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 an important position. On the one hand, this is because religion is closely linked to actual society, making the critique of religion a unique and effective perspective for observing reality. As Engels said: "Politics was then a very thorny field, and so the main struggle was transformed into a religious struggle; this struggle, especially from 1840 onwards, was indirectly also 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; as a radical intellectual group, breaking the shackles of religion and celebrating human subjectivity were the primary tasks of the early Young Hegelians. Strauss and Bauer both launched fierce critiques against Christianity, while Feuerbach, grounded in anthropological materialism, reached the conclusion that God is the alienation of the human essence. Subsequently, Stirner, raising the banner of "the Ego" [1], stated bluntly, "Whether he be God or man, both weaken my feeling of uniqueness," thereby characterizing religion as a tool for oppressing humanity.
Throughout Engels's life, his discourses 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—both before his collaboration with Marx and after becoming the "second fiddle."
Regarding Engels’s religious outlook and his thought on the critique of religion, there are two research paths in academia. One merges the study of Engels and Marx, treating it as a component of Marxist atheism. The advantage of this path is that it maintains the integrity of Marxism well, but it simultaneously obscures the distinct intellectual characteristics and developmental logic of the two men. The other path involves independent study of Engels’s atheistic religious outlook; research in this area generally revolves around the theoretical origins, social background, and subsequent influence of his religious critiques, though its ultimate aim remains to clarify Engels’s contribution to Marxist atheism. Generally speaking, there are relatively few studies that treat Engels’s atheistic religious outlook as a system in its own right.
Two debates exist in the study of Engels’s religious critique. The first concerns his religious outlook, specifically how to understand his attitude toward primitive Christianity—whether Christianity was indeed a revolutionary fellow traveler of the proletariat. The view that sees them as comrades-in-arms originated in Kautsky’s The Foundations of Christianity, subsequently entering China and being accepted by some scholars. The textual basis for this lies in the "religious trilogy" [2] released by Engels in his later years. Some scholars believe that Engels’s attitude toward religion in these three works seems relatively moderate, suggesting an "inclination shift" in his later years. Other scholars argue this is a misreading of his late thought and appeal to the scientific nature of materialism, emphasizing Engels’s "position of materialistic atheism."
The second debate concerns 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, Supranaturalism, and atheism; the third defines the changes in his religious outlook through four stages—Pietism, Rationalism, Pantheism, and atheism; a fourth method also uses four stages—the period of doubting religion, the period of critiquing religious Pietism, the period of political critique, and the period of the historical materialist conception. The commonality among these methods lies in drawing 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, theoretical logic, and the evaluation of the historical function of atheism.
I. Regarding 1839 as the Beginning of Engels’s Religious Critique
When exactly did Engels’s religious critique begin? As 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 a significant 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 explicitly critiquing religion in 1839. This was marked by the anonymous publication of "Letters from Wuppertal" in March 1839 in Telegraph für Deutschland (Telegrams for Germany), an organ of the Young Germany movement. In July 1838, Engels began to come into contact with the Young Germany group and, under its influence, the 19-year-old Engels revealed in "Letters from Wuppertal" the harm caused by Christian Pietism [3] to the cities of Elberfeld and Barmen along the Wupper Valley.
Engels’s religious critique began with a profound exposure of the social tragedies caused by religion. Engels was born into a conservative Pietist family; in his hometown of Barmen, every aspect of life was influenced by religious Pietism, and any slight violation would result in an interrogation as a heretic. Religion restricted the thoughts and spirits of the people. 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, lest their souls fall into hell due to depravity. People growing up in such an environment lived in a state of long-term mental oppression; thus, the people were either intoxicated by Pietistic mysticism or by brandy. Soft spiritual oppression combined with economic hardship brought double devastation to mind and body; the dominant ideology foreclosed any possibility of spiritual or material development for the people.
Second, Engels’s religious critique contained critiques and reflections on the phenomenon of capitalist exploitation. Engels wrote extensively on the oppression of workers by religious forces. He claimed that those who treated workers the worst were the Pietists. The Pietists demanded lower wages for workers under the pretext of preventing them from drinking excessively. Capitalists at the time tried to keep workers in ignorance, because once workers were educated, the bourgeoisie would gain little benefit; in what little education remained, religion occupied the bulk of the curriculum. From a young age, people were instilled with a large amount of religious dogma and theological thought—this was not a consolation for earthly suffering, but a mask for the capitalists’ exploitation of the workers. Though Engels had not yet found the root cause of the workers' oppression and exploitation, he had begun to use the critique of religion as an entry point. On the one hand, Engels realized that once Pietism became popular in a region, it would permeate all aspects of life and ruin them; on the other hand, Engels believed that the precipice of "old obscurantism" could not stop the great torrent of the era and was bound to collapse.
