Oops I slipped out of my collar
While religion has often been entangled with power, hostility toward religious institutions can unintentionally strengthen capitalism by weakening mutual aid networks, free communal spaces, moral limits on markets, and traditions of redistribution. When non-market institutions are weakened without public alternatives replacing them, people are pushed back toward markets for needs once met through community.
Temples are third spaces. Churches, mosques, and other religious organizations are physical places where you can go and meet other people without spending money. Many of these spaces are already struggling to pay their own utilities as it is, and yet the people behind them believe in the act of creating a free communal space that celebrates their beliefs and invites outsiders to come in and experience it.
And many of them offer much more than just traditional services! A glance at the calendar for the Washington National Cathedral (an Episcopal church) shows upcoming yoga classes, music recitals, and a meeting on gun violence prevention. My own priest befriended me through free afternoon tea and vegetarian dinners. In many Muslim communities, hospitality and feeding strangers are deeply embedded norms; if I walked up to a mosque and said I was hungry, I could expect to leave with a full stomach.
When these temples get taxed and billed out of their buildings, communities lose those spaces. (I would know. My sister's church got bought out by a new landlord who wanted to turn it into a luxury venue space. He didn't even succeed. That building sits abandoned now.) Every free gathering place that disappears pushes social life further into monetized spaces.
On a larger scale, religious institutions are one of society's biggest safety nets when the market fails to meet the needs of the people. They're often very imperfect (especially when it comes to matters such as the treatment of marginalized people in some spaces), but I think an imperfect institution can still provide functions worth preserving, especially when no replacement exists. Religious hospitals, homeless shelters, crisis centers, and food banks are vital. One in six hospital beds in the United States is in a Catholic hospital, and over 99% of those hospitals are nonprofit. In a system where your ability to receive healthcare often depends on how important you are to a company, a major segment of religious healthcare operates outside the shareholder-profit model. Religious systems also often maintain hospitals in rural or low-margin regions where purely profit-driven systems may be less likely to remain. There’s evidence many rural hospitals are financially fragile, which makes non-market or mission-oriented providers especially significant.
Weakening religious institutions without replacing these systems risks not liberation from hierarchy, but further dependence on privatized healthcare markets.
Scaling back down to the individual level, I think the teachings of some major religions are also very important for creating communities that want to help each other instead of only valuing individualism. Institutions that encourage (or even mandate) charity are acting in direct defiance to the idea that people need to hoard every last penny. Many religions treat surplus wealth as something owed, not owned. Religious traditions also often insist some things (care, dignity, rest, even human bodies) should not be treated as commodities.
Of course, religious institutions are far from perfect. They can be very, very oppressive. I think it's great that many of them are starting to take accountability and make reparations for the damages that have been done, but others are still fighting against marginalized communities. Some do fully align with power or reinforce capitalist ideals. But criticizing those failures is different from assuming religion has no anti-capitalist social function. This is not an argument that churches should replace public welfare, nor that faith communities are beyond critique.
Lastly, even if absolutely nothing I've said has had any truth to you: What replaces these institutions if they disappear?
Where are the free gathering spaces? Where are the volunteer care networks? Where are the nonprofit hospitals? Where are the re-distributive norms? Is your answer to any of these real, successful, and actively present in society? Especially in rural communities? Too often, the answer is not democratic public infrastructure, but the market. And that should concern anyone who opposes capitalism.
A final personal anecdote: When I started my transition, I was scared to death. I reached out online for help, and was told to go to my "local LGBT center". I live on a cow farm in the middle of nowhere. There is no local LGBT center. But there is a church, and that church welcomed me and gave me the resources I needed. A pastor offered to bless me with my chosen name, and she gave me information on my closest Planned Parenthood.
I haven't even touched on the cultural importance of religion here, but this is already getting longer than I intended, so I'll leave it at this: if the disappearance of religious institutions does not lead to stronger public commons, but only greater dependence on landlords, insurers, and corporations, then anti-religious hostility has not weakened capitalism at all. It has served it.