Spirit in Action
Jesus Made Me a Communist
[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along The title of the article pretty much says it all. Jesus made me a communist. When I saw the article and perspective book title on Facebook, posted by Charlie Earp, it seemed obvious that this was something that needed to be aired on Spirit in Action. Without further ado, let's head down to the Chicago area by phone to talk to Charlie Earp. Charlie, I'm really pleased you could join me today for Spirit in Action. I'm actually honored that you even asked me, so I'm glad to be here. I saw quite a while ago when you posted that you were getting ready to do a book. Jesus made me a communist, and that was such a thrilling idea for me as part of Spirit in Action. I had to get you, update us on the progress toward the book or what you've actually done so far. Maybe I can just tell you how it came to me. My background is a Pentecostal preachers kid. I then, as an adult, I spent nine years with a Christian commune. It was Mennonite and Charismatic in Orientation. So, communal living was something that I had direct experience even though I was not fully invested in the commune. So, I had communal experience, and I'd always thought capitalism wasn't quite the way the world should go. When I transitioned from the Mennonite commune to Quaker Meeting, I sort of was in a kind of, I would almost call agnostic period. There's other ways to talk about it in which I just didn't identify with that whole Christian thing at all, or Jesus. Fast forward, over 15 years, I'm in a class on creative nonfiction, and in this time I'm trying to be an activist. I'm trying to work for peace in whatever small ways, and I'm just trying to raise my teenagers. In this creative nonfiction class, the first big assignment, because I had a lot of small assignments, little quick writing pieces, then they had the big, was a personal essay on a life-changing experience. And I wrote about my years with the Christian commune. And then the next piece was to be more journalistic, it was to do what's called literary journalism, where you use journalism or a social topic, but you embed it within literary autobiography and so on. What happened is writing the essay on the communal experience reignited something that had kind of been dormant, which was that even though I wasn't directly identifying as a Christian, even though I was still a Quaker, that it was really true that my left-wing politics came from Jesus. At least my Pentecostal preachers' kid, years in the men and I commune, had sort of shaped me into a particular view of the world, that I had to acknowledge and accept that really was me. And so the title for my literary journalism piece was Jesus made me a communist. The teacher didn't like it, but she gave me a B. He felt I was a little too out of, well, she just didn't feel it was journalism. It didn't quite write it or it was still in the memoir mode, but more political than I had been in the first piece. That was the first workshop of the essay. Fast forward almost a year later, I take Creative Nonfiction Class II, and there I workshoped it again. So it became clear to me that this was staying with me. I wanted to turn this into a book. And I initially was going to talk about publishing it in a Quaker journal or taking that essay that I had in publishing a magazine, but it still feels to me that there's a lot more to be written on the theme. So the answer is I'm not at the stage where I'm writing a book. I have an outline of a book and I have pieces, including this main foundational essay that has been reworked and reworked. That is where it stands. It's still an important theme to me. Jesus made me a communist because it shocks people. They think, well, no, Satan made you a communist or, or, you know, you got that from Karl Marx. Well, I didn't get it from Karl Marx. He came along later and he helped flesh it out, but he was much later for me. I was already committed to the idea of a communal sharing economy as the fundamental way human society should be organized rather than competitive. Well, let's make sure that people have some places they can check online since you don't have a book yet. So you've got a couple different blogs. Why don't you mention what they are? Sure. The oldest blog, I mean, I have older blogs, but this is the one that's more solid. It's political theory with religion involved. Religion is in the mix, but it's not dominant. It's called radicalprogress.info. I NFO, I bought that domain because I wanted to write a book on political philosophy. And this blog was my attempt to commit myself to writing on a regular basis. So I did that. The second blog emerged a little bit later as this more religious turn in my thinking was happening. And that's called leptisquaker.wordpress.com. I've tried to combine them at one point, but it doesn't work. They kind of are their own thing. So those are the two. Both of them have essays on communism, not a lot. A few short little blog type pieces on the theme of communism and Jesus in communism. So let's start with your background as a Christian. Where this came from because you didn't, I don't think, start out by saying, "Hooray for communism." And we'll get to the definition of communism later. But let's talk about your Christianity. Where did that come from? You'd be surprised how early communism became a theme in my Christianity. So I was Pentecostal preachers kid. I said that earlier. Assemblies of God. So if you've heard the name, Jimmy Swagger, you know who the summons of God are. They're the most numerous U.S. Pentecostal denominations. My dad was moderate to conservative as far as the denomination goes. Because he had some political modernness. He was, he considered himself a Hubert Humphrey Democrat if that puts him somewhere. And I, early on, and this started happening in, I would say, the late '60s, early '70s. I was like, "Yeah, I was one in '63, so I'm young." By most baby boomer standards, I'm young. By the early '70s, there was this thing called the Jesus movement that was sweeping through evangelical and even to some extent, the counterculture. Some of the counterculture was turning to the old-time religion, if you