Why Marxism Criticises Religion

Most USA citizens, and many other people around the globe, perceive socialism as inherently atheistic or irreligious, and even antireligious; the more educated ones will inform you that socialism arose from a deeply Christian foundation, expounding on moral philosophies and reaching a sociopolitical structure with economological foundations. Attention is then shifter to modern communism, which is more viciously criticised for being (supposedly) immoral, intolerant, and authoritarian.

Whereas these are certainly true of the Stalinistic and Maostic trends of communism and these two men should be recalled as examples of oppressive, totalitarian rulers, the association of these states with somewhat earlier political notions is in sharp contrast to reality...

Marx is well known for saying that religion is the opium of the people; the same phrase can be traced back to Sade in his play L'Histoire de Juliette, where she is placed by the author telling King Ferdinand:

Though nature lavishes much upon your people, their circumstances are strait. But this is not the effect of their laziness; this general paralysis has its source in your policy which, from maintaining the people in dependence, shuts them out from wealth; their ills are thus rendered beyond remedy, and the political state is in a situation no less grave than the civil government, since it must seek its strength in its very weakness. Your apprehension, Ferdinand, lest someone discover the things I have been telling you leads you to exile arts and talents from your realm. You fear the powerful eye of genius, that is why you encourage ignorance. Tis opium you feed your people, so that, drugged, they do not feel their hurts, inflicted by you. And that is why where you reign no establishments are to be found giving great men to the homeland; the rewards due knowledge are unknown here, and as there is neither honor nor profit in being wise, nobody seeks after wisdom.

I have studied your civil laws, they are good, but poorly enforced, and as a result they sink into ever further decay. And the consequences thereof? A man prefers to live amidst their corruption rather than plead for their reform, because he fears, and with reason, that this reform will engender infinitely more abuses than it will do away with; things are left as they are. Nevertheless, everything goes askew and awry and as a career in government has no more attractions than one in the arts, nobody involves himself in public affairs; and for all this compensation is offered in the form of luxury, of frivolity, of entertainments. So it is that among you a taste for trivial things replaces a taste for great ones, that the time which ought to be devoted to the latter is frittered away on futilities, and that you will be subjegated sooner or later and again and again by any foe who bothers to make the effort.

In this excerpt, it becomes evident that Juliette is criticising strangling the people's inquisitive nature, killing genius in its cot before it can make the effort to upset the fragile balance of a decadent state, with no desire for higher aspirations - and judges that whoever foe makes the effort will lay waste to it most easily. Juliette has been called the embodiment of the philosophy of enligtenment.

On the other hand, Aldus Huxley, the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, who called himself "Darwin's Bulldog" and coined the term "agnostic," has written in the Brave New World Revisited that soma (an opiate-like drug) is the religion of the people, in sharp relation to what Marx said.

I feel I have to expound on this, as people often miss the point Marx meant to make - in his almost poetic literary style, his statement can be left out of its original context, under a new context that is nothing other than a quote mine, commonly as part of an agenda and completely misrepresenting his claim:

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—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. [Emphasis added]

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.

The first paragraph presents us with the religious person: a human who's found self-consciousness and self-esteem in the face of religion, either having not found his own self-worth and importance, or having lost them at some point and submitting to a herd mentality that allows that person some small solace in its numbers.

It's these same numbers that allow a person to feel good, for humanity demands some sort of society in the end that defines oneself by contrast and complement alike. In that sense, religion is a form of circular foundation, a product of a society that has not reached a point where humanity at large has a purpose; lacking this guiding anima, humanity, in its darkest hour, demands for consolation, and thus gives rise to a worldview that in turn introduces special, spiritual notions and explanations based on the needs of the populace, enthusing them and justifying everything.

Religion is thus not criticised for wronging people, but for being the result of a society that is still struggling to find its aspiration; much like opium, religion dulls the pain and anguish of those who partake of it - at the cost of great hurt in the long run. In this inquiry for humanity's true happiness that can only ever be reached when people find each their own goals and purpose, religion is the great last inhibitor, claiming that they are the only ones who have a grasp of reality, and the criticism laid against it was, back then, was not fully realised.

As George Bernard Shaw said:

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

This article is based on data from the corresponding article on Wikipedia.