play endless video games. No, these things happened because the system was impure, not because of their all-too-human flaws. It’s a way to forget your faults, drowning in the opiate of the masses.

America is bedeviled by Evangelicals, whose political influence causes pain and suffering. It’s Evangelical votes that let America continue to imprison more people than anywhere else. It’s Evangelicals who fuel Tea Party vindictiveness, oppose science, demonize government. They don’t mind, because they’re absolved by faith. Until they contemplate their inherent guilt, Evangelicals remain dangerous.

Europe is troubled by Islamists, in ways more immediately deadly. Until Islam finds a way to self-reflect on guilt, it will keep spawning demons of faith.

Marx underestimated nations, when he believed the working class would drive identity politics. Nations, it turns out, are a good bet. The future of Europe and the U.S. may seem unsettled by their religious extremists, those who drown in faith. But extremists undermine their nation, and eventually citizens figure it out. When they do, expect nationalism to win. Theocracy emerges in a few places, like Iran, because like human nature itself, no social trend is pure. But the nation-state bats last.