will. And that was exciting to me because I believed in God. I believed in Jesus, I was a committed Christian, but I didn't understand the culture of the church. It didn't make sense. It wasn't contemporary. It wasn't engaged with the things that were starting to matter to me as a 10-year-old kid. The Jesus movement did. It triggered all my hippie inspiration. I began to think, "Wow, I wish I could live in a commune and play Christian folk rock music and all those things." So I was already diverging from my upbringing. And then at summer camp, during this whole Jesus movement period, I went to Pentecostal summer camp almost every year, and a choir there was singing. So you were college kids, right? Singing to us middle school age kids. After this concert by this college age group, and I was fascinated because I love music, they did a question and answer with us middle school and some junior high, and even there might have been a high school kids there about just things, just life and religion and faith. And somebody asked the question about communism. And I don't even remember the question. This is one of the kids. Ask the question about communism and a woman in the choir, one of these college students, answer the question this way. Well, communism is a beautiful idea, but people are too sinful. And I'm over here as this burgeoning Jesus-free kippy, hearing that. And the effect is, well, God's all powerful. And Jesus wants, you know, if communism is a beautiful idea, why not? So that's sort of how my religious upbringing sort of shifted me a little towards something different than what you might expect of a Pentecostal preacher's kin. So you've started out, you've got this idea as a middle school kid, you're influenced by the hippies and the communes and all of that kind of thing. And I'm sure your dad welcomed this into the house. It's funny. It's his fault. He were still alive. He died in 2005. He's still alive. He denied some of this. But the truth is, he invited the Jesus people to our little town. Because he was trying to reach the college kids. He was an evangelist. He wanted to get these college kids saved. And he thought, hey, if Dredson Jesus up like a hippie saves college kids, let's do it. So he brought them in. So it's his fault. He later turned to the right as did most of American evangelicalism during the Reagan era. But this was just before the Reagan era. So I was free to not follow the rest of the church after Ronald Reagan. So you're in middle school and you're progressing. The Jesus freak movement, as it was called. I recall it in my later years of high school, getting 1970 and so on. And to be a Jesus freak was not to be a conservative. Is that what you experienced it as? They were peace, love and not necessarily sex and drugs, but peace and love at least. Yeah. And that's kind of the funny thing. Because when you're a kid, you don't get all the nuances. The Jesus movement started as an effort by people like my father who are conservative theologically and seeing the country just convulsing with what I would call a cultural revolution and not knowing how to address it. And so they adopted the hippie paraphernalia and slang as a way of trying to evangelize. On me, as somebody who didn't need to be evangelized, I was already saved, in my view. I just liked the adopting of the cultural paraphernalia, the counterculture. I took it as a license to go to the left, to be peace-oriented. In fact, I had arguments about my father at the age of nine over nonviolence. I still don't quite know where I got that from. I have theories, you know, I grew up in an emotionally dysfunctional family and I was spanked quite harshly. And so maybe it was, oh, violence is bad, Dad, you shouldn't use it. A little self-interest in there. Yeah, there might have been. But it was, I clearly believe what Jesus said, "Turn your other cheek, love your enemies." And then a few years later, I learned about Martin Luther King because he was sort of off the scene by the time I was knowing he died in '67. And this stuff was happy for me, it was much later. By '67, I was only four years old. So I barely knew what happened with King. But I learned more about it and it was inspiring. He was a pacifist and a Christian. And so I fed that into my burgeoning Jesus rebellion. That led me to even further left because capitalism, to bring in communism opposite of capitalism, it always seemed to me to be based on selfishness and not caring for the planet. I didn't understand why Christians thought it was a great thing. And there was the example of the New Testament where the Acts of the Apostles, where they shared all their possessions and claimed that nothing they had was their own that shared with the poor and needy. That was communism. Again, taking it back to that summer camp experience. Well, I'm going to keep rewinding you back to that time so that we can march forward in your life because your ideas are growing about communism. At some point, you actually had some idea of what communism meant in the world. I mean, we were still 20 years from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Right. So it's still the Cold War and it's still the evil commies, even if there was some detente going on. Right. The word communist still had to have some kind of negative connotations in your family and the people you were hanging out with. I was a loner. Being a preacher's kid means one thing. At least it meant one thing in my life that we moved almost every four years. I had no lifelong friends, which sounds lonely and it was. So every time we moved to Newtown, I had to make new friends and I was the shy awkward mama's boy. Didn't do well. I had this fantasy world of where I could just live in there. And that becomes a liability at some point, but that's what I had. That's what I was dealt. Yes, I knew that apparently the communists had killed a lot of people. And believe me, there were occasionally someone would come and speak at our church about the torture that were going on in Romania of Christians with glory detail. I knew that that was communism, but I believed somehow I'd early on come to the idea because of this whole communism is a beautiful idea, but humans are too