Wang Beite and Chen Tianjia: The Theoretical Positioning of Engels's Critique of Religion
In the history of the development of Marxism, the critique of religion occupies a significant position. On the one hand, this is because religion is inextricably linked to real-world society, making religious critique a unique and effective perspective for observing social reality. As Engels noted, "Politics was then a very thorny field, and so the main struggle was transformed into a religious struggle; this struggle, especially from 1840 on, was also indirectly a political struggle." On the other hand, religious critique is a tradition in the history of Marxist development. The thoughts of Marx and Engels emerged from the Young Hegelians [1]. As a radical intellectual group, the early Young Hegelians' primary task was to break the shackles of religion and celebrate human subjectivity. David Strauss and Bruno Bauer [2] successively launched fierce critiques against Christianity, while Ludwig Feuerbach, grounded in anthropological materialism, reached the conclusion that God is the alienation of the human essence. Subsequently, Max Stirner, raising the banner of "The Ego," stated bluntly that "whether he be God or man, [he] weakens my feeling of uniqueness," thereby characterizing religion as a tool for the oppression of man.
Throughout his life, Engels's writings and research on religion were not only numerous but also possessed considerable systematicity. Compared to Marx, Engels embarked on the journey of critiquing religious theology earlier, and his critique remained consistent whether it was before his collaboration with Marx or after he became the "second fiddle." [3]
Regarding Engels's view of religion and his thoughts on religious critique, the academic community has followed two research paths. One path studies and discusses Engels and Marx together, treating his work as part of Marxist atheism. The advantage of this path is that it effectively preserves the integrity of Marxism, but it also obscures the individual intellectual characteristics and developmental logic of the two thinkers. Another path conducts independent research on Engels's atheistic view of religion. Research in this area generally centers on the theoretical origins, social background, and historical influence of Engels's religious critique, yet its ultimate aim remains to clarify Engels's contribution to Marxist atheism. Generally speaking, there are relatively few studies that treat Engels's atheistic view of religion as a systematic whole.
Two major debates exist in the study of Engels's religious critique. The first concerns his view of religion, specifically how to understand his attitude toward primitive Christianity—namely, whether Christianity is a fellow traveler of the revolution and the proletariat. The view that regards the two as comrades originated in Karl Kautsky's Foundations of Christianity and subsequently entered China, where it was accepted by some scholars. The textual basis for this lies in the "Trilogy on Religion" released by Engels in his later years. Some scholars believe that Engels's attitude toward religion in these three works appears relatively moderate, suggesting a "turn" in his later years. Other scholars argue that this is a misreading of his late thought and appeal to the scientific nature of materialism, emphasizing Engels's "position of materialist atheism."
The second debate involves the periodization of the development of Engels's religious critique. Several views exist: the first bisects his thought into the periods before and after the formation of historical materialism; the second divides it into three stages: Pietism [4], Supranaturalism, and atheism; the third identifies four stages: Pietism, Rationalism, Pantheism, and atheism; and a fourth division also identifies four stages: the period of doubting religion, the period of critiquing religious Pietism, the period of political critique, and the period of the materialist conception of history. What these classifications have in common is an attempt to draw a clear line between Engels's early religious faith and historical materialism. This article attempts to analyze and clarify several controversial issues involving the theoretical positioning of Engels's religious critique from three aspects: the starting point in time, the theoretical logic, and an evaluation of the historical functions of atheism.
I. Regarding 1839 as the Start of Engels's Religious Critique
When exactly did the start of Engels's religious critique occur? As previously mentioned, some research takes the formation of historical materialism (1845) as the starting point for both his religious critique and his scientific worldview. This article contends that Engels's life experiences were an important source of motivation for his critique of religion; therefore, 1839 should be regarded as the starting point, even though Engels was still a religious believer at this time and had not yet encountered historical materialism.
First, Engels began to explicitly critique religion in 1839. This was marked by the anonymous publication of "Letters from Wuppertal" in March 1839 in Telegraph für Deutschland (Telegraph for Germany), an organ of the Young Germany movement. In July 1838, Engels began to come into contact with the Young Germany group and, influenced by them, the 19-year-old Engels revealed in "Letters from Wuppertal" the harm that Christian Pietism brought to Elberfeld and Barmen, two cities along the Wupper Valley.