Third, Engels’s religious critique in 1839 provided the intellectual preparation for his later thinking on the proletariat’s pursuit of self-emancipation. After 1839, Engels’s stance on critiquing religion became increasingly resolute, and he explicitly viewed the workers as the actual force upon which the critique of religion relied. Meanwhile, the logic of his early religious critique continued to deepen: religion would sooner or later be discarded by the era, because no matter how much religious doctrine was instilled into the workers, they would abandon faith due to economic poverty. "The sharper the antagonism between workers and capitalists becomes, 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 disguise for the bourgeoisie to extract their lifeblood; they would more easily rid themselves of bourgeois principles and ideas, gradually forming interests and principles opposed to the bourgeoisie, and gradually giving rise to a unique proletarian worldview.
It is evident that even though Engels was still a religious believer in 1839, regarding 1839 as the beginning of his religious critique is of great significance. The prerequisite for critique is familiarity with and acknowledgement of the existence of the object of critique; Engels’s early experiences with faith made his religious critique more profound. Although Engels’s 1839 investigations still appeared crude—such as attributing the suffering of the Wupper Valley people to a specific evil sect under Christianity; proceeding only from sympathy for the people’s suffering without correctly identifying the causes or proposing feasible solutions; and remaining at the level of accusations against sects and denunciations of factory owners—it cannot yet be called a scientific theory. This was merely the first step on Engels’s journey toward a theoretical critique of religion. However, the 1839 texts already contained two important elements of the communist movement: the goal of achieving dual liberation, both material and spiritual, and the working class as the subject for the actualization of Marxism. It can be said that Engels’s religious critique in 1839 was the germ of the Marxist theory of religious critique. Ignoring the 1839 origin and over-refining the historical periodization of Engels’s religious critique—particularly understanding it through a binary of pre-scientific and scientific stages—will inevitably and severely fragment and obscure the intellectual trajectory of the young Engels.
II. Engels’s Religious Critique is Coherent and Indivisible
Attempts to perform various periodizations of Engels’s religious critique face certain difficulties and problems. For example, during his Pietist period, Engels had already begun exposing the various evils of religion; one cannot simply assume that he had not yet formed a religious critique. There is also the view that Engels’s relatively moderate discourse on Christianity in his later years represented a degeneration of his religious critique. How can these issues be effectively addressed? Is a detailed intellectual periodization necessary? This article contends that Engels’s religious critique constitutes 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 in-depth theoretical critique, while his subsequent empirical analysis served to enrich historical materialism. Attempting to make a clear-cut periodization of Engels’s thought ignores both the continuity of his own thinking and the mutual influence between Marx and Engels; therefore, a clear temporal division is difficult to achieve. Forced periodization may also trigger new problems. For example, using 1845 as the dividing line between the scientific and pre-scientific worldviews of Marx and Engels may cause an opposition between the "young" and the "old." Overly detailed divisions are also academically tenuous; for instance, the classical German philosophy Marx and Engels accepted early on, particularly Hegelian philosophy, had a profound influence on the later development of Marxism and is difficult to sever through periodization. Proceeding from the consistent position held by the two men to explore the gradual deepening of their thought should be a relatively sound approach.
First, Engels was always a steadfast and profound critic of religion. If one examines Engels’s intellectual trajectory using the critique of religion as a thread, one finds that he never wavered—not only as a steadfast religious critic but also in his position of integrating the critique of religion with scientific socialism. This remained true whether in his radical early expressions or in his later opposition to overly radical proposals through the elucidation of the laws governing the emergence, development, and disappearance of religion.
After denouncing the Pietists' oppression of the lower classes, Engels sought to explore the path to breaking it. From...