simple for it. But that's what had happened is that simple people had tried to do communism rather than people following Jesus. So, yes, I knew about the dark side, the Stalin and the whole iron curtain in totalitarianism. As I grew up, I learned more of those things. But they didn't shake my early, communism is a beautiful idea. It just hasn't been put into practice the right way, kind of idea. I guess we can keep in mind that capitalism is relatively new on the world stage. That is to say, you know, it's got a few hundred years basically of experience. So, mainly Christianity existed without capitalism for the previous 1600 years. What actual, I guess, feudalism? I don't know exactly what the economic system is called then. Right. And this comes more into the Marxist analysis of the idea of communism. Because Marx admits he got the idea of communism from Christians. He doesn't make a lot of, therefore we should include Christians that are moving. No, we should kick them out because they're irrational, religious nuts. Seriously, that was Wilhelm Whitling. Read this story of Wilhelm Whitling. He was a German communist preacher in the time of Marx and Marx forcibly removed him from the international. He and Engels teamed up to get this guy out because he was too religiously crazy in his inner mind. So, Marx admitted he got the idea of communism from Christians. In fact, the word was coined by a Christian named Etienne Cabay. He's a Frenchman who actually came to the United States and founded the Icarian communes. Marx's best ideas came from Christians. That's to me an interesting irony of history. So, Marx's analysis was that there were modes of production that the current one was capitalism, the one before it was he called feudalism, the one before it he called the slave economy. And then he believed that capitalism would be succeeded by a socialist economy, which would be established through violent revolution. And then communism would emerge out of the socialist revolution. That's going a long way for that concern. And so, you weren't just reaching towards socialism. You wanted the end point. The communist utopia, is that a good view? I mean, communism would be utopian? Well, Marx didn't believe it was. Rick Engels wrote a pamphlet called socialism utopian and scientific, which is where the phrase scientific socialism comes from. So, he argued that what Marx had done had been to destroy all the superstitions and all the false ideas that the early Christian communists, as well as French socialists and communists, had and was putting them on a scientific foundation that would win. And so, they argued against utopianism. We haven't talked about the definition of communism that I work with. And I work with the same one that most people who call themselves communist work with. I just disagree about some of the practical politics that should go along with it. So, I am not a utopian. I think communism is achievable. But it's not going to be achieved the way I think Marx said it. Although, Marx was right about some of it. It's a complicated thing, because we know that the Marxists tried one thing for 70 years, and it just collapsed. Now, we have China and Cuba and Vietnam and maybe North Korea, although they don't use the word communism much anymore, are the last communist states in the world. At least in the Marxist sense of them. Although, that wasn't really Marx. That was more Lenin. But that's another turn of the screw to talk to bring in Lenin. Okay. Well, let's talk about what your definition of communism is. What is it? And why is it essentially different than what got implemented in Russia, et cetera? I believe it was Louis Blanc, who was a French communist, after the idea of communism was created by Etienne Cabay, who deposed this definition that everybody's heard from each, according to ability, to each, according to need. The radical part of that definition is how much you work doesn't decide how much you are allowed to consume or live off of. That it's assumed that there's an economy of abundance, and all you have to do is contribute to keeping that abundance in place, and then you are able to use whatever of that abundance is appropriate to you. So, to me, it's a rational, and Marx believed. It was a rational economic principle, unlike capitalism, which says, well, you work for so many hours, but you only get this small amount of the wage, and your owner of the company gets most of the profit. He said that was irrational. I agree with him on that point. I define communism in that way where I differ, and this is one of the essays you could find on my blog, is by taking it back to how Jesus made me a communism, to me what Jesus was, what he taught was love. When I look at the definition of communism from each, according to ability, I include in there not just material, but spiritual and emotional needs. I'm tended to not care about that. The communism of the Leninist variety, and I'm going to use that term Leninist to sort of encompass everything from the Russian Revolution to the Chinese Revolution. There are subtleties in there too, but basically a Leninist version of communism is really about political power and central command of the economy. I'm not really advocating that, and I'm not sure Marx advocated a centrally-command economy. Okay, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, or her need, I guess. Yes. So, where do you think that this divergence from this original idea of communism happened? I don't know that we know of an implementation of communism that followed the idea of love that you were talking about. Right. Even the economic idea, because no communist state's centrally-planned economy actually gave people an abundance of material things, which Marx believed in abundance. He believed that everybody should have really nice places to live, excellent, healthy food, nice clothing, the best of everything. He was an abundance theorist if you really read him carefully. He believed that capitalism, and this is the funny thing, he believed that capitalism had unlocked the secret to producing massive wealth. And here's where I would diverge from them a little bit, because what we know now about the environmental consequences