: "Capitalism forces the worker into the class struggle. In
this class struggle he comes across the clergy and finds it the champion
of his class adversary. The worker transfers his hate from the clergyman
to religion itself, in whose name this clergyman is defending the
social order of the middle classes. In Austria the bourgeois parties
take advantage of the belief of hundreds of thousands of proletarians in
a Lord in Heaven to keep them in subjection to their earthly masters."

Ernest H. Barker, the general secretary of the Australian Labor Party,
holds forth in an article entitled, "The Church is Weighed and Found
Wanting." He is quite emphatic in his statements. "The attitude of the
Labor Movement in Australia to the Church is one of supreme
indifference. There is little or no point of contact between the two and
apparently neither considers the other in its activities and plan of
campaign.... The Church preaches the brotherhood of man. What
brotherhood can exist between the wealthy receiver of interest, profit,
and rent and the struggling worker who sees his wife dragged down by
poverty and overwork, and his children stunted and dwarfed physically
and intellectually--between the underworked and overfed commercial or
industrial magnate and the underfed, overworked denizen of the slums?
... The Church is put on trial in the minds of men. They ask, 'What did
the Church do when we sought a living wage, shorter hours of work, safer
working conditions, abolition of Sunday work, abolition of child labor?'
The answer is an almost entirely negative one. The few instances when
church officials have helped are so conspicuous as to emphasize the
general aloofness.... In how many of the advanced ideas of our time has
the Church taken the lead? Is it not renowned for being a long way in
the rear rather than in the vanguard of progressive thought and action?
It resents any challenge to its ideas, doctrines, or authority."

Emile Vandervelde, the leader of the Belgian Labor Party, discusses the
personal religious convictions of the Labor leaders in France and
Belgium. "Today as yesterday the immense majority are atheists,
old-fashioned materialists, or at least agnostics, to whom it would
never occur to profess any creed, no matter how liberal it might be."

Toyohiko Kogawa, the secretary of the Japan Labor Federation, says:
"Labor considers the Church too other-worldly. It thinks it has no
concern with the interests of labor; a