Marxism and Religion
The American journal New Socialist, issue 51 (2009), published an article by French scholar Michael Löwy titled "Marxism and Religion: Opium of the People?" Löwy is a member of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) and author of books such as The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America. For a long time, the views of some Marxists on religion have been relatively simplistic, typically equating the Marxist perspective on religion with the assessment that "religion is the opium of the people." In this article, Löwy questions this simplistic view and systematically expounds upon the rich variety of Marxist perspectives on religion. The main contents of the article are as follows.
Is religion still a bastion of reaction, obscurantism [1], and conservatism, as Marx and Engels believed in the 19th century? To a large extent, the answer is yes. Their views still apply to many Catholic organizations, to the fundamentalist factions of the major faiths (Christianity, Judaism, Islam), to the vast majority of evangelical groups, and to most new religious sects—some of which, like the notorious "Unification Church," are nothing more than economic manipulation, obscurantist brainwashing, and fanatical anti-communism.
Nevertheless, the emergence of revolutionary Christianity and liberation theology in Latin America (and elsewhere) has opened a new chapter in history and raised exciting new questions. These new questions cannot be answered without a renewed understanding of the Marxist analysis of religion, which is precisely the theme of this article.
The well-known aphorism "religion is the opium of the people" is identified by the vast majority of its supporters and opponents as the essential essence of the Marxist view of religion. But to what extent is it an accurate view? First, we must emphasize that this expression was by no means the exclusive property of Marxists. We can find the same sentence in various texts, in the works of the German philosophers Kant, Herder, Feuerbach, Bauer, Hess, and Heine. For example, in an article about Ludwig Börne, Heine had already used the expression in an affirmative (albeit ironic) way: "Blessed be a religion that pours into the bitter throat of suffering humanity a few drops of sweet, spiritual opium—the hypnotic water of love, hope, and faith!" Moses Hess, in his work published in Switzerland in 1843, adopted a more critical (but still ambiguous) stance: "Religion can make the conscious misery of the slave bearable—in the same way that opium is a beneficial aid against the pains of disease."
This expression of religion as the opium of the people soon appeared in Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction (1844). A careful reading of the passage where this expression appears makes it clear that it is a statement with more qualifications and less one-sidedness than is generally believed. Although clearly critical, Marx considers the dual character of the religious phenomenon: "Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people." [2]
If we read Marx's entire article, it is evident that Marx's view comes more from the Young Hegelians—the Hegelian Left, who saw religion as the alienation of the human essence—than from the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which simply dismissed religion as the trickery and intrigue of the clergy. In fact, when Marx wrote the above passage, he was still a student of Feuerbach, a Young Hegelian. His analysis of religion was "pre-Marxist," without any class orientation, but rather a historical one. However, it possessed a dialectical quality that grasped the contradictory nature of religious "suffering": "at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering."
The study of religion in the strict Marxist sense came later, especially in The German Ideology (1846), where Marx began to study religion as a social and historical reality. The key to this new method of religious analysis is to study religion as one of the many forms of ideology; in other words, as a spiritual product of a people, as a product of ideas, representations, and consciousness, which is necessarily conditioned by material production and the corresponding social relations. Although Marx occasionally used the concept of "reflection"—which led generations of Marxists astray into barren territory—the core idea of The German Ideology is that forms of consciousness (religion, ethics, philosophy, etc.) must be explained by social relations in their production and development. "By doing this, of course, the whole process can be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another)." [3]
After co-authoring The German Ideology with Engels, Marx paid little attention to religion as a specific cultural/ideological system. Nevertheless, in Volume I of Capital, one can still find some interesting comments of a methodological nature. For example, in a well-known footnote, he responds to an argument which claimed that the importance of politics in the ancient world and religion in the Middle Ages revealed the flaws of materialism in historical explanation: "The Middle Ages could not live on Catholicism, nor could the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the economic conditions of the time that explain why here politics and there Catholicism played the chief part." [4] Marx took the trouble to provide economic reasons for the importance of medieval religion, but this passage is very important because it acknowledges that, under certain historical circumstances, religion can indeed play a decisive role in social life.
