Can Socialists Use Astrology?

The problem of anti-religious bigotry on the secular Left

As the calendar moved toward Donald Trump’s birthday on June 14 and the summer solstice on June 21, leftist political commentator and comedian Francesca Fiorentini invited astrologer Chani Nicholas to give her  Bitchuation Room podcast audience some insight into how the stars might be impacting the United States and its current authoritarian leader.

It was all done in a spirit of lighthearted fun, and while Chani might be a different kind of guest than the politicians or activists that often visit The Bitchuation Room, Fiorentini is no stranger to quirky and irreverent takes on the news of the day.  Lord knows we all need a laugh now and then to help us cope with the deadly serious news in the daily headlines. I giggled along with Fiorentini and Nicholas as I listened to the segment on my way to work, but then I made the mistake of looking at what people in the comments had to say. 

I think very little of right wingers because of their nonsensical views and their inability to see reason past their culturally enforced beliefs. I think the same for astrology weirdos. 

Space/birthday bigotry. No thanks. We have enough scientific illiteracy killing us already. 

Stop that nonsense. You can’t practice astrology and be a socialist. The two are mutually exclusive. 

Some secular leftists tend to view both organized religion and any spiritual “woo woo” as illogical and therefore symptomatic of the anti-intellectualism that characterizes U.S. fascism. This categorical rejection of all so-called “nonsensical” beliefs betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of spirituality, as well as a deep, often unchallenged bigotry among secular socialists against the vast majority of working-class people in our country. 

In a nation where 82% of people identify as religious and/or spiritual, anti-religious prejudice must be discarded by socialists who want to draw more people into the fight against capitalist exploitation. These rationally minded people would do well to learn more about religion from both scholars and everyday practitioners, in order to understand what the many diverse forms of healthy spirituality can do for human beings. 

Rationality and empiricism, I would argue, are irrelevant to the function of spirituality. Humans are emotional, psychological beings who have emotional, psychological problems that can’t be addressed purely through the tools of the scientific method. Spiritual systems help us navigate everything outside of our higher cognitive functions–the emotional storms brewing beneath our conscious intellectual processes. Spirituality helps us become conscious of our unconscious drives and our embodied, emotional experience of life, the fathoms-deep shadow side of human consciousness to which none of the factual statistics in the world can ever speak.

Spirituality gets a bad rap for removing humans from reality,but I believe everyone needs a form of spiritual practice in their lives to be able to fully accept and logically address the (increasingly illogical) realities of our society. I define spiritual practice broadly, and for atheists, agnostics, or anyone else who has no desire to engage with theistic beliefs or organized religion, a spiritual practice can be therapy, meditation, or intentional engagement with art or nature. These practices touch the irrational and emotional parts of our human experience that, left unexamined, can blind us to our own prejudices, limitations, and harmful habits. These spiritual practices can also come from Islam or Christianity or Hinduism or reading tarot cards or practicing astrology. We can’t judge people’s spirituality based on its logical premises. We can only judge it based on its outcome for human flourishing. 

The oppressive systems that co-opt spirituality to hold power over people, whether that’s the Christian Right or a manipulative “counter-cultural” cult, are the problem when it comes to religion, and I fully support the strongest criticisms of those exploitative powers. But we can’t throw out the baby with the bath water if we want to stay self-aware and grounded in reality. (Woke, if you will.)

I’ll give an example from a spiritual perspective that I myself am prone to look down my nose at. Jessica Lanyadoo describes herself as an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator. Claims of psychic perception certainly strain logical credulity for me, and I’m wary of the con artists that walk among the sincere believers. But on Jessica’s Ghost of a Podcast, she recently used her “nonsensical” spiritual framework to provide very helpful guidance to an emotionally vulnerable woman in need of help. 

The guest was seeking an astrologer’s advice in navigating her “relationship” with an AI chatbot. Using their shared spiritual beliefs, Jessica guided her guest toward a path I think most socialists would agree with–she backed off AI use in favor of real human connection and got a reality check about the unsavory motivations of the capitalists who profit from our use of LLMs. 

The guest’s animistic beliefs about the spirits of the minerals that make up technological hardware would probably have been viciously mocked by the people who left the YouTube comments quoted above, but Jessica, an ethical person who shared her spiritual framework, was able to engage with her and help her escape her (in my opinion) unhealthy delusions about the “personhood” of her AI chatbot. She was helped, not harmed, by spiritual counsel that most secular skeptics would dismiss as irreconciliable with reality. 

I sympathize with my secular comrades who are sincerely troubled by the wobbly nature of reality in our unstable, “post-truth” society. And I agree that any form of religion or spirituality that urges us to turn away from the material problems our world faces is no more than an opiate for the overwhelmed masses. But the idea that socialism and spirituality are mutually exclusive is both historically false (see Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, or the DSA’s own Zohran Mamdani) and politically disastrous. 

Eliminating religious and spiritual people from the ranks of our potential allies means never achieving a socialist majority in this country. Instead, we should take the advice of someone who both atheists and people of many different spiritual paths can agree had some solid ideas. How do we divide helpful spirituality from harmful spirituality? “By their fruits you will know them.”