TERRY REY
OVERVIEW
“Religion is … the opium of the people.” Few things ever written on the topic have received as much attention or sparked as much controversy as this epic metaphor from Karl Marx, crafted in 1843. Many interpret the intended meaning of this phrase to be that human beings are suffering creatures in need of anesthesia and that religion’s raison d’être is to fill that need. That is all true, but Marx in fact saw much more in religion than this. Even as he argued that human suffering is essentially what religion reflects, he also held that it is precisely what religion protests. Human suffering, meanwhile, is multiform and multilayered, Marx argued. It is sometimes subtle and sometimes acute, but always rooted in forms of alienation that are caused by unjust and literally dehumanizing economic forces. Instead of opium, Marx prescribed communism, and we know too well how that turned out. Yet despite the demise of communist regimes throughout the world, which has led many to question the worth of Marxist thought today, Marx’s critiques of what is wrong with the world remain as compelling as when he first wrote them about a century and a half ago, be it his critique of religion, capitalism, or the state.
Although later in is his prolific career he seldom returned to the topic of religion, Marx did say a good bit more about it, rather pithily, in the very essay in which his famous opium reference appears. That essay, “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” is among the most influential of Marx’s early writings, a collection of papers treating a range of subjects that he penned circa 1843 and 1844. In these texts we see Marx laying the foundation for his social philosophy at large, as here, in addition and related to his critique of religion, the young philosopher began to develop his theory of alienation, which is key to understanding his “relentless … hostility to religious beliefs, practices, and institutions.”1 This chapter examines the philosophical underpinnings of this hostility, and moves toward mapping out the contours and content of Marx’s thinking about religion and how it relates to his larger intellectual project. It concludes with a brief suggestion about the relevance of Marx’s sociology of religion for our own time.
TURNING HEGEL ON HIS HEAD THROUGH A STREAM OF FIRE
Marx was born in the German Rhineland two years after the 1816 anti-Jewish laws drove his father to convert to Protestant Christianity in order to continue his legal practice there. Thus, although several prominent German rabbis were among Marx’s ancestors and relatives, he was raised Protestant, albeit marginally, in a predominately Catholic region, and as an adolescent the future champion of atheism did display a marked poetic and spiritual temperament. By the time he had completed his undergraduate studies in law and begun working toward his doctorate in philosophy, however, the spirituality of that temperament had been burned away by his reading of Ludwig Feuerbach’s great atheistic treatise The Essence of Christianity, which first appeared in 1841. The name Feuerbach literally means “fire stream” in German, a metaphoric opportunity that was not lost on the erstwhile poet Marx, who wrote that “there is no other road for you to truth and freedom except that leading through the stream of fire, Feuerbach is the purgatory of the present time.”2 Truth about what? Freedom from and through what? A purging of what? These are questions that Marx spent the better part of his life seeking to answer.
Although deeply compelled by the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel and its explication of the dialectical cadence of history’s unfolding, like Feuerbach before him, Marx was convinced that philosophy needed to be freed from the idealism of Hegel’s ambitious and influential system of thought and purged of its underlying assumption that history is essentially some grandiose divine project. Identified by the term “dialectical idealism,” Hegel’s highly complex and far-reaching philosophical system is predicated upon the notion that history progresses dialectically in a triadic formula wherein truths meet contradictions and consequently surer truths emerge. Or, in Hegel’s own terms, thesis meets its antithesis and a synthesis results.3 Moving this entire historical dialectic is God (Geist, literally “Spirit” or “Mind”), who is ever moving toward self-realization in humanity’s ongoing quest for higher truth. In this inherently theistic scheme of things, it is especially philosophy and religion—or, more precisely, the philosophy of religion—that leads the way toward God’s ultimate self-realization, which is the absolute meaning and purpose of human existence. And, for Hegel, this self-realization was nearing its culmination with the emergence of Christianity as the world’s dominant religion.