Despite Marx's general lack of interest in religion, he paid attention to the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism. Several passages in Capital mention the contribution of Protestantism to the rise of early capitalism—for example, by facilitating the expropriation of church property and common pastures. In the Grundrisse (1857-1858), half a century before the famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by the renowned German sociologist Max Weber, Marx made the following illuminating comments on the internal connection between Protestantism and capitalism: The cult of money has its own asceticism, its own self-denial, its own economy of self-sacrifice and frugality, and contempt for mundane, monotonous, and fleeting pleasures; it has the eternal pursuit of wealth. Therefore, there is a connection between English Puritanism or Dutch Protestantism and money-making. This passage is strikingly similar (though not identical) to Weber's theme, which is particularly remarkable since it was impossible for Weber to have read this passage (the Grundrisse was first published in 1940).
On the other hand, Marx often referred to capitalism as a "religion of everyday life" based on commodity fetishism. Marx described capital as a "Semitic god who requires the whole world as a sacrifice" and described the capitalist process as a "monstrous pagan god who only drinks nectar from the skulls of the slain." His critique of political economy frequently refers to idolatry: the cult of Baal, the cult of Semitic gods, the cult of Mammon, the cult of the Golden Calf, and, of course, the concept of "fetishism." However, as far as the sociology of religion is concerned, the significance of this language is more symbolic than substantive.
Engels showed a greater interest in religious phenomena and their historical roles than Marx did. Engels' main contribution to the Marxist study of religion was his analysis of the reciprocal relationship between various religious manifestations and class struggle. Engels was interested in understanding and explaining the specific socio-historical forms of religion, an understanding that transcended "materialist and idealist" philosophical arguments. Christianity no longer appeared (as it did with Feuerbach) as a timeless "essence," but as a cultural system that underwent transformations in different historical periods: first as a religion of slaves, later as the state ideology of Rome, then adapted to the feudal hierarchy, and finally to capitalist society. Thus, in Engels' work, religion appears as a symbolic arena where various antagonistic forces—for example, in the 16th century, feudal theology, bourgeois Protestantism, and the plebeian heresies—struggle against each other.
Occasionally, Engels' interpretation of religious movements would slide into a narrow utilitarian and pragmatic analysis: each different class would utilize the religion suited to itself—as for whether those gentlemen believed in their respective religions, it was irrelevant.
Aside from discovering the "religious disguise" of class interests in different forms of faith, Engels seemed to find nothing else. Nevertheless, because of his class struggle analysis method, he recognized—unlike the Enlightenment philosophers—that the clergy was not a social body composed of homogeneous elements: in certain historical situations, it divided itself into several parts according to its own class composition. Thus, during the Reformation, on the one hand, we had the high clergy, the top layer of the feudal hierarchy, and on the other hand, the lower clergy, who provided the ideological followers for the Reformation and the peasant revolutionary movements.
As a materialist, an atheist, and an uncompromising enemy of religion, Engels, like the young Marx, still grasped the duality of religious phenomena: religion plays the role of legitimizing the existing order, yet it also plays the role of critique, protest, and even revolution, depending on the social reality. Moreover, the vast majority of the specific studies he conducted focused on the rebellious forms of religion.
First of all, Engels was very interested in primitive Christianity, which he defined as the religion of slaves and freedmen, of the poor and the disenfranchised, of those conquered or expelled by Rome. The earliest Christians came from the lowest strata of society: slaves, freedmen deprived of rights, and small peasants crushed by debt. He even made a surprising comparison between this primitive Christianity and modern social movements: 1) Neither movement was created by leaders and prophets, but were mass movements, although prophets were never lacking in either; 2) Both were movements of the oppressed and persecuted, and their members were excluded and hunted by the ruling class; 3) Both preached an upcoming liberation from slavery and misery. To qualify this comparison, Engels somewhat provocatively cited a quote from the French historian Renan: "If you want to know what the first Christian communities were like, you only have to look at a local branch of the International Workingmen's Association" (the International Workingmen's Association was a multinational working-class organization founded in 1864, known as the First International).
According to Engels, the similarities between socialism and early Christianity appeared in all those movements over the centuries that dreamed of restoring primitive Christianity: from the Taborites of Jan Žižka and the Anabaptists of Thomas Müntzer to (after 1830) the French revolutionary communists and the staunch advocate of German utopian communism, Wilhelm Weitling.
Even so, in Engels' eyes, an essential difference remained between the socialist movement and primitive Christianity: primitive Christians placed salvation in the beyond, while socialists hoped to achieve liberation in this world.
