• do you think that religion is antithetical to dialectical materialism?

Ultimately, yes. Religion is fundamentally incompatible with a materialist understanding of the world.

• was suppression of religion in the USSR enforced out of a belief by the party that it contradicted the principles of Marxism–Leninism?

I think this is a good example of overdetermination and we should be cautious about attributing one single motivation to things like government policy, especially in such a fraught situation as the USSR’s suppression of religion. In short, it’s worth approaching this situation itself dialectically.

One factor is that religion was a factory for reactionary sentiment and for agitating the masses for the purposes of reaction (not speaking about capitalism specifically here but more like Black Hundreds types and obviously white restorationist kinda reaction). One of the ways to prevent white restorationist movements is by destroying the nucleus of the movement, which was largely centred around the church. Setting aside all considerations about state atheism, the antagonisms between materialism and idealism, and the goal of achieving an irreligious society etc. the suppression of the church can be seen as a political expediency; if you have a problem with gang members, you can uproot the problem by destroying their clubhouse.

Another factor is that it was likely a realpolitik manoeuvre where the church held a lot of political and economic power that rivalled the soviet DotP and thus posed a threat to it. Whether there was ideology justifications for the suppression of religion (there were) I think it’s worth being materialist about this and acknowledging that a state seeks to establish itself as peerless because it’s ultimately a tool of domination and the church threatened to become a peer so it got clapped, essentially.

Another factor is that I would assume that when the Bolsheviks liberated the USSR from the clutches of feudalism, aristocracy, and burgeoning capitalism etc. people would have experienced a watershed moment.

I would be surprised if the masses, perhaps for the first time, becoming aware of the sheer opulence of the aristocracy and the church which was so closely intertwined with it and of the ways that they oppressed the masses, didn’t experience a very strong reaction against these forces and, perhaps, if this were the case then the Soviet government may have been riding a wave rather than issuing edicts from up on high.

There are times in the Chinese GPCR where the resentment amongst the masses that had built up over generations of oppression and deprivation were unleashed. It’s easy to say “Mao/the CPC directed the masses to attack landlords and reactionaries” but it’s more realistic to say that they were riding a wave of popular sentiment at the time and that they were attempting to direct that energy towards the end-goal of revolution.

• would a socialist state with a party that strictly adhered to Marxism–Leninism but allowed religious freedom among its citizenship be stable?

I think the state and religion has always existed with varying degrees of tension. Even in an example of a theocracy such as the Tibetan Ganden Phodrang there were currents of reform, liberalisation, and different religious sects vying for political dominance. It’s easy to say that religion exists independent of the state. It’s almost as easy to say that religion exists as an arm of the state. But that’s not really very dialectical tbh.

Due to the inherent antagonisms that exist between a DotP state and religion (I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole here but ultimately in many respects the pointy end of socialism and of religion can be boiled down to matters of jurisprudence and where you have incompatibility between overlapping systems of jurisprudence, you necessarily have antagonisms and, inevitably, conflict) the question should be considered through the lens of what religious freedoms are permitted, which means interrogating the concept of religious freedom itself because it is laden with a lot of baggage.

In short, where religious freedom impinges upon the power of a DotP, religious freedom should be a secondary concern. Where religious freedom impinges upon “rights” (excuse the shorthand), religious freedom should be a secondary concern.

The freedom to practice of religion as an individual is one thing but the socio-political nature of organised religion is something that goes far beyond just what someone believes in and how they enact their reverence.

[CW: minor discussions of religious abuse]

If you want to abstain from eating beef or pork or meat entirely due to religious beliefs, fine.

If you want promote and conduct conversion therapy under the pretext of religious freedom, nope.

If you want to get circumcised as an adult as a sacrament, fine.

If you want to impose routine infant circumcision because your God hungers insatiably for the foreskins of children, nope.

I’m sure you get the idea.

It’s a bit like “political freedom”; that concept is very nebulous and it exists in tension with state power. You have channels by which you can exercise your political freedom that is endorsed by the government but you have to be unhinged to think that any state is going to permit people to organise an insurrection.

In a similar way, religious freedom exists in that same sort of tension with the state. I think that a lot of the socio-political channels that currently exist for religious freedom that we see today would be dramatically curbed, if not closed off entirely. This imo would be fundamental to the stability of a post-revolution society.

• would a hypothetical state be able to cultivate material conditions that lead people to willingly give up religion, if said state decided that religion was a threat to its sovereignty?

I’m agnostic about this in the same way that, if you press me on it, I’m agnostic about whether we will ever achieve communism in its purest sense or if it’s even possible; maybe it is, maybe it isn’t and we will only ever understand this from a retrospective perspective. Regardless of that particular debate, it’s something that I believe is worth working towards and even if we only achieve 90% of the goal then it would still be an immense benefit for humanity in itself.

It also depends on how you define religion. Something like ancestor “worship” (shorthand again, sorry - don’t come at me) carries over in extremely irreligious societies.

Is this ultimately a religious practice? In origin, yes.

In its modern examples? …maybe - in certain instances. But it’s largely something which has shifted to being a cultural practice in irreligious contexts imo so it’s more custom and ritual than it is strictly religious from that perspective.

To extend this metaphor a bit more, since we’re talking East Asia and the blurry lines between custom and religion, sticking your chopsticks upright in your bowl is considered taboo due to funerary practices that are largely in the past. Is this prohibition itself religious? Ehhh… not so much. It’s a lot like saying “bless you” when someone sneezes - you’re probably not actually blessing them, you’re probably entirely detached from the religious and superstitious underpinnings of the origin of saying “bless you” and you’re just engaging in custom when you say it.

Religion is a collection of beliefs, superstitions, practices, and jurisprudence that has been codified.

While we very well might see the end of the beliefs themselves, humans are by nature superstitious and we will always carry the cultural practices of our ancestors and of our social context with us to some extent

As for religious jurisprudence, I don’t want it belabour the point (any more than I already have) but I see it as being something that will be largely sidelined post-revolution; those religious prohibitions on something like gambling will still exist (it’s not like there is going to be state-mandated participation in gambling) but the ability for a person to deny their family medical care on the basis of religious jurisprudence, for example, would be overriden.

I would expect to see a withering away of religion under socialism over generations, whether this is directed by the state as intentional policy or whether it occurs as a reflection of the material basis of society in the same way that saying “bless you” was wrapped up in either superstitious beliefs or religious beliefs (depending on which story you believe) but now it has been effaced of its spiritual meaning and has simply entered into the domain of custom.

• have you personally experienced any cognitive dissonance from simultaneously holding religious and Marxist-Leninist beliefs?

No because I was raised largely irreligious and I haven’t held religious beliefs since becoming an ML.

• I haven’t read/listened to a whole lot of theory, what literature would you recommend to better understand dialectical materialism?

The Principal Contradiction by Torkil Lauesen