Four years after Hegel’s death in 1831, the publication of David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus4 heralded the arrival of the school of philosophy in which Marx would take his own place, the Young Hegelians, which was inspired in part by Marx’s mentor and friend Bruno Bauer. In the first of a series of influential treatises that used Hegel’s dialectic to critique religion itself, and hence liberate the dialectic from its illusory idealism, Strauss argued both that there was nothing at all supernatural about the Gospels or Jesus’s ministry and that the absolutism of Christianity in Hegel’s philosophical system was fallacious and absurd because the infinite could not logically incarnate in the finite.
From Strauss, the Young Hegelian’s atheistic torch was passed to Feuerbach, who asserted that Hegel’s Geist is nothing more than a human product and thus God does not exist independent of human thought and desire. As such, theology amounts merely to anthropology, in the sense that humanity’s most cherished values (for example, love, wisdom, righteousness, power, majesty, and so on) are infinitized and projected onto a mythic notion called God, which in turn legitimates the embodiment and pursuit of those vaules.5 Feuerbach therefore concluded that “man has in fact no other aim than himself.”6 These words would have a resounding influence on Marx, who reflected them in his own stated conviction that “the more man puts into God the less he retains in himself.”7
Thus fueled by Feuerbach, Marx ventured to turn Hegel on his head by cracking “the mystical shell” in Hegel to get at the “rational kernel,” the dialectic, which Marx esteemed to be “the outstanding achievement of Hegel’s phenomenology and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle … that Hegel conceives the self creation of the human being as a process.”8 David McLellan describes this feature of Hegel’s dialectic that so compelled Marx, that each “successive stage [of human progress] retains elements of the previous stage at the same time as it goes beyond them”: “Hegel also talked of ‘the power of the negative,’ thinking that there was always a tension between any present state of affairs and what it was becoming. For any present state of affairs was in the process of being negated, changed into something else. This process was what Hegel meant by dialectic.”9
With Hegel’s idealism thus banished, Marx grounded this dialectic in the material social processes of human history. This history is defined by class struggle and by fluctuating periods of stability and instability, a progression fueled by the forces of human productivity and by economics. In this way, Marx departs from Hegel and moves ahead in forging his dialectical materialism, which in time would prove to be one of the most concretely influential developments in the history of human thought.
Meanwhile, though indebted to Feuerbach in his criticism of Hegel, Marx also criticized Feuerbach’s materialism for being ahistorical and missing the practical dimension of human existence, that human beings are defined not by their thought but by their physical, “sensuous” action, their practice, the essence of which for Marx is labor:
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectivity.… Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity.… Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary,” of “practical-critical” activity.10
And this is a serious problem for Marx, because, as he writes a few lines later in one of his most famous statements, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it.”
Although in Feuerbach “the criticism of religion is essentially complete,”11 the criticism of the cause of religion remained unarticulated. This was the deeper problem that perplexed Marx, one that Feuerbach failed to address: the suffering that causes people to turn to religion in the first place. “Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the ‘religious sentiment’ is itself a social product.”12 More specifically, for Marx, our “religious sentiment” is the product of alienating social forces. In the rapidly industrializing, urbanizing world in which Marx lived and wrote, capitalism had spawned the latest version of the class struggle that he viewed as constant across human history: the proletariat (working class) versus the bourgeoisie (managerial class). Three principle forms of alienation result from this: (1) humans are alienated from the product of their labor (they do not control what they produce); (2) humans are alienated from one another, laboring in competition rather than communally; and (3) humans are alienated from their very essence, or “species-being,” as Marx terms it—that which distinguishes humans from all other species—which is our capacity to freely and communally labor to make and transform our world and life itself. Religion serves to mask all of these forms of alienation, and as such it contributes to their reproduction. And whereas other Young Hegelians were hopeful that Feuerbach’s putative demonstration of the human creation of God would lead to our liberation from religion, Marx was of the mind that religion would only go away once its causes were eradicated: human suffering and alienation. Let us now take a closer look now at Marx’s early writings on religion and how they relate to his philosophy of human existence at large.