However, is this distinction as clear-cut as it appears at first glance? In his study of the Great German Peasants' War, this view of Engels' seems to become blurred: Thomas Müntzer, the theologian and plebeian revolutionary leader of the 16th-century peasants and heretics (Anabaptists), wanted to establish the Kingdom of God directly on earth—the millennial kingdom of the prophets. According to Engels, for Müntzer, the Kingdom of God was a society with no class distinctions, no private property, and no state power independent of or external to the members of society. Nevertheless, Engels still attempted to simplify religion into a form of trickery: he spoke of Müntzer's Christian clichés and his biblical "disguise." The unique religious dimension of Müntzer's millennial kingdom, its spiritual and moral strength, and the true depth of its mystical experience all seemed to fall outside Engels' field of vision.
Engels did not conceal his admiration for the German millennialist prophets, describing their ideas as "quasi-communist" and calling them "religious revolutionaries": they represented more of a "brilliant vision" of the future goals of proletarian liberation than a synthesis of the plebeian demands of their own era. Regarding this visionary and utopian dimension of religion—which was not explained according to "reflection theory"—Engels offered no further elaboration; it was Ernst Bloch who undertook concentrated and fruitful work in this area (as we shall see later).
According to Engels, the last revolutionary movement carried out under the banner of religion was the 17th-century Puritan movement in England. If it was religion, rather than materialism, that provided the ideological support for this revolution, it was because of the politically reactionary nature of that philosophy in England at the time, as represented by Hobbes and other proponents. Contrary to materialism and deism, Protestantism provided the religious banner and the combatants for this war against the Stuart dynasty.
This analysis is highly interesting: Engels breaks with the linear view of history inherited from the Enlightenment, acknowledging that the struggle between materialism and religion does not necessarily correspond to the struggles between revolution and counter-revolution, progress and regression, liberty and despotism, or the oppressed and ruling classes. In this case, the situation was precisely the opposite: a revolutionary religion stood in opposition to a despotic materialism.
Engels was deeply convinced that since the French Revolution, religion could no longer function as a revolutionary ideology; when French and German communists such as Cabet and Weitling claimed that "Christianity is communism," he was astonished. He could not have foreseen liberation theology; however, because he analyzed religious phenomena from the perspective of class struggle, he gave voice to the latent protest within religion. This opened a path toward the relationship between religion and society that differed from both Enlightenment philosophy (which viewed religion as the conspiratorial trickery of the clergy) and the German Young Hegelians (who viewed religion as the alienation of the human essence).
Within the European labor movement, many Marxists maintained a radically hostile attitude toward religion, yet believed that the atheist struggle against religious ideology must be subordinate to the concrete circumstances of the class struggle, which required unity between believers and non-believers among the workers. Lenin himself occasionally declared religion to be a "mystical fog," yet in his article "Socialism and Religion" (1905), he insisted that atheism should not be an integral part of the Party program, because "the unity of this truly revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on a paradise in heaven." [5]
Rosa Luxemburg held the same view regarding this strategy, but she developed a different and original methodology. Although she was a committed atheist herself, she rarely attacked religion in her writings as much as she attacked the ultra-conservative policies of the Church for attacking atheism in the name of its own traditions. In an article written in 1905 ("The Church and Socialism"), she declared that modern socialists were far more faithful to the original principles of Christianity than the contemporary conservative clergy. Since socialists struggle for a social order of equality, freedom, and fraternity, priests—if they truly wished to realize the Christian principle of "loving one's neighbor as oneself" in human life—should welcome the socialist movement. When the clergy support the rich and those who exploit and oppress the poor, they enter into clear conflict with Christian doctrine: they are indeed serving not Christ but the Golden Calf. The pioneering preachers of Christianity were all passionate communists, and the Church Fathers (such as Basil the Great and John Chrysostom) denounced social injustice. Today, this cause is continued by the socialist movement, which brings the gospel of fraternity and equality to the poor and calls upon people to establish a kingdom of freedom and love for one's neighbor on earth. Rosa Luxemburg sought to salvage the social dimension within the Christian tradition for the labor movement, rather than engaging in a philosophical battle in the name of materialism.
