There is a lot of confusion and nonsense about the relationship between Marxism and religion. In recent years, some have tried to suggest that Karl Marx saw a positive role for religion in a revolutionary movement. He did not. But neither did he want to focus on religion as the main target. Nor did he deny the possibility that religious people could play a positive role in the movement. But in no way did Marx think religion was a good thing for the proletariat.
That said, he did not endorse a culture war against religion. He knew from his own experience that there was no point alienating workers from communist ideas by making their faith an issue. That could be addressed later on. But as workers were exposed to the underlying theory of Marxism, they would have discovered that dialectical materialism and religion do not mix. Despite the best efforts of some neo-Marxists to achieve that combination today.
Only sophistry can combine Marxism and religion
Those who try to reconcile Marxism and religion engage in some rather questionable sophistry. They take the first part of Marx’s critique of religion that belief in a supernatural realm governed by a creator and the hope of life after death is a direct result of the oppression and exploitation experienced by millions of people.
Then they latch on to the second part of his argument that lacking any other explanation for their suffering, they turn to religion for solace and comfort. Then the pro-religionists stop and attempt to contort this into an argument that Marx endorsed religion as a healing balm for the masses. He did no such thing.
Because the conclusion drawn by Marx – and nearly all Marxists since – is that while individual priests, rabbis, and preachers may stand alongside the working class, the institution of the church and its power is yet another weapon in the armoury of the ruling class. The role of religion in a time of class upheaval is to spread a gospel of peace and unity intended to blunt, not sharpen, the revolutionary impulse. When that fails, the church preaches divine retribution and threatens excommunication.
Misuse of a quote by Marx
Everybody knows the quote by Marx that religion is the opium of the people. Those who want to try and prove that Marx was soft on religion then point to the next phrase, “the sigh of the oppressed” to suggest that Marx was sympathetic to religious belief. What this proves is the poet Alexander Pope’s pithy observation that a little learning is a dangerous thing. Because if you bothered to dig up the original text, Marx goes on to say:
“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.”
There is no suggestion that workers should continue to be religious. Quite the contrary, in the same article, Marx repeats the view of all Enlightenment philosophers that criticism of religion is the essential starting point for all human thought and progress: “the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.”
So please let’s never hear that feeble misuse of Marx’s quote ever again.
Religion – not a benevolent force
Now some ‘neo-Marxists’ have seized on Marx’s rather poetic language in relation to religion, especially when he talks about communism realising the paradise advocated by religion but in material, earthbound form. They twist this to suggest that Marx viewed religion as a benevolent force in society – which is stretching a point to put it mildly.
These neo-Marxists argue that religion can act in two ways – as a tool against revolution but also as a means of inspiring a movement for change. They give the example of religious leaders who have led radical movements throughout history and invoke passages in the bible to imply that Christianity has an underlying revolutionary message.
But bible scholars have long shot this down. Christ and his followers – and the wider Roman world – had no conception of a society without class relations. During the pagan festival of Saturnalia, Romans reversed the master/slave relationship but they didn’t abolish it. Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher whose message was framed in entirely non-materialist terms – bringing heavenly rule to earth and avenging those who had tormented his followers. Nothing about abolishing private property or slave ownership.
In the Marxist view, salvation is to be achieved here on Earth and not after death. Life is not lived to gain access to heaven but to pull heaven down to Earth – and experience it while we’re still living and breathing.
Difference with New Atheism
There is a fundamental difference between Marxists and the New Atheists who came to the fore in the early 2000s – especially after the 9/11 attack in New York, which was followed by a wave of revulsion against theocratic based terrorism. The two leading voices New Atheism were the scientist Richard Dawkins and the author Christopher Hitchens.
They eviscerated religion in their books, warning that society was in danger of slipping back into a pre-Enlightenment world where blasphemy laws would be reintroduced and scientific teaching undermined. But there was a problem with their analysis. In their desire to condemn theocracy, they blamed religion as the cause of the world’s problems – and not class. In addition, they promoted the cure as western liberalism and in the case of Hitchens, cheered on western intervention in the Middle East to roll back the rise of jihadi and fundamentalist variants of Islam.
Dawkins was never a Marxist, claiming that those who reject religion and embrace scientists are “Brights” while those who do the opposite are “Dims”. Hitchens did have a relationship with Marxism – admiring Trotsky but not Stalin – but his New Atheism meant he veered towards a philosophically idealist position. He committed the sin, in Marxist eyes, of placing ideas above material reality.