of capitalist production challenged that abundance thinking is believed that capitalism had unlocked abundance. It did, and it damaged our relationship to the earth severely, maybe irreparably. So, to get back to the question of what did the Leninist states do wrong? The Leninist states believed that they were not supposed to create communism. They were supposed to create a centrally-planned socialist economy in the world that could withstand capitalist competition and spread revolutionary Marxist ideas around the world to third world countries as well as two more middle-class and capitalist countries, and eventually an international revolution would be kicked off. And this was all before World War II, okay, with World War X as World War I, was where the socialist movement, the Marxist movement, was at its height, was just prior to World War I. And that, of course, went 1917 when Lenin overthrew the pancake government which had replaced the czar in Russia. In Germany, you had this huge party called the Social Democratic Party, which was the biggest Marxist party up until that point. What the Russian Bolsheviks following went and believed is that by successfully taking over Russia, they would kick off the revolution in Germany. We know that didn't happen. What happened was World War I, and then World War II, and it just gets darker from there. The communist movement, the Leninist governments, just couldn't hack the capitalist nations of Germany and Britain and America, the U.S., were able to throw at them, and they consequently turned against themselves. They not only had these external enemies, they had these internal problems that they could not solve, and it made them very inhumane places to live. So we end up with some pretty horrible implementations of what they are calling communism. Are there any of them that you think came close to the communist ideal? Was there an implementation that was at least somewhat close to what you work with as your ideal that you would like to target? I've been asked this question before, and I always have to think. I think we can learn from every attempt. I would emphasize that all the Leninist governments from Russia to China to East Germany to Cuba don't believe they're implementing communism. They are communists in ideology, and that communism is the end goal. But what they are is the negation of capitalism, and from the negation of the negation, this is a Marxist-Hagalian term, you comes communism. They don't believe that their job is to create communism. Their job is to create a socialist state that can withstand capitalist onslaught, create a center of power that can eventually help overthrow capitalism in the West. We can learn from all of those experiments, but I think they all failed in one form or another, and pretty dramatically and even horrifically in some cases where the stories of torture, they're not all made up. There was a lot of torture going on in Russia and China and Cuba in the struggle for power, and since we're Quakers here, I'm not a big fan of power struggle in violent revolution. I don't say that violent revolution is why the Leninist states failed because capitalism is succeeding very well with violence. You know what I'm saying? Violence isn't necessarily an impractical choice. Capitalism succeeds on the basis of violence, it's able to compel people to submit to the wind of the market. In fact, the overthrow of Russia or the downfall of the Leninist government of Russia is the best example of the capitalist undermining anybody who wasn't playing by their roles. So I don't think violence was just the whole problem. It was part of the problem, but violence is part of the problem with capitalism too. We'll come back to a lot of those ideas about communism, but first I want to remind our listeners that they're listening to spirit and action, and this is the Northern Spirit Radio production. We're on the web at northernspiritradio.org. It's like ORG in organic, not COM commercial, northernspiritradio.org, and on that site you'll find more than nine years of our programs for free listening and download. You'll find links to our guests, so you'll find links, for instance, to Charlie Earp's various blogs, the radical progress info and leftistquaker.wordpress.com, but again you can find those on northernspiritradio.org. You'll find comments, and we ask that you add your comments when you visit our site. There's also a donate button, and that's how we fund this full-time work. Click donate when you visit northernspiritradio.org, but even more important than all of that support your local community radio station. Local community radio stations provide a slice of news and of music that you get nowhere else on the American landscape. So please start by supporting them with your hands, with your pockets. Please support your local community radio stations. Again, we're speaking today with Charlie Earp. He's author of an essay and perhaps a book in the not-too-distant future called "Jesus Made Me a Communist." So we're discussing ideas of religion and communism and what that actually means in the world. I want to come back to some earlier steps in your evolution, Charlie, because one of the things that happened along the way is you moved in and you lived in a commune, as in communion, as in communism. So did that work in favor of your ideas of communism or opposed to it or were they completely irrelevant? I don't know. Just how did that relate to your ideas about communism? I will say that from 1986 to 1995, the years I lived with an intentional Christian community that was communally organized were some of the most wonderful, the most healing, the most transformative experiences of my life. My daughter was born just before we moved to live there, and my son was born a couple of years after we moved there. So both of my kids had an early upbringing in this intensely compassionate group of people who co-parented our kids with us because I wasn't ready to be a father and my wife was maybe a little more ready, and that was just such an powerful experience because I mentioned that my family that I grew up in was emotionally dysfunctional, and even I would use a term abusive, and this was heaven. I had crossed