God-Building
건신주의
A current put forward by some Russian Social Democrats after the defeat of the 1905 revolution: instead of "seeking" a transcendent God, they proposed to "build" a new religion whose object would be humanity and the power of the labouring collective itself. Its leading figures were Lunacharsky, Gorky and Bazarov, and it overlapped with the Vpered group around Bogdanov. It drew on Feuerbach's religion of humanity, Mach's empirio-criticism and Nietzsche's idea of the creation of values; Lenin and Plekhanov condemned it as an abandonment of Marxism and atheism.
In depth
Why did revolutionaries propose to "build God"?
The 1905 revolution had been defeated, and after Stolypin's coup of June 1907 Russia entered a period of reaction. Many revolutionaries were demoralised, and mysticism and religious searching were in fashion among the intelligentsia. Some theorists and writers within the Bolshevik faction thought this mood could not simply be ignored: if socialism only took away the religious feeling that moved millions and gave nothing in return, it could not inspire the masses.
Their answer was God-Building (bogostroitel'stvo). As the Russian Wikipedia sums it up, they did not "seek" God as an already existing transcendent being but sought to "build" God out of the power of the collective. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (third edition) records that the current proclaimed "a new proletarian religion without God", which in practice became a deification of the collective and of progress. The idea was to discard the content of religion but to harness for socialism the power of the feelings, rituals and symbols that bind people together.
Korean encyclopedias render it geonsinjuui (建神主義). The name pairs with God-Seeking (bogoiskatel'stvo), pursued at the same time by religious philosophers such as Merezhkovsky and Berdyaev; the God-builders in fact argued most fiercely against these religious "decadents".
Who argued what?
The theorist was Anatoly Lunacharsky. In Religion and Socialism, published in two volumes in 1908 and 1911, he argued that scientific socialism was the most religious of religions and that God is humanity at its highest potential. Vladimir Bazarov set out the position in the essay "God-Seeking and God-Building" (1909), and together with Bogdanov they contributed to the 1908 collection Essays on the Philosophy of Marxism. The English Wikipedia records that, along with Feuerbach's religion of humanity, they drew inspiration from the empirio-criticism of Avenarius and Mach and from Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's idea that man smashes old values and creates new ones himself was carried over in Lunacharsky and Gorky into the dream of a socialist "new man".
In 1907, in a survey on religion in the French journal Mercure de France, Maxim Gorky set out the God-builders' position against Georgi Plekhanov, who held that religion had no future and would disappear in a socialist society. The next year he turned the idea into fiction in the novel A Confession (1908). Its hero Matvei, wandering in search of God, hears from an old man: "The God-builder is the common people! The countless people of the world!"
Богостроитель — это суть народушко! Неисчислимый мировой народ!
The novel ends with the hero's prayer to the people: "Thou art my god and the creator of all gods, who wove them from the beauties of thy spirit in the labour and rebellion of thy searching!" Here God is not in heaven; God is the working, fighting people themselves.
Ты еси мой бог и творец всех богов, соткавший их из красот духа своего в труде и мятеже исканий твоих!
Why did Lenin attack God-Building so sharply?
For Lenin this was no mere difference of words. He saw religion as a spiritual oppression born of the powerlessness of the oppressed and serving to justify exploitation, and held that any attempt to revive religion, however refined, was exactly what the bourgeoisie wanted in a period of reaction. He criticised his friend Gorky's A Confession sharply. In June 1909 the enlarged editorial board of the Bolshevik paper Proletary declared God-Building "a trend breaking with the foundations of Marxism", and at the same meeting Bogdanov was pushed out of the faction's leadership.
From August to December 1909, with Gorky's support, the God-builders ran a factional school for workers on the Italian island of Capri, which Lenin called "the literary centre of God-Building". After the school they formed the Vpered group around Bogdanov at the end of 1909. Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909), written in the same period, targeted their philosophical basis, Machism, and in letters to Gorky in the autumn of 1913 he again objected that "seeking" God and "building" God were at bottom no different.
What became of God-Building?
According to the Russian Wikipedia, after the Vpered group effectively ceased to exist in 1913 most of the former God-builders abandoned their neo-Kantian and Machist leanings. Lunacharsky rejoined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and became People's Commissar for Education, and Gorky became the leading figure of Soviet literature after the revolution. Bogdanov's cultural theory flowed into the Proletkult.
But the question God-Building raised, how socialism would answer people's need for feeling, ritual and meaning in life, did not go away. After the revolution, debates over red rituals and state festivals in the Soviet Union, and studies of the Lenin Mausoleum and the cult of leaders, kept looking for traces of God-Building. As a case of how the idea of the creation of values that began with Nietzsche was transformed among Russian revolutionaries, God-Building holds an important place in the history of Nietzsche's reception.