Engels's religious critique began with a profound exposure of the social tragedies caused by religion. Born into a conservative Pietist family, Engels saw every aspect of life in his hometown of Barmen influenced by religious Pietism; any slight violation would lead to an interrogation as a heretic. Religion restricted the people's thoughts and spirit. To strengthen their influence in the region, the Christian Pietists even extended their reach to children, publicly declaring that children needed to attend church twice every Sunday, or else their souls would fall into hell through depravity. People growing up in such an environment lived in a state of long-term mental suppression, leading them to either be intoxicated by Pietist mysticism or succumb to alcoholism. This soft spiritual oppression, combined with economic hardship, brought both mental and physical devastation. The dominant ideology cut off any possibility for the people's spiritual or material development.
Second, Engels's religious critique contained a critique and reflection on the phenomenon of capitalist exploitation. Engels wrote extensively on how religious forces oppressed workers. He claimed that the Pietists were the ones who treated workers the worst. Pietists demanded lower wages for workers under the pretext of preventing them from drinking excessively. Capitalists at the time tried to keep workers ignorant, because once workers were educated, the bourgeoisie would gain little benefit; the remaining education was largely dominated by religious curricula. From a young age, people were instilled with a large amount of religious dogma and theological thought—not as a comfort for earthly suffering, but as a cover for the capitalists' exploitation of the workers. Though Engels had not yet found the root cause of the workers' oppression and exploitation, he had already begun to use the critique of religion as an entry point. On the one hand, he recognized that once Pietism became popular in an area, it would permeate all aspects of life and ruin them; on the other hand, he believed that the precipice of old obscurantism could not stop the great torrent of the era and would inevitably collapse.
Third, Engels's 1839 religious critique provided the intellectual preparation for his later reflections on the proletariat's path to self-emancipation. After 1839, Engels's position on critiquing religion became increasingly resolute, and he explicitly viewed the workers as the real force to rely on for this critique. Meanwhile, the logic of his early critique was deepening: religion would sooner or later be discarded by the era, because no matter how much religious doctrine was instilled into the workers, they would eventually abandon their faith due to economic poverty. "The sharper the antagonism between workers and capitalists, the more the proletarian consciousness among the workers develops and becomes clearer." Faced with the vast disparity in wealth and quality of life, workers would gradually awaken, realizing that faith was merely a cover for the bourgeoisie to extract their lifeblood. They would find it easier to shake off bourgeois principles and thoughts, gradually forming interests and principles opposed to the bourgeoisie, and developing a unique proletarian worldview.
Thus, it is evident that although Engels was still a religious believer in 1839, regarding that year as the start of his religious critique is of great significance. The prerequisite for critique is familiarity with and acknowledgment of the object’s existence; Engels's early experience with faith made his religious critique more profound. Although Engels's 1839 investigation appeared rudimentary—for instance, attributing the suffering of the Wupper Valley people to a specific "evil sect" of Christianity, and starting only from sympathy for human suffering without a correct understanding of the causes or a feasible plan to overcome them—and though it consisted merely of accusations against sects and condemnations of factory owners and could not yet be called a scientific theory, it was the first step on his theoretical journey. However, the 1839 texts already contained two essential elements of the communist movement: the goal of achieving both material and spiritual liberation, and the working class as the subject for the actualization of Marxism. It can be said that Engels’s religious critique of 1839 was the germ of the Marxist theory of religious critique. Ignoring this starting point or applying an overly granular historical periodization—especially one that understands it as a binary between a pre-scientific and a scientific stage—unavoidably severs and obscures the trajectory of the young Engels’s thought.
II. Engels's Religious Critique is a Coherent and Indivisible Whole
Attempts to apply various periodizations to Engels's religious critique face certain difficulties. For example, during his Pietist period, Engels had already begun to expose the various defects of religion; one cannot simply assume he had not yet formed a critique. Furthermore, the view that Engels’s relatively moderate discussions of Christianity in his later years represented a "degeneration" of his critique must be addressed. How should we respond to these issues? Is a detailed periodization necessary? This article contends that Engels's religious critique is a coherent and indivisible whole, just as the formation of historical materialism was itself a process. Engels's moral critique of religion served as the precursor to his deep theoretical critique, and his subsequent empirical analysis served as the substantiation of historical materialism. Attempting to draw a sharp line between periods ignores the continuity of Engels’s own thought and the mutual influence between Marx and Engels; thus, a clear temporal division is difficult to achieve. Forced periodization can also trigger new problems. For instance, using 1845 as the dividing line between a scientific and pre-scientific worldview for Marx and Engels may lead to an opposition between the "Young" and "Old" versions of the thinkers. Overly detailed divisions are also academically tenuous; for example, the German classical philosophy Marx and Engels accepted early on—Hegelianism in particular—exerted a profound influence on the later development of Marxism and cannot be severed through periodization. Starting from the consistent position held by both men and exploring the gradual deepening of their thought is a relatively sound approach.
