Communists launch religious outreach commission

WASHINGTON (RNS) The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) has created a new commission to welcome people of faith to join the movement, according to a report Monday (June 15) from the party’s newspaper. “We want to reach out to religious people and communities, to find ways of improving our coalition work with them, and to welcome […]

WASHINGTON (RNS) The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) has created a new commission to welcome people of faith to join the movement, according to a report Monday (June 15) from the party’s newspaper.

“We want to reach out to religious people and communities, to find ways of improving our coalition work with them, and to welcome people of faith into the party,” Tim Yeager, the commission’s chairman, wrote in People’s Weekly World, the party’s newspaper.

Yeager is a Chicago trade unionist and a member of the Episcopal Church.


He said the goal of the commission is to produce articles that will discuss socialist perspectives on religious matters, as well as to plan a series of nationwide gatherings and eventual national conference in 2010.

The commission will counter the public conception that atheism is a mainstay of communism, he said.

Progressive social activism is encouraged by major religious traditions, the party said, and noting a “small trend among the religious community which considers capitalism as immoral and is moving towards socialism.”

Yeager denounced former President George W. Bush’s Christian ideology as a “cloak for his unpopular agenda” and a “theology of war and imperialism” in a May 2005 article published to the party’s Web site.

“The struggle over the direction in which millions of religious people will move is a part of the class struggle,” Yeager said in the article. “Its outcome will have a significant impact upon the success or failure of the broader peoples’ movement.”

Representatives at party headquarters in New York did not return phone calls for comment Tuesday.

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