Beginning in 1839, Engels continuously developed a critique centered on the oppression of human beings by religion and the realization of human liberation. Engels first confronted the internal contradictions of religious theology itself. On the one hand, religious alienation arose due to the separation of human nature from divinity; theologians ascribed everything beautiful, noble, and great in human nature to God, leaving man to wait for divine salvation within a "fragmented" humanity. In religion, man lost his own essence. The ability to grasp this point was particularly crucial in the heavily religious atmosphere of Prussia at the time. As Engels noted, only those familiar with philosophy—the other side of the German national development—could understand the full historical significance of this perfected humanity and the overcoming of religious dualism. On the other hand, the expansion of religion required people to be educated, at least enough to comprehend religious dogmas. To this end, religious dogmas and theological knowledge were designed as the primary curricula, which paradoxically rendered the educated even more ignorant and narrow-minded. This occurred because the religious interpretation of the world served the interests of the ruling order. In 1844, Engels joined forces with Marx to write 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 analyzed the living conditions of the urban working class to reveal the social structure of the time, seeking to derive communist conclusions therefrom. In 1848, he co-authored the Manifesto of the Communist Party with Marx, breaking through pure theoretical activity to integrate directly with the practice of the international workers' movement, employing thorough materialism to provide a profound and comprehensive explanation of all spheres of social life. From the moral critique of his youth, born of sympathy for the common people, to the theoretical critique of his later years, Engels followed an intellectual trajectory similar to Marx’s. As for the relatively moderate discussions of Christianity in Engels’s late works, they were by no means a defense of Christianity, but rather reflected wise and cool-headed struggle strategies proceeding from the practical realities of the workers' movement.
Reviewing the course of Engels’s religious critique, one finds that his methods included philosophical criticism, empirical research, and historical analysis. The continuity of Engels’s thought on religious critique cannot be denied simply because of shifts in research methods or perspectives.
Second, Engels’s religious critique developed in tandem with his historical materialism. From the very beginning, his critique of religion was never divorced from factors such as history, society, and class. Whether it was the moral accusations arising from sympathy for workers in his early years or the historical studies of religion in his later years, the developmental direction of his religious critique was identical to that of historical materialism; moreover, the two manifested 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 ideas, 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 instance, the preface to the Principia [4] firmly declared that natural philosophy was the most appropriate weapon for dealing with the godless rabble. Engels’s work always centered on exposing how religion uses the illusion of rationality to conceal 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 of material production and the life-relations formed on that basis. This powerfully struck against the theological doctrine, prevalent since Augustine, of explaining the world through Reason. By the time of Engels’s later research into the origins and development of Christianity, the theoretical maturity of historical materialism was fully displayed.
Engels’s research into 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 a religion based on the historical conditions under which it arose and attained dominance. He sought the roots of religious development in socio-economic contradictions. Representative religious movements in both the East and West were caused by economic factors, and the differences between the two also stemmed from the different productive forces and social environments of the East and West. Christianity was a veil for the lower classes' assault on the economic system, while Islam provided the theoretical source for the poor nomadic peoples to launch attacks on the wealthy citizens. "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 vast 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 a salvation of the soul to replace it, that is, ideological consolation... it had to appear in a religious form." After the Enlightenment, Christianity gradually underwent changes, precisely as a result of the struggle between the bourgeoisie—representing advanced productive forces—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 critique was always accompanied by a focus on the worker collective. Before the birth of Marxism, Engels had already turned his attention to workers as the most revolutionary proletarian group. For Engels at the start of his theoretical career, the illiberal political situation within Germany was not conducive to direct political discussion. Therefore, using the critique of religion to speak covertly about reality became a commonality among the Young Hegelians [5].
In 1839, the worker collective entered Engels’s field of vision and remained a high priority thereafter, always linked to his religious critique. Promoting the union of the world’s proletarians to achieve total liberation was not only a theoretical pursuit of Marxism but also the practical aspiration 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 nations or groups of nations; 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 nature. This "socialism" advocated using charity and prayer, asceticism and church life to oppose private property. While it seemed to share a common enemy with communists, it was in essence an attempt to turn back the clock of history and protect the interests of feudal lords.
Engels’s religious critique played an important role in resisting erroneous trends of thought within the workers' movement. For instance, Dühring [6] called religion "infantile, primitive imagination" and argued that "all the props of religious magic, and therefore all the basic components of worship, must be removed." This proposition of opposing all religion and its outward manifestations appeared revolutionary but 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, not the cause, of the movement of social contradictions. 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. Historically, many anti-church decrees 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 essence of the emergence of Christianity, Engels did not forget to reflect on the issues of the workers' movement. He believed that the original Christians of history shared many similarities with the workers' movements rising in the 19th century under various "socialist" banners. Both were mass movements, and both were equally in a state of confusion, lack of goals, and endless internal strife [7]. Due to a lack of guidance from scientific theory, "The original Christians were just as incredibly credulous toward everything that suited their taste as were our original communist workers' sections." It is evident that Engels’s religious critique always followed the direction of his early critiques, consistently and tightly centered on protecting and purifying the workers' movement.