over the Jordan and found the Promised Land. This is where I thought I was going to live the rest of my life with this community. It's called Reba Place Fellowship. It's still in existence. It was founded in 1957 by Mennonite seminarians. Mennites are people of the earth. They're people of hard work and commitment to ideals, not too different from Quakers. I can't say enough good about Reba Place Fellowship and the communal life that I experienced. I did leave because my religious philosophy as I began to heal from the wounds of my childhood, I began to think differently about religion, and I needed a period of time where I wasn't going to be a Christian, and that wasn't really compatible with living with the community. A couple of things intervene. We truth and I moved out of Evanston where we were living into the city, although there was still another subgroup of the community there, and we related to them for a while, but eventually I just pulled back and became a Quaker. I don't know if that's enough of an answer. What I learned from communal living was change my life. It convinced me more than the whole communism as a beautiful idea back in summer camp that, yes, communism is a fantastic idea. How close did your living and community come to the kind of community that they talk about in acts of apostles? Was it income sharing, you shared parenting? What other elements made it close to communism? I was a neighbor and a neighbor of the fellowship and a member of the church, because the church was organized distinct from the commune for legal reasons. They had to do that, and they had a lot of people who wanted to be a part of the church and not a part of the commune, so they separated organizationally. I was a member of the church and I was a neighbor of the community, the fellowship, and I lived in housing owned by the fellowship. I paid rent, but there were many times they excused the rent, because I had trouble holding on the jobs, in part because of my emotional struggles. They had an income sharing group that's sort of the basis of what they do. It's still in existence, they own a lot of property. This is probably the most, I will say it is the most successful commune outside of the hutterites in terms of maintaining an economic sharing at its core that has persisted for decades, like I said, 57 till now, 1957 till now. So they pre-existed the Jesus movement in the '60s and all that. And so there was not income sharing, but there was a kind of generosity in the economic area that is, I guess, different from hard-nosed capitalism. No, there was income sharing. Within, there was, but you weren't income sharing. I was a neighbor, I was a member of the church, I went to communal meetings, I didn't turn over my income, or live on the communal budget. I wanted to, but I'm a young guy in my 20s with two kids and a wife, and I'm not having a good luck holding a job. All those things kind of played into making it complicated. I was never really at a healthy enough moment to join that community. I wanted to, and I attended every meeting I could, and they understood that I intended to join, and they welcomed that. But I wasn't ready for it, and it turns out in the long run, it probably wasn't a bad thing that I didn't financially invest. But I experienced their communal practice. I know how the commune was set up, how they decided what money went where, and so on. It was a great experience, and I don't think if a few things were different, I might still be there. And mostly those are my issues, not theirs. Let's talk about the hierarchy of values, because I'm seeing a kind of evolution in your life, and I'm wondering how this relates to communism, capitalism, being related to not being religious, and so on. For instance, one of the hierarchy of values that you could put in there was something about religious devotion, like Jesus' Lord and Savior, or whatever. I followed Jesus, and that could be a specific value. And then there's values like peace, or love, which may overlap, or may be different than following Jesus. Things like economic fairness, or devotion to your own family. Did the hierarchy of those values change over your life, from your early ideal, as communism is a great idea, living in commune to where you are now? Could you talk about the flow of that hierarchy? I'd been indoctrinated and put my own spin on a very intense form of Christianity, Pentecostalism. And then on top of it, I layered this whole Jesus movement and this communal idea and pacifism. I had no idea how to make a living. I'd had high school jobs, but to work full time outside the home was something I was emotionally unprepared for, because my father had been a preacher, and I had every reason to believe I would grow up to be a preacher too, but something wasn't quite right. And what wasn't right was that I was a wounded individual who didn't know how to care for myself or my wife or my children. And the community made that possible for a wounded person to become whole. I can tell stories of just dramatic healing encounters in that community that changed me from that idealistic, fantasy-laden little kid to an adult who's, you know, I've helped the same job for 12 years. The age of 52, maybe that's not something to be proud of, but it was an accomplishment to get there. I'm planning to finish my education. I dropped out of school twice, actually three times, college, because I just wasn't able to live in the world, and I was struggling with being an adult in a world that I wasn't prepared for because of the dysfunctionality of my family of origin. Jesus was important, but I was a kid, and I had kids' interests. Yes, religion was important, but I also was a big Star Trek nerd. I was a big comic book nerd. I had boxes and boxes of comic books. So I had the interests of a kid. I believed that I was supposed to grow up in follow Jesus and become a preacher. That's really what I believed. In the community, in the communal experience, I learned to take responsibility for my family. That was a challenge because my dad wasn't very good at that, and I had no role model. So I had to kind of learn through therapy and just interacting with the community at the kind of intimate level