First, Engels was always a steadfast and profound critic of religion. If we use religious critique as a thread to examine Engels's intellectual trajectory, we find that he never wavered—neither as a resolute critic of religion nor in his position of integrating religious critique with scientific socialism. This remained true whether he was using the radical expressions of his youth or in his later years when he opposed overly radical proposals by elucidating the laws of the birth, development, and demise of religion.
After denouncing the oppression of the common people by Pietism [5], Engels sought to discover a path toward resolution. Beginning in 1839, he continuously developed a critique centered on the religious oppression of humanity and the realization of human liberation. Engels first encountered the internal contradictions of religious theology itself. On the one hand, religious alienation arose from the separation of the human and the divine; theologians attributed all that is beautiful, noble, and great in human nature to God, leaving man to await divine salvation within a "fragmented" human nature, thereby losing his own essence in religion. Grasping this point was particularly crucial in the heavily religious atmosphere of Prussia at the time, as Engels noted: "Only those who are familiar with the other side of the development of the German nation—philosophy—can understand the full historical significance of this perfected humanity, this overcoming of religious dualism." On the other hand, the expansion of religion required that people be educated, at least enough to comprehend religious dogma. To this end, religious dogmas and theological knowledge had to be designed as the primary curriculum, which paradoxically rendered the educated increasingly ignorant. The reason for this lay in the fact that religious interpretations of the world served the ruling order. In 1844, Engels joined Marx in writing The Holy Family, demonstrating that the critique of religion is the prelude to achieving political and human liberation. That same year, he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, which, by analyzing the living conditions of the working class in British cities, revealed the social structure of the time and sought to derive communist conclusions therefrom. In 1848, he co-authored the Manifesto of the Communist Party with Marx, breaking through pure theoretical activity to engage directly with the practice of the international workers' movement and applying thorough materialism to provide a profound and comprehensive account of all spheres of social life. From his early moral critique rooted in sympathy for the common people to the theoretical critiques of his later years, Engels followed a developmental trajectory similar to Marx’s. As for the relatively moderate discussions of Christianity in Engels's later works, these were by no means a defense of Christianity, but rather a manifestation of wisdom and a calm strategy of struggle proceeding from the reality of the workers' movement.
Reviewing the course of Engels's critique of religion, one finds that his methods included philosophical critique, empirical research, and historical analysis. One cannot deny the continuity of Engels's religious-critical thought simply because of shifts in research methods or perspectives.
Second, Engels's critique of religion developed in tandem with his historical materialism. From the very beginning, his religious-critical thought was never divorced from factors such as history, society, and class. Whether it was the moral indictments born of sympathy for workers in his youth or the historical studies of religion in his later years, the developmental direction of his religious critique was identical to that of historical materialism, and the two exhibited a relationship of mutual reinforcement. From a theoretical starting point, the prerequisite for establishing a scientific worldview is to correctly position the relationship between the real world and religious dogma. Religion subordinates the real world to certain spiritual concepts, attempting to make reality conform to dogma. In Christian theology, God is the supreme reason, and happiness can only be attained through reason. For a long time, the development of natural science was also mixed with spiritual concepts; for example, the preface to Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy firmly declared that natural philosophy was the most suitable weapon to use against the godless mob. The work Engels performed always centered on exposing how religion used the illusion of reason to mask conflicts and contradictions between material interests. Marx and Engels's historical materialism holds that social existence determines social consciousness, and that human history is ultimately determined by the sum total of material production and the relations of life formed on that basis. This powerfully challenged the doctrine, prevalent since Augustine, of Christian theology using reason to explain the world. By his later years, Engels’s research into the origins and development of Christianity fully manifested the theoretical maturity of historical materialism.