RELIGION AND HUMAN SUFFERING IN MARX’S EARLY WRITINGS
For the better part of the 160-odd years that have passed since Marx penned his foundational manuscripts of the early and mid-1840s, social-scientific debate about religion has been predominated by three fundamental points of general consensus, which themselves of course take various forms in a wide range of analyses. As summarized by Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, they are: (1) “that religion is false and harmful”; (2) “that religion is doomed”; and (3) “that religion is an epiphenomenon.”13 Marx clearly held each of these positions quite firmly, and his critique of religion is commonly portrayed in light especially of the first of these. In its legitimation of the division of labor and the radical inequalities in wealth distribution that characterize the capitalistic world, Marx certainly found religion to be harmful. He saw this function of religion to be nothing new with the emergence of capitalism, moreover:
The social principles of Christianity justified slavery in antiquity, glorified medieval serfdom, and, when necessary, also know how to defend the oppression of the proletariat, although they may do this with a pious face. The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and for the latter they have only the pious wish that the former will be benevolent.… The social principles of Christianity declare all vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either just punishment for original sin and other sins, or suffering that the Lord in his infinite wisdom has destined for those to be redeemed.14
As such, religion as an opiate has two chief functions: (1) to anesthetize us to our suffering; and (2) to dupe us into understanding this suffering to be part of a divine plan or cosmic law (for example, the will of God or karma), rather than the product of material historical forces that it really is. This, for Marx, is the crux of the matter, and this indeed is the main message about religion that most readers take from him. But surrounding Marx’s assertion that religion “is the opium of the people” are other intriguing ideas that receive neither further development in his work nor anything near the same degree of attention among his interpreters. Let us consider here more fully this extraordinary passage:
Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man.… Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of a soulless condition. It is the opium of the people.15
The allusion to Feuerbach is clear in the claim that human beings make religion, yet Marx is also implying here the core of his humanistic philosophy: that human beings by nature are—or at least they should be—the producers of themselves and their own world, that is, their species- being. Furthermore, in claiming religion to be “the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself or has already lost himself again,” Marx means that religion is symptomatic of our alienation from our species-being. This alienation is the root cause of the suffering that makes people turn to religion to begin with. Thus while our opium to some degree alleviates our suffering in this “heartless world,” it also misplaces our focus onto God instead of humanity, thereby further alienating us from what we as a species should be.
Often overlooked in Marx’s famous critique of religion is the notion that religion is not only “the expression of real sufferings” but also “the protest against real suffering.” But Marx never bothers explicating what precisely he means by the word “protest” here; it would seem that he was of the mind that religion had virtually nothing to offer in the way of “revolutionary praxis,” or any practical means that could help change the world. Like several important Marxist thinkers after him, Marx’s close friend and frequent coauthor Friedrich Engels deviated from Marx in this regard, writing at some length of the function of religion in challenging the social order in Central European history,16 ideas that are echoed by the twentieth-century German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch.17 In a similar vein, the great Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci saw some revolutionary potential in popular religion,18 while the Polish-born German Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg called for an alliance between socialism and the church.19
Such an alliance has nowhere witnessed a greater concrete realization than in Latin America, where in the 1970s and 1980s liberation theology inspired the church to give a “preferential option to the poor.” In the United States, furthermore, religion clearly played a central role in the Civil Rights Movement and forever changed the world’s most powerful and wealthiest nation, and for the better at that. In a careful and sustained reading of Marx, John Raines—who himself was jailed in Little Rock during the movement for his pastoral work toward racial justice—goes so far as to claim that “for Marx the essence of religion is its voicing of ‘suffering’—its crying out against the realities of exploitation and degradation.”20 As such, shouldn’t those who wish to change the world turn to religion as a serviceable resource rather than seek to abolish it as a form of alienation? Perhaps by the “abolition of religion,”21 in effect, Marx meant something else?