that it affords. It was sort of like figuring out, growing up a second time, emotionally. That was really what I think of those years. So you have to go to my family. I mean, I'm so much sure how to track that with the sort of growing circle of commitments or hierarchy of needs, because Christianity, at least as I understood Jesus, was about love. Love the whole world. Now there's a dark side of that, and it loved it so much that you want to save them so they don't go to hell, because somehow this loving God is going to send people to hell. But that's an aside. We don't have to go down there, but it was a factor in what I understood love to mean. I think perhaps for you and maybe for many other people, the value starts out being devotion to Jesus. And because they're devoted to Jesus, they follow Jesus's way, which is love and generosity. It's going to be healing. But eventually, some people, and peace is one of those things, someone can be very devoted to the peace movement and say, "Well, I guess I don't need Jesus to be devoted to this." And so peace or love become the high values as opposed to Jesus, who tells us to do peace and love. Okay. I don't know if this gives a little story that my going beyond Jesus. When I left the community, although I was already, probably the year prior to that, I was already pretty far detached, and 97 is when I finally settled on, "I'm going to go to a Quaker meeting." And at that point, I did not consider myself a Christian, because the teachings of Jesus that I took with me were the teachings on love. But I couldn't believe some of the theology and the dogma that I'd been raised with. And the Christian commune that I lived in, held much of it, that they were actually far more flexible on it than I maybe even realized when I was there, because I came with a lens. And the lens eventually got removed from my face. But while I was there, I probably didn't see just how different their Christianity was from what I've been raised in. I know it was different, and that was probably why it saved me, why it healed me, why it put me back and made me a whole person, was because it wasn't exactly what I've been raised in. But it was enough to like it that I was able to come there, even as I was. When I began to question my kind of hostile dogma, and that was a part of this healing process, it was like, "This isn't my dad's religion, is it really mine?" And so I went through that period of, I don't know if I can believe any of this stuff anymore. And so I would have said at that point, I was an agnostic, and I went to a Quaker meeting, because there I could just sit with myself and my process and my interior life and like, "Okay, how do I make more sense of tomorrow than I made sense of yesterday or last week?" And that's what committing affording me was this ability to kind of go where I'd already been through the healing process and learn was there, this interior world where I needed to be whole and healed. So the first few years in Quaker meeting were kind of just more healing in silence. So I don't know, I guess I did go beyond being a Christian, and that's what this whole creative writing experience was for me is all of a sudden, "Oh, Jesus is still there, he didn't really leave. I left him or I left a version of him, but there's a version of him that's still around." That led the whole Jesus name, the economist, is like, "Oh, I've been an active socialist in various organizations for many years, and most of them secular, and realizing that I was there because of things I've got from Jesus and from my experience with the commune." Let's get back now to talking about communism and how good of an idea it is or isn't. I think a lot of people believe that capitalism is the best idea because selfishness is a great engine of economic production, that selfishness works better than idealism to make the world a better place. I'm kind of guessing you don't agree with that. There's a lot of ways to answer that question about is believing that love can change the world. Is that idealistic? Is it utopian? Is it fantasy? Oddly enough, I find the answer in some of the psychological theories about humanity, particularly Freud, later feminists who've taken Freud's ideas and sort of upended them because he had some very male-centric ideas, but what Freud talks about and what later feminists agree with him on is that the first bond a human being forms is with their parental caregiver, whether it's male or female, but typically it's female. In that bond, we learn what is most important emotionally to be held, to be fed, to be cleaned, to be talked to, to be sung to. Now, not everybody has all of the good parts. Some people have very poor mothering or parenting, but in that initial child parent bond it depends for it to have a good outcome for the parent and the child to have developed this bond of love. Freud called it eros, the life force, and he believed that somehow it was embedded in every human interaction. There was another thing though he called the death force, the aggression, the anger, the hatred, the disapproval that you get from your parents and you don't approve of what your parents have been. You wish your parents gave you more. So early on there is a struggle of the wills that is also embodied in the child parent relation, but if you begin with that, that that is sort of the core defining moment of our personalities is that initial child parent bond, and in all the other relationships we've formed through life are sort of variations on a theme, whether you like this person or don't like this person or love this or hate that, it all kind of goes back to early. Now, this is a psychoanalytic, and I know that Freud's not popular these days, but this is the kind of thinking that helped me heal, was to begin to recognize the importance of my parent child bond and how it had not been healthy and to work on how to heal from a broken parent child bond. So what I guess where I'm going with this is that I believe unlike the Marxists who believe that economics is the real driving engine of humanity, I believe emotion and a desire to be loved is the driving engine. A lot of people tell you, I don't need anybody to love me just give me