Engels's research on the history of the origin and development of religion is a model application of historical materialism. As Engels said, "The problem can only be solved by explaining the origin and development of religion based on the historical conditions under which it arose and achieved dominance." He sought the roots of religious emergence and development in economic and social contradictions: representative religious movements in both the East and the West were caused by economic reasons, and the differences between them also stemmed from the different modes of production and social environments of the East and West. Christianity was a cover for the lower classes to attack the economic system, while Islam provided the theoretical source for impoverished nomadic peoples to launch attacks on wealthy townspeople. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles," and religion is no exception. Historically, Christians were produced by the expansion of the Roman Empire; Roman military might and conquest created a large number of propertyless freemen and slaves whose immense suffering necessitated a search for ideological consolation. Christianity provided exactly this consolation. As Engels put it: "Since they despaired of material salvation, they sought the salvation of the soul instead, that is, a mental consolation... it had to appear in a religious form." After the Enlightenment, Christianity gradually changed, precisely as a result of the struggle between the bourgeoisie—representing the advanced productive forces at the time—and feudal forces. Within the framework of historical materialism, Engels provided a convincing analysis of the origin, development, and forms of religion.
Third, Engels's religious-critical thought was always accompanied by an engagement with the working class. Even before the birth of Marxism, Engels had already focused on workers as the most revolutionary proletarian group. For Engels, whose theoretical career was just beginning, the illiberal political situation within Germany was not conducive to direct political discussion; therefore, using the critique of religion to obliquely discuss reality became a commonality among the Young Hegelians [6] of that time. In 1839, the working class entered Engels’s field of vision, and thereafter remained highly regarded and consistently linked to his critique of religion. Promoting the union of the world’s proletarians to realize total liberation was not only the theoretical pursuit of Marxism but also the practical lifelong wish of both Marx and Engels. In 1847, the relationship between communism and religion was clearly expressed in Engels’s texts: "All religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of peoples; but communism is the stage of development which makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance." In 1848, when "feudal socialism," constructed by the clergy in league with feudal lords, and Christian socialism appeared to interfere with the workers' movement, Engels and Marx together exposed their reactionary essence. This "socialism" advocated using charity and prayer, asceticism and worship to oppose private property; while appearing to share a common enemy with communists, it was in essence turning back the clock of history in an attempt to protect the interests of feudal lords.
Engels's religious-critical thought played an important role in resisting erroneous trends of thought within the workers' movement. For instance, Dühring [7] called religion a "childish, primitive imagination" and argued that "all the props of religious magic must be removed, and therefore all the basic components of worship must also be removed." This advocacy for the opposition of all religion and its external manifestations seemed revolutionary, but it was very far from the truth of historical materialism. In Engels's view, religion, as the alienation of the human essence, is an expression of certain relations of production. Religion is the result of the movement of social contradictions, not the cause; as long as members of society cannot escape the state of enslavement to the means of production, religion will not disappear. Dühring’s erroneous doctrine only served to help religion extend its life cycle; many anti-church decrees implemented in history ultimately ended in failure, instead increasing religious fanaticism and the number of believers.
Concern for workers and the workers' movement continued until Engels's death. In 1894, while exploring the historical and social nature of the origin of Christianity, Engels did not forget to reflect on the issues of the workers' movement. He believed that the primitive Christians in history shared many similarities with the workers' movements rising under various "socialist" banners in the 19th century. Both were mass movements, and both were similarly situated in chaos, a lack of clear goals, and endless infighting [8]. Lacking the guidance of scientific theory, "The early Christians were just as incredibly credulous toward everything that suited their taste as were our early communist workers’ branches." It is evident that Engels's religious-critical thought always followed the direction of his early critiques, consistently and closely revolving around the protection and purification of the workers' movement.
III. Re-examining Engels's Functional Positioning of Atheism and Its Realistic Significance
Atheism is an important link in Marxism, and Engels wrote extensively on it, elucidating it from multiple perspectives. This is because Marx and Engels saw both "religion as the alienation of the human essence," as Feuerbach [9] said, and the substantialized manifestation of religion as a product of alienation: religion had already become a social force that could not be ignored in human civilization. How then can the dissolution of religion be completed in reality? Based on historical materialism, Engels identified atheism as a long-term strategy for practice and struggle.