Ernst Bloch was the first Marxist theorist to fundamentally change the theoretical framework for the analysis of religion without abandoning Marxist and revolutionary perspectives. In a manner similar to Engels, he distinguished between two opposing social currents: on one hand, the theocratic religion of the official church, which is the opium of the people and a tool of mystification serving power; on the other hand, the underground, subversive, and heretical religions of figures such as the Albigensians, the Hussites, Joachim de Fiore, Müntzer, Baader, Weitling, and Tolstoy. Nonetheless, unlike Engels, Bloch refused to view religion merely as a "disguise" for class interests: he explicitly criticized this notion. In its forms of protest and rebellion, religion is one of the most important forms of utopian thought and one of the richest expressions of "The Principle of Hope."
Building upon his own philosophical premises, Bloch developed an unorthodox and iconoclastic interpretation of the Bible, thereby deriving a "Bible of the Poor" that openly denounces tyrants and calls upon every individual to choose either Caesar or Christ.
As a religious atheist and a revolutionary theologian—who argued that one can only be a good Christian by being an atheist, and vice versa—Bloch not only provided a Marxist reading of the Christian millennialist ideal (following Engels) but also invented a millennialist reading of Marxism, which was entirely new. Through this interpretation, the socialist struggle for the "realm of freedom" is seen as the direct successor to the eschatology and collectivist heresies of the past.
Of course, Bloch, like the young Marx who wrote that famous passage in 1844, acknowledged the dual nature of religious phenomena: its oppressive character and its potential for rebellion. The first aspect requires the application of what he called the "cold stream of Marxism": a ruthless, materialistic critique of ideology, various idols, and idolatry. The second aspect requires the "warm stream of Marxism," seeking to salvage the cultural surplus of utopian ideals within religion, as well as its critical and prefigurative power. Undoubtedly, Bloch dreamed of a genuine alliance between Christianity and revolution, like the one formed during the German Peasants' War of the 16th century.
Bloch's perspectives were largely inherited by certain radical scholars of the German Frankfurt School. Horkheimer believed that "religion is the record of the hopes, nostalgia, and indictments of countless generations." Fromm, in his book The Dogma of Christ (1930), applied Marxist and psychoanalytic methods to clarify the messianic, plebeian, equalitarian, and anti-authoritarian essence of primitive Christianity. Meanwhile, the theorist Walter Benjamin attempted, through a uniquely creative synthesis, to combine theology and Marxism, the Jewish messianic ideal and historical materialism, and class struggle with divine redemption.
In terms of innovative Marxist studies of religion, Lucien Goldmann’s work The Hidden God (1955) represents another pioneering attempt. Although inspired by a very different spirit than Bloch, Goldmann was equally interested in salvaging the moral and human values within religious traditions. The most unexpected and original part of Goldmann's work is his attempt to compare religious faith with Marxist faith without assimilating one into the other: both reject pure individualism (whether rationalist or empiricist), and both believe in values that transcend the individual—God for religion, and the human community for socialism. Both religious faith and Marxist faith are built upon a wager—religion bets on the existence of God, Marxism bets on human liberation—which implies risk: the danger of failure or the hope of success. Both imply certain fundamental convictions that cannot be proven solely at the level of factual judgment. What distinguishes the two is, of course, the trans-historical character of religious transcendence: "Marxist faith is a faith in the historical future, namely, that man himself bets on the success of our actions, or rather that we must bet with our actions; the transcendence of the goal of this faith is neither supernatural nor trans-historical, but trans-individual, nothing more and nothing less." Goldmann did not intend to "Christianize Marxism" in any way; he merely introduced a new method for viewing the contentious relationship between religious and Marxist faith based on the concept of faith.
Marx and Engels believed that the subversive role of religion belonged to the past and no longer had any significance in the modern class struggle. This prediction has been more or less proven by history for a century—with some important exceptions (especially in France): Christian Socialism in the 1830s, the worker-priests in the 40s, and the Christian Left alliances in the 50s.
However, to understand what has actually happened over the last thirty years in Latin America (and to a lesser extent, on other continents) regarding the issue of liberation theology, we need to integrate Bloch and Goldmann’s insights into the utopian potential of the Judeo-Christian tradition into our analysis. Additionally, in these "classic" Marxist discussions of religion, there is a serious lack of discussion regarding the impact of religious doctrine and practice on women.