stuff, but I don't think that's true, at the bottom I don't think that's really true, even though the most jaded cynical greedy person, deep down if you can give them love and they could believe in it, they could believe that they were being loved, they would give up the stuff. Now, is that still idealist? Maybe it is, but I kind of believe this is the organic truth about ourselves. We want love more than we want stuff, but we substitute stuff for love because it's easier. So to come back to my question, selfishness versus idealism, you're saying love is truly more valued, although I think maybe we could say that selfishness has mind share right now. People think that their things will make them happy, but that's not what they're actually experiencing. That's not what we're seeing in the world. Right. If you've ever listened to philosophers, Slavoj Juszak, he's a current Slovenian philosopher, he talks a lot about communism and Freud and the desire, the motive of desire and psychoanalytic. He talks all the time about how capitalism just isn't really making us happy. And we go from item to item to item, hoping that the next purchase or the next consumption or the next movie or the next sexual experience will make us happy. And it's the fact that we get frustrated and don't get the happiness we think we're seeking or just to keep looking and he said the real solution is to find happiness not in stuff, not in the next experience, but to find happiness to come from somewhere else. And to me that somewhere else is spirituality, it's love, it's finding the meaning of your life in expanding your love connections with other people, not getting more stuff. How does that translate into communism? And this is where I'm different than the Marxists because the Marxists all say it's all economics. And I say no, it's more psychology than economics. It's more real the way we are because we've substituted what's really fundamental and organic to ourselves, our need for love for stuff, which we need stuff. You can't survive without stuff, but it doesn't satisfy, it doesn't make you feel happy and healthy and whole to just have stuff. Let's talk about another dichotomy, Quakers like you and I tend to talk a lot about that of God and everyone, the inner light. So we talk about everyone has the light within them. We don't tend to talk too much about how much darkness one has within them. I think when some people refer to sin, maybe darkness is the matching metaphor for the light. How do you view those oppositions within us, particularly as this has implications towards what system is actually going to work in the world? Is this communist ideal that you're talking about versus capitalism or something else? There's a lot of things I could say. I mean, darkness is simply the absence of light. It's not a bad thing. And anger or hatred, the opposite of love, isn't always a bad thing. There are things that truly deserve to be hated. What happens is when the hatred dominates your ability to love. I'm going to jump back to communism and I'm going to jump to some extent back to Marx. Marx came up with the theory of the ruling class. I mean, everybody knows. The capitalists of the ruling class and the workers are the revolutionary grave diggers of capitalism. That's the common understanding. I still think Marx is right about there being a ruling class, that there are a class of people who have, and here we can bring in the whole Freud, the love, and hate thing, who live for stuff. They live to make stuff rule, to make the world rule for their stuff. The rich, the political leaders, the religious leaders who are at the top of the top of the hierarchy of human society. They all live to maintain their power and their wealth. And what the world means is for people from below, this is, again, sort of Marx but us and bringing back a little bit of Christianity here, people from below who are motivated by love to organize a counter-society, a counter-force, a power greater than that ruling class massive wealth in politics and power, and basically blow the lid off it. Now that's toying with the image of a violent revolution, and I'm enough of a passage to say, "Oh, I'm not advocating violence, and I'm not, but I am advocating destroying something, destroying the power of hate and violence and wealth in the world that keeps so many people poor and decimated, particularly if you go to Africa, you'll see the dark side of what capitalism does. That continent has been drained dry by centuries of capitalist exploitation, but now you can call it imperialism, whatever, but we took all the wealth out of there, enslaved as many people as we could, and divided the natives into these nation-states that make no sense to them, and gave them our religion. All at the same time capitalism is coming to rise in Europe. So it's, to me, it's all part of the same historical moment. There is a class struggle, the mark called it the class struggle. He didn't invent the term it was other people who did invent it, but he borrowed it from people and expounded on it and made it the basis of his philosophy. I agree there's a class struggle, and that the ruling class is winning. I hope the compassionate class, maybe I'll talk about that, the people who care about humanity, who care about the Earth, who care about the future, and don't just care about the next profit or the next power play or the next gadget that you care about making a better world, if enough of those people can work together and figure out how, despite the interference of the ruling class, to keep us apart and keep us separated and keep us hostile and suspicious of one another, which they're very good at doing, if we could figure a way to come together and push back, that's what I live for. And that's why I joined various socialist organizations, including Open Admin Now, in the hope that that's possible, that creating a counter force through the ruling class's death drive coalescence, the coalescence of forage death drive is the ruling class of the world, and we need to be the coalescence of the love drive, the arrows. Make sure that's what you will. So I think we have a pretty good idea of what path you've taken, Charlie. Again, I want to remind people