Marx Goes to Church

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MARX GOES TO CHURCH

By Thomas Riggins, PA contributing editor

Historically, Marxism has been perceived to be inexorably hostile to religion and especially to Christianity (since Marxism grew up in the Christian West). Nowadays most non-Marxists think Marxism is hostile to all religions and looks down on those who have religious beliefs. There are others today who think Marxism has become more mellow and is either neutral about religion or even somewhat encouraging in its attitudes towards some religious opinions. I hope to show that a contemporary Marxist position will incorporate some of both these perceptions.

The basic Marxist position was first enunciated by Marx as long ago as 1843 in his introduction to a “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.” This work contains the famous “opium of the people” remark. More pithy than Lenin’s “Religion is a sort of spiritual booze”, which I am sure it inspired.

What did Marx mean by calling religion an opiate? Being a materialist, Marx of course holds to the view that religion is ultimately man made and not something supermaterial or supernatural in origin. “Man makes religion,” he says.

Man, or better, humanity is not, according to Marx, some abstract entity, as he says, “encamped outside the world.” In the world of the early nineteenth century the masses of people lived in horrendous societal conditions of poverty and alienation and lived lives of hopeless misery. This was also true of Lenin’s time, as well as of our own for billions of people in the underdeveloped world as well as millions in the so called advanced countries.

The social conditions are reflected in the human brain (“consciousness”) and humans living in such conditions construct their lives according to these reflections (ideas). These social conditions and ideas give rise to forms of culture, political states, and ideas about the nature of reality and the meaning of it. Marx says, “Religion is the general theory of that world... its universal source of consolation and justification.”

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/2711/1/148/