First, how should one correctly understand Engels's statement that "atheism is a religion"? There is some controversy in academic circles regarding this, and some in society even believe it to be a defense of religion; this issue must be clarified. As Engels stated: "As for atheism merely expressing a negation, we ourselves said this as far back as 40 years ago when refuting the philosophers; but we added: atheism, as a simple negation of religion, always relates to religion; without religion, it would not exist itself, and therefore it is itself still a religion..." In Engels's view, atheism exists as the opposite of religious theism and as a negation of theism. As an ideology in opposition to theism, the two are identical in category: both are worldviews. However, the theoretical nature of Marxism is fundamentally different from the religious worldview; the two cannot be conflated. Atheism is the ideological preparation for the complete disappearance of religion and the subsequent realization of communism. It is not, as McLellan [10] suggests, that the atheism held by Engels shares with Christianity the content of "support from the oppressed masses," "promises of salvation," "opposition to the current society," and "the guarantee of final victory." Since the real world has not yet reached the final state of communism, there will always be a need for progressive atheism to counterbalance various forms of religious theism. Therefore, accurately understanding Engels's functional positioning of atheism within the context of historical materialism means recognizing that theism comes first and atheism follows; the long-term existence of theism determines the long-term existence of atheism, until the concept of the divine disappears after the realization of communism.
Second, the promotion of Marxist atheism must conform to historical materialism. As an alienated expression of man in the ideological sphere, the core of religion remains within the secular world. Engels severely criticized Dühring's radical plan to forcibly prohibit religion. Dühring had promulgated even stricter May Laws [11], opposing not only Catholicism but all religions. It is clear that attempting to eliminate religion through coercive means regardless of the stage of historical development may not only fail to achieve the goal of eliminating religion but may also produce the opposite effect. In other words, the extreme approach of dismissing all religious dogmas as nonsense and then completely prohibiting them does not clear the way for atheism and, moreover, does not conform to historical materialism. Therefore, the true mission of Marxist atheism is to construct a secular state according to the great vision of Marx and Engels, continuously deepening the degree of the state's secularization. Through practical atheism in both ideology and institutions, it gradually reaches a thorough and comprehensive secularization, thereby dissolving religion. This is of great value for guiding the building of ideology in contemporary China: on the one hand, one must actively promote Marxist atheism, and on the other hand, one must focus on realistic strategies, particularly the need to unite more people to struggle together during the construction of the state in the primary stage of socialism.
Third, atheism relying on dialectical materialism possesses the important function of resisting idealism and neo-theism. Idealism sanctifies and objectifies a certain human spirit and worships it, which is one of the important roots of the emergence and development of religion; the emergence of this situation is, in fact, also a manifestation of human alienation. Eliminating this phenomenon is the mission of Marxist atheism. When analyzing the "research" on spiritualism and pseudo-science by Wallace and Crookes [12], Engels revealed that these scientists turned toward mysticism not because of the necessity of natural philosophical theory, but out of excessive trust in observation based on experience. Such empirical observation "despises all theory and doubts all thinking" and possesses an irredeemable shallowness; due to a lack of dialectical thinking, it ultimately moves toward the opposite of science. Thus, Engels lamented that despising dialectics is sure to be punished. This provides important theoretical guidance for resisting the prevalence of contemporary superstitions, pseudo-sciences, and mystical activities associated with neo-theism.
Human history proceeds from theism to atheism, and then from atheism to communism, which thoroughly transcends religion. When humanity finally achieves complete liberation and the alienation of ideas within the mind is eliminated, atheism will have fulfilled its historical mission. Engels’s functional positioning of atheism as a dialectical link reaching toward communism is historical, clear-headed, and wise; it remains possessed of profound practical guiding significance.
Conclusion
This article contends that Engels’s thought on the critique of religion should be viewed as an organic whole rooted in historical materialism. That is, from Engels's first critique of religion in the 1839 Letters from Wuppertal [13] until the publication of On the History of Early Christianity in 1894, the entire span should be regarded as the developmental period of Engels’s atheistic thought. On the one hand, Engels’s critique of religion emerged within the history of the development of Marxism, propelled by the internal logic of Marxist theory; on the other hand, it was founded upon the premise of historical materialism, inherently containing the theoretical requirement to move from the critique to the transcendence of religion. Under this dual framework, the theoretical logic inherent in Marxism led Engels to issue the call to “excavate those spirits buried under the foundations of churches and dungeons, yet knocking beneath the hard crust of the earth, seeking rescue.” [14] As the theoretical cornerstone, historical materialism impelled Engels to propose an advanced ideology tasked with a historical burden—one that also serves as the bridge communicating between pre-communist society and communist society: atheism. It can be seen that the internal logic of the theory points the way, while the theoretical premise lays the foundation for insight into the future. The theoretical aim of Engels’s thought on the critique of religion is deeply concerned with the future destiny of humanity, history, and society; therefore, it remains a guide for addressing the problems of the current era and possesses significant theoretical and practical importance.