MARX, RELIGION, AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF HEARTLESSNESS
In Marx’s claim that religion is both “expression of” and “protest against” suffering, we see at work the dialectic that runs through his entire philosophy. As Andrew McKinnon helpfully explains, it is important to be mindful of the historical (and future) implications of Marx’s dialectical mode of thought, for in this light we can come to see that when Marx speaks of the “abolition” of religion he means something more like “transcendence.” “For Marx, the criticism of religion, although essentially finished, is not an end in itself, but rather a means. Marx’s concern is to take the latest developments of Hegelian philosophy, and turn them into praxis-oriented critique of the social world, one rooted in the ‘categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being.’ ”22
This is not to suggest that Marx held out any hope for religion, for he seemingly believed that it would eventually die a slow death of desuetude as humanity progressed toward emancipation in the realization of our species-being. Like so many subsequent sociologists of religion who once subscribed to the secularization thesis, he was wrong about that, even though his own vision of religion’s eventual disappearance was more sophisticated than most in terms of his broader vision that all forms of alienation, religion being chief among them, would disappear once human emancipation is achieved. Timelessly, and therefore more importantly, what Marx’s critique of religion does suggest is that we must bring to the study of religion today an “attentiveness not only to heart and spirit, but also to the concrete heartless and spiritless situation in which heart and spirit are expressed. Religion … points beyond them to other possibilities.”23 In his broader vision of religion’s eventual demise, Marx conceived of such possibilities as bringing to humanity “heaven on earth.”24
With nearly half of the total global human population today subsisting on less than $2.50 a day and more than twenty thousand children dying daily as a result of poverty, heaven seems as far away from earth as ever. New and increasingly widespread and globalizing forms of heartlessness and soullessness embattle and embitter our species, with far too many people living unfree, alienated, and malnourished lives. Marx’s philosophy helps us understand both how we got to this point and how we might transcend it. It also suggests that we should pay careful attention to the social and economic forces behind the global resurgence of religion in our age, just as we should listen attentively to Marx’s ever-trenchant critique of the dehumanizing market forces of global capitalism.
NOTES
1. Delos B. McKown, The Classical Marxist Critiques of Religion: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Kautsky (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 10. The term “relentless” may be challenged here: McKown offers ample evidence of a sustained hostility toward religion in Marx’s writing, though in his personal life, according to his daughter Eleanor, Marx was known to frequently say, “Despite everything, we can forgive Christianity much, for it has taught us to love children.” Samuel K. Padover, “Introduction: Marx’s Religious Views,” in The Karl Marx Library, vol. 5, On Religion, ed. Samuel K. Padover (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), ix–xxvii, xxvii.
2. Karl Marx, Early Texts, trans. and ed. David McLellan (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972), 25, italics in original.
3. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
4. David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus: Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2008).
5. For this reason, Feuerbach’s philosophy of religion is commonly referred to as “projection theory.”
6. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans (London: Trubner, 1881).
7. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1982), 108.
8. Marx, Early Texts, 164.
9. David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 29.
10. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Vintage, 1975), 421–22.
11. Ibid., 243.
12. Ibid., 423.
13. Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Exploring the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 28–29.
14. Karl Marx, “Social Principles of Christianity,” in Marx on Religion, ed. John C. Raines (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 184–85, 186.
15. Marx, Early Writings, 244.
16. Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (Moscow: Progress, 1959).
17. Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom, trans. J. T. Swann (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
18. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978). See also Dwight B. Billings, “Religion as Opposition: A Gramscian Analysis,” American Journal of Sociology 96, no. 1 (1990): 1–31.
19. Rosa Luxembourg, Socialism and the Churches, trans. Juan Punto (Colombo, Ceylon: Young Socialist Publication, 1964).
20. John Raines, “Introduction,” in Marx, Marx on Religion, 1–14, 8.
21. Marx, Early Writings, 244.
22. Andrew McKinnon, “Opium as Dialectics of Religion: Metaphor, Expression and Protest,” in Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice, ed. Warren S. Goldstein (Boston: Brill, 2006), 21.
23. Ibid., 29.
24. Marx, Early Texts, 64.