God-Building is an idea proposed by some prominent early Marxists in the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Inspired by Auguste Comte's Religion of Humanity, the concept had some precedent in the French Revolution with the Cult of Reason. The idea proposed that in place of the abolition of religion, there should be a meta-religious context in which religions were viewed primarily in terms of the psychological and social effect of ritual, myth, and symbolism, and which attempted to harness this force for pro-communist aims, both by creating new ritual and symbolism, and by re-interpreting existing ritual and symbolism in a socialist context. In contrast to Leninist atheism, the God-Builders took an official position of agnosticism.
Origin
Anatoly Lunacharsky was aligned with the Vperedist wing of the Bolshevik faction. Although he would later rejoin the Bolsheviks and indeed become People's Commissariat for Education after October 1917, he was originally closely associated with Vladimir Lenin's rival, his brother-in-law Alexander Bogdanov. In his two volume work Religion and Socialism (1908–11), Lunacharsky propounded his theory of ():
He proposed a new religious sentiment which would be accommodating to the world-view of communism by creating a new religion that was compatible with science and not based on any supernatural beliefs.
Lunacharsky claimed that, while traditional religion was false and was used for the purposes of exploitation, it still cultivated emotion, moral values, desires, and other aspects of life that were important to human society. He believed that these aspects should be transformed into positive humanistic values of a new communist morality, instead of destroying religion outright when it served as the psychological and moral basis for millions of people. In his idea, God would gradually be replaced with a new vision of humanity, and through doing so socialism would achieve great success.
He and his supporters argued that Marxism was too mechanically deterministic with regard to human beings and that it alone would not be able to inspire masses of people. They further posited that symbolism and ritual served a necessary social and psychological role. Regarding the social value of religion, Lunacharsky wrote:
Ludwig Feuerbach's 'religion of humanity', on which this was inspired, held that God would be replaced by man as an object of worship. It did not mean that single individuals would be worshipped, but rather the entire potential of the human race and all its achievements would be the object of worship. Instead of projecting human values onto the heavens and submitting people to their own illusory creation, these values would be worshipped in humanity as a whole, which possessed them collectively. This religion would bring people to value themselves and to find common purpose, community and universal meaning in themselves as a collective.
Along with Feuerbach, they also received inspiration from Richard Avenarius' Naturfilisof, Ernst Mach's Empirio-criticism, as well as from Friedrich Nietzsche. Lunacharsky was also particularly interested in the Greek Mystery Schools, especially the Eleusinian Mysteries. Lunacharsky viewed the Eleusinian Mysteries as a model for how communal ritual could be used as a vehicle for the teaching of moral concepts.
They understood the term religion to mean a link between human beings as individuals, a link between human beings and communities, and a link between human beings and societies in the past as well as future. Lunacharsky wrote, "For the sake of the great struggle for life... it is necessary for humanity to almost organically merge into an integral unity. Not a mechanical or chemical... but a psychic, consciously emotional linking-together... is in fact a religious emotion." He argued that atheism in itself is pessimistic, because life becomes meaningless, and that in order to solve this one needed to turn to the pleasure of a religion to give meaning. Atheism didn't provide people with the meaning in their lives that religion did and once religion was taken away, people would feel empty unless something was put in its place. In its place, Lunacharsky proposed they should place humanity as a transcendent entity.