III. Re-examining Engels's Functional Positioning of Atheism and its Practical Significance
Atheism is an important link in Marxism, and Engels wrote extensively on it, elucidating it from multiple perspectives. The reason was that Marx and Engels saw both what Feuerbach called "religion as the alienation of the human essence" and the substantialized manifestation of religion as a product of alienation: religion had become a social force in human civilization that could not be ignored. How then to complete the dissolution of religion in reality? Based on historical materialism, Engels identified atheism as a long-term strategy of practice and struggle.
First, how should we 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 is a defense of religion; this issue must be clarified. As Engels stated: "As for atheism, it only expresses a negation... this we ourselves already said forty years ago when refuting the philosophers; but we added: atheism, as a simple negation of religion, always refers back to religion; without religion, it itself would not exist, and therefore it is itself still a religion..." in Engels’s view, atheism exists as the opposite of religious theism and is the 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 ultimate disappearance of religion and the realization of communism. It is not, as McLellan [8] suggested, that Engels’s atheism and Christianity shared content such as "support of the oppressed," "promises of salvation," "opposition to current society," and "guarantees 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 serve as a check on various religious theisms. Therefore, one must accurately understand Engels’s functional positioning of atheism within the context of historical materialism: first comes theism, then comes atheism. The long-term existence of theism determines the long-term existence of atheism until the concept of divinity disappears after the realization of communism.
Second, the promotion of Marxist atheism must conform to historical materialism. As a manifestation of human alienation 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 enacted even harsher May Laws [9], opposing not only Catholicism but all religions. It is evident that attempting to eliminate religion through coercive means, regardless of the stage of historical development, may not only fail to achieve the desire to eliminate religion but may also have the opposite effect. In other words, the extreme approach of dismissing all religious dogmas as nonsense and then completely prohibiting them is not clearing the way for atheism, nor does it conform to historical materialism. Therefore, the true mission of Marxist atheism is to build a secular state according to the great vision of Marx and Engels, continuously deepening the secularization of the state, and gradually reaching thorough and comprehensive secularization through practical atheism in both ideology and institutions, thereby dissolving religion. This is of great value for guiding ideological construction in contemporary China. On the one hand, it is necessary to actively promote Marxist atheism; on the other hand, attention must be paid to realistic strategies, particularly the need to unite more people to strive together during the state-building process of the primary stage of socialism.
Third, atheism based on materialist dialectics possesses the important function of resisting idealism and neo-theism. Idealism sanctifies and objectifies a certain spirit of man and worships it, which is one of the important roots for the emergence and development of religion. The occurrence of this situation is, in fact, also one of the manifestations of human alienation; eliminating this phenomenon is the mission of Marxist atheism. When analyzing the "research" of Alfred Russel Wallace and William Crookes into spiritualism and pseudo-science, Engels revealed that the reason these scientists moved toward mysticism was not out of a necessity of natural philosophical theory, but rather an excessive reliance on empirical observation. Such empirical observation "despises all theory and distrusts all thinking" and possesses an irredeemable shallowness. Due to a lack of dialectical thinking, it ultimately moves to 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, mysticism, and other "neo-theistic" activities that emerge in endless succession.
Human history proceeds from theism to atheism, and then from atheism to communism, which thoroughly transcends religion. When humanity finally achieves complete emancipation 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 in the attainment of communism is historical, sober, and sagacious; it remains of great practical significance for providing guidance today.
Conclusion
This article maintains that Engels’s thought on the critique of religion should be regarded as an organic whole rooted in historical materialism. That is, the period from Engels's first critique of religion in his 1839 "Letters from Wuppertal" until the publication of "On the History of Early Christianity" in 1894 should be viewed as the developmental phase of Engels's atheistic thought. On one hand, Engels’s critique of religion emerged within the history of the development of Marxism, driven by the internal logic of Marxist theory; on the other hand, it was grounded in the premises of historical materialism, inherently containing the theoretical requirement to move from the critique of religion to its transcendence. Under this dual framework, the theoretical logic inherent in Marxism led Engels to issue the call to "dig up those spirits buried under the foundations of churches and dungeons, but which are knocking under the hard crust of the earth and seeking salvation" [10]. As a theoretical cornerstone, historical materialism impelled Engels to propose an advanced ideology tasked with a heavy historical responsibility—and which also serves as a bridge between pre-communist society and communist society—namely, atheism. As we can see, the internal logic of the theory pointed the way, while the theoretical premises established the foundation for insight into the future. The theoretical orientation of Engels’s critique of religion is deeply concerned with the future destiny of humanity, history, and society; therefore, it remains a guide for dealing with the problems of the current era and possesses significant theoretical and practical importance.