the thing among the three’, or, even more literally, ‘to co-image among the three’. To drink is therefore a co-imaging the Trinity. Booze turns out to be a metaphor as complex as opium, if not more so. It is both spiritual booze and divine vodka: relief for the weary, succour to the oppressed, inescapable social mediator, it is also a source of addiction, dulling of the senses and dissipater of strength and resolve. Religion-as-booze thereby opens up even more complexity concerning religion in the Marxist tradition.
Between Reaction and Revolution By now it should be clear that religion is politically ambivalent. It can go one way or the other, to reaction or revolution. Throughout history, we find that a religion like Christianity – on which I focus since I know it best – has easily supported all sorts of tyrants and despots. From the moment the Roman Emperor Constantine decided to make Christianity the religion of empire (from 312 CE and confirmed by Theodosius I in 380 CE), it became clear that religion fits very easily into this role. To be sure, there was plenty of preparation in Christian literature and thought (already in the Bible), as the text of Romans 13:1 reveals: ‘Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God’. But Constantine’s act made this process perfectly clear. The danger, however, is to assume that this is the default position for a religion like Christianity. We can easily assume that religion is inherently 16