that Charlie has two blogs you can look at that will fill in a lot of the blanks that we can't cover in this hour. One of his blogs is radicalprogress.info and the other one is leftistquaker.woodpress.com. You can find both those links on norgonspiritradio.org. My final question, though, Charlie, is you talked about leaving this commune as close to paradise as you've gotten and having gone to the silent place of Quaker meeting because nobody was telling you what to do it, left you free to sort things out. But that was, I don't know, 12 years ago, it was a long time ago, and you've had time to get past the silence, and now I guess you can talk. And so my question is, you're still in Quaker meeting. Why is that? Why not back to the Mennonite community where I think you're better equipped now to live that life? Well, I live actually only a few blocks from the community right now, and that's an odd, my wife has a job in Evanston, and she wanted to have a short commute, so we move back to Evanston. And literally, people my children grew up with is one of my next door neighbors practically. So I'm not too far from the commune. I am a universalist, I am a pantheist, and I'm a communist. I mean, communism isn't a bad thing to be at the community, but to not be a more or less evangelical Christian is still something that the few who I know aren't, evangelical Christians kind of keep it on the down low in that community, because there is still a certain amount of conformity to biblical doctrine that pervades there. Again, not to criticize them because they're the best examples of what Jesus should be in the world, and what Jesus attended Christians to be in my opinion. I'm still not a Christian. I tell people that the Clearness Committee in my head is Jesus, Karl Marx, Babuda, and the pagan goddesses. I'm always listening to a variety of voices, of course, that comes from being a dysfunctional personality, but I'm always listening to variety of voices. I want to see the world come together, not just the Christians. I think it's important that the Christians come together in favor of this revolution of love and the Muslims come together in favor of a revolution of love and the atheists and the Buddhists and the pages. I want them all to come together and figure out how to talk to one another and put love at the center, not our competitive, "Oh, my religion is more true than yours." Or my atheism is better than all your thinking religions. I don't think any of that gets us out of the quagmire that we're stuck in with the destruction of the planet in the balance. So I am a quaker, Quakerism is still the spiritual practice that ministers to me most deeply, most of the time. I am planning to go to seminary and become a Unitarian Universalist Minister. That's kind of throwing a curve because we don't have time to explore why I'm doing that, but it is reconnecting in a sense with I was always believed I was supposed to grow up and be a preacher, and I can do that in a Quaker meeting, but if I preached every Sunday in a Quaker meeting, they'd tell me I'm not running my guide, so I won't do that. I won't impose that on a Quaker meeting. It sounds like a delightful -- you're one of the happiest communists I've ever met, Charlie. That is one of the best compliments I've ever had. It is a joy to get to know you, to hear both your deep ideas, philosophy, and your heart trip as part of this. Thank you so much for sharing that and lighting the world with that and for joining me today for spirit and action. Thank you. I'm still honored and almost surprised that you asked, but I'm glad you did. With our last couple moments, I want to send you off with a song kind of on today's theme, at least tongue-in-cheek. This is performed by Charlie King and Martha Leader. I've been kissed by a communist. Enjoy it, and we'll see you next week for spirit in action. I never should have left the bass behind and took the bus downtown, never should have opened up my mind and let my defenses down. She was sitting across the aisle with the radio that's at the bottom of the seven inning, and she looked like a girl that I used to know, so I asked her, "Hey, who's winning?" Should have jumped off the bus, called the feds when she simply smiled and said, "The Red's." I've been kissed by a communist, saw her name on a government list, a fellow traveler and an activist. Now, how can I ever go home? She was known to be friendly with a person who was friendly with a person of the pink persuasion, and it even was suggested that she once protested the Bay of Pigs invasion. I've been kissed by a communist, thought she was the daughter of a Methodist, sonny school teacher and the organist. Now, how can I ever go home? I was, I didn't know that she was in disguise, never showin' all her union cards. And guess I should have known that I'd be compromised if I lowered my national guard. She said, "You like to cook, and I like to eat." So I followed her home to her high rise, sat there playin' with her parakeet, while she mixed us a couple of my ties, then my hair stood up, my toenails curled when her parakeet sang, "We are the world." There's a choice we're making. I've been kissed by a communist, had a short wave, plans made her hangin' from her wrist, I crumpled in the clutches of an anarchist, now how can I ever go home? It was gettin' distressed and eatin' rusty and pressin', and I should have been a little more leery. She got my stomach for a start, then she captured my heart, and they fell like a domino theory. I've been kissed by a communist, the Air Force will never let me re-enlist, but comrades will never let me go, exist now, how can I ever go home? When there's a moon involved, never fall in love without hirein' a good detective, you'll be spendin' your days with a fellow like a plays, workin' on a big collective, a-u-n-am, a-u-n-am, a-u-n-am, I've been kissed by a communist, saw her name on a government list, I thought I couldn't resist now, how can I ever go home? The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World", performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Charley Earp is honestly devoted to the religiously-inspired communism of his youth, without apology or irony.