Religion is the only human cultural system preoccupied full time with the problem of meaning. Philosophy thinks about it, but does so in the abstract, and has no ritual, art, or other associated tradition.
Art, in the form of aesthetics, for its part, does not take as its primary task the creation of meaning. Art can enable you to transcend difficulties, but has not historically treated it as the primary objective, in the secular tradition.
The task is to transmute pain into acceptance. To tie people together, not just as communities, but as in-dividuals. Only religious art, in the broadest possible sense, does that.
To reject religion, then, is to reject meaning formation. Socialism, quite literally, is a system which is self destructive on the most basic level. It is not economically productive, leads to political tyranny, homogenizes truth, and rejects the possibility of individual meaning formation, which of course is the only place it could ever form, since none of us can exist as abstractions.