In other words, he attributed the world’s problems to religious ideas and not the class relations that underpin them. To a Marxist, religion is part of the superstructure sitting on the capitalist base. To Hitchens, religion had become the base.
He also failed to make a clear distinction between Islam as a religion and Islamism as an ideology – consciously developed to divert the Muslim masses from communism and socialism into support for an Islamist theocracy. By attacking all Muslims as superstitious fools, he drove them into the hands of the class enemy.
Sadly, as Hitchens has now departed us, video clips of him attacking Islam as a religion are now circulated by far right social media accounts. One would like to think that Hitchens would have been dismayed by this. But it shows that by making religion the underlying issue, his outpourings have become weapons for racists and bigots.
Let me give you a quote from Marx at this point from a dispute he had with a former ally Bruno Bauer. The latter adopted a very dogmatic line making religion the main enemy to the point where he opposed the emancipation of Jewish people by the Prussian state – something Marx criticised with the following words which could easily apply to the New Atheists:
“We no longer regard religion as the cause, but only as the manifestation of secular narrowness. Therefore, we explain the religious limitations of the free citizen by their secular limitations. We do not assert that they must overcome their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular restrictions, we assert that they will overcome their religious narrowness once they get rid of their secular restrictions. We do not turn secular questions into theological ones. We turn theological questions into secular ones… The question of the relation of political emancipation to religion becomes for us the question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation.”
Basically, religion will wither away – like the state and the whole ideological superstructure of capitalism – once the capitalist system is destroyed. But that does not mean criticism of religion is postponed until after the revolution. Those neo-Marxists who seem to believe that today have departed from Marxism.
FIND OUT MORE: Marxism and Islamism – do they mix?
How Marxist groups tackle religion internally
Having been a member of a Marxist group in the 1980s, I understand the approach to religion from a tactical point of view. It is a subject that Marxists, like polite dinner party guests, tend to avoid. At least, it’s pushed aside when a religious worker is being recruited to Marxism.
A good example of this is the situation in Northern Ireland where sectarian politics has long divided working class people along religious lines. Now, some ultra-left groups have been sucked into this, adopting a pro-Republican (Roman Catholic) position thereby alienating Protestant workers.
But an orthodox Marxist position would be to cut across the religious divide by focussing away from it to class-based issues – bread-and-butter, “transitional” questions that question the ability of capitalism to deliver decent living standards. At the same time, showing how religion has been used to divide and rule and the opportunist nature of the politicians who stoke sectarianism.
However, once a worker becomes a comrade within a Marxist party, the question of religion is not avoided. In the course of explaining Marxist dialectics and materialist philosophy, there is a necessary rejection of religion and the role of God and his representatives on Earth. This is the tactical approach intended to avoid alienating workers or placing a Marxist group on one side of a religious argument within a working-class community.
Because the New Atheist believes that religion is the principal reason for the world’s ills – and not class – this tactical approach would seem like a cop out. But to a Marxist it makes complete sense. Therefore, Marxists differ philosophically, strategically, and tactically from New Atheists.
Marxism and Islamism
I’ve written about this in more depth elsewhere on the blog and there are links above. But since the early 1990s, some ultra-left sects have come to believe – largely out of desperation – that Marxism can forge some kind of alliance with Islamism. What they choose to ignore or forget is that Islamism – an ideology forged largely over the last century – was created explicitly as a barrier to communism. It is fundamentally opposed to secularism, human rights, and the emancipation of the proletariat.
From his earliest writings, Marx made it abundantly clear that religion should have no role in the state. The cornerstone of Islamism is that the state should be directed by their version of Sunni Muslim theology – which is not necessarily the majority view of most Sunni Muslims and certainly not Shia Muslims. See what happened in ISIS-controlled Syria and Iraq in the 2010s and how events will play out in post-Assad Syria.
Marx wrote the following in 1842, which should make matters clear on the mixing of church and state:
“Once you introduce religion into politics, it is intolerable, indeed irreligious, arrogance to want to determine secularly how religion has to act in political matters. He who wants to ally himself with religion owing to religious feelings must concede it the decisive voice in all questions, or do you perhaps understand by religion the cult of your own unlimited authority and governmental wisdom?”
Categories: Philosophy
Marxism Explained 
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