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vyllraen · 6 days ago

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Class and Divinity

I think only the rich want god. And they want him in the way they want a grand self-portrait; something to last beyond their lifetime and echo their perfected, glorified image. An old-fashioned thing rarely indulged in in the modern age. Their god (whichever they lay claim to) never gives them commands that run against their existing ways. Their god is a bigger, louder voice than theirs (or so they say) but it always speaks the exact way that they would. And their god is always gilding, both in that it accentuates their existing selves as an chosen bit of vanity and that it runs barely skin deep. There is always a perfectly functional engine of pragmatism and mortal will beneath all trace of religion in the wealthy.

The middle class (what paltry few remain, excuse my lack of knowledge) seem the least godly of people to me. Comfortable enough that divinity is a fun thought exercise, neither needed nor wanted to get through the day or excuse the day's takings, they tend to gravitate more towards general spirituality and mutated trappings of religion rather than firm belief in a deity itself and relationship to it. Self-actualization, and more importantly the freedom to pursue it, means all forms of modernized "hippie-dippie" pursuits, most of which read to me as incredibly incomplete and insincere. A thought experiment, where in the end there seems to be an assumption that it's all for fun: at the end of the day, your own thought is all there is.

The lower class (and this reaches in my mind all the way down to destitution) need god. Desperately. And their belief in it is the most all-consuming, sincere religion in the world. Maybe it's always been this way. When the leisure to self-actualize is robbed from you, when forces far beyond your control that dominate every aspect of your life are already something you are accustomed to, when the road up is so steep and impossible that often the best you can do your whole life is not slide too much further backwards, then divine intervention is your only lifeline. You believe in the thing you need to believe in or lose all hope. Same reason rich people don't buy lottery tickets. They don't need a distant miracle to save them, and they don't need to depend on such miracles to start with.

And the suffering. When existence alone is full of hunger and fear and uncertainty, you starve for purpose and fairness even oftener than you starve for food. Religion gives you a reward far out in the distance. Purpose. Divine protection. Divine punishment on your enemies. It hands you a set of pre-made rules and principles, sparing you the long process of developing your own (something you do not have spare time or mental energy for anyway). A shortcut to mental relief from oppression. A sense of order and justice in a hostile and chaotic world. A new standard by which to measure yourself, one in which you can succeed regardless of how much you lack. A shortcut to community and understanding with others that bypasses their personality and background. Something, somebody else to trust in, who is powerful beyond measure, when you are intimately aware of how powerless you are.

In lockstep with this, wealth affords a thousand ways in which you can distance yourself from the human experience. Leisure and safety are only worth so much toward self-realization when stripped of all consequences, risk, struggle, and empathy. The ability to opt out of all conflict and even mere exposure to the suffering of others leads to a very different kind of god than the inability to escape suffering, your own and everyone else's, for even a moment. Not only do the rich want god, while the poor need it, but the divinity of the poor is fuller and sharper and far more sincere not just because of sheer necessity, but because it contains vast amounts of trauma and fear.

this, of course, skims past many related ideas like how religion is actively used to satiate and control the lower classes, how it relates to the way cults form, the differences between deity-specific religions and vaguer, more principle-based religions and how they express, and the limitations of my own experience as it involves almost exclusively the MOST christianized elements of western religion, but it's still a thought i've been turning over.

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