One of the most important results to come out of the ILRS Congress was the formal launch of the first project of our Campaign Against Religious and Political Extremism.

The ‘Hand to Hand’ project puts forth five common principles and five common actions that believers of all faiths can unite round to build understanding and tolerance in the community, as well as to advance a progressive-minded perspective within each faith group. ‘The way to deal with the religious right is not with the secular left, but with the religious left inside of our secular parties,’ said ILRS Secretary General Andrew Hammer. ‘The religious left is the only force that can effectively debate and challenge the arguments used by the religious right, because we know exactly where and how the religious right has gone wrong.

More information on this campaign will be made available on the web site, as we examine the progress of the campaign as implemented in our member nations.

Download the Hand to Hand document here.

The following document was presented to the Congress by Cedric Mayson, representative of the Commission for Religious Affairs of the African National Congress (ANC). Many delegates felt that this document captured the essence of the theme by its combination of both practical and theoretical points.

Who is our God? The Basis of Religious Socialism
A viewpoint from South Africa

This discussion paper comes from Cedric Mayson with major contributions from Iqbal Jhazbhay and inputs from Johan van Workum and Andrew Hammer. It attempts to approach religious socialism from a spiritual understanding, analyse problems within institutional religion, and explore ways to go forward.

1. Introduction

1.1 The phrase ‘religious socialism’ plays tunes on inherited themes of ‘politics’ and ‘religion’ which are not always harmonious. Many envisage a God ‘out there’ beyond the realities of life and respond on a ‘spiritual’ level only. However, God is not ‘out there’ at all, but the essence of living here and now, the Ground of our Being, ‘not far from any of us, since it is in him that we live and move and exist.’ The universal sense that the spirit of God in grounded in each human being, is captured in the Qur’anic verse: And when I have formed him and breathed My spirit (ruh) into him, so the angels prostrated all of them together in homage (Qur’an, 38:72 see also 17:70).

1.2 All humans are part of community by nature and cannot be separated from God. Our specific contribution is from a personal background in a national, religious and economic setting, but as part of wider society. Just as Beethoven, Benny Goodwin and Enoch Sitonga made music for Germans, Americans, or Africans, which also speaks to the whole of humanity, so from our different perspectives and experience we share the same vision of life: and it is godly.

Click here to read the entire document in Acrobat PDF format.

Here we offer an Acrobat PDF file containing some of the motivating interventions on the theme, as presented by representatives of various Swiss religious socialist groups. (Readers can read a more extensive article on the ideas which motivated this theme in both English and German by Urs Eigenmann, which was published on this site in 1999.)

Download the file
Part 1: Urs Eigenmann
Part 2: Zürich Group, Eugen Schmid, Linda Stibler
Part 3: Ferdinand Troxler