Philosopher’s View on Religion

Karl Marx
“Religion as Oppression”
PHI 100
PREPARED BY: RONNEL JOHN M. ROMAGOS

Foundation University
 PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences, and Spirituality
2

Religion as Oppression
Karl Marx
(1818-1883)
Karl Marx 3
(1818-1883)
Religion as Oppression

PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences, and Spirituality

 Scope:
 Of all the thinkers and authors whose theories we will consider in this topic, none
was more obstinately hostile toward religion than Karl Marx.

 In social theory, Marx’s great breakthrough was to realize that material reality
comes before any other kind, whether mental or spiritual. In human life, this
means that human beings must eat, drink, have clothing, and find shelter before
they engage in any of the higher pursuits such as art, politics, or religion.
Karl Marx 4
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Religion as Oppression

PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences, and Spirituality

 Seeing all of history as a struggle between workers and owners, a struggle that the
workers must one day win, Marx analyzed religion as a tool in the hands of
owners to keep workers docile and compliant, and he called for an assault, not on
religion itself, but on a political economy that made religion necessary in the first
place.

 Later Marxists, however, broke with him and saw historical precedents that
showed how religion could actually help workers free themselves from
exploitation.
Karl Marx 5
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Religion as Oppression

PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences, and Spirituality

 Outline

I. Almost everyone has heard

Karl Marx’s famous dictum,
“Religion is the opium of the people.”
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Religion as Oppression

PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences, and Spirituality

A. The phrase is found in an essay titled “Toward the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right.” The full quotation reads: “Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of an
unspiritual situation. It is the opium of the people.”
B. The phrase leaves little room for doubt about Marx’s implacably hostile
attitude towards religion.
1. As Daniel Pals noted, Marx never proposed a full-blown theory of religion
because he did not think religion was worth bothering about.
2. Marx thought that religion rested upon foundations other than itself.
3. Once these foundations were knocked out from under it, religion would fall
by itself without any special effort needed.
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences, and Spirituality

II. Karl Marx is one of the founding figures in the discipline of sociology.
A. He started in philosophy, following the devotion to Hegel common in his
youth, but later turned against Hegel’s idealism.
1. Idealism is the view that ideas come before material reality. Matter
remains unformed until infused from without by something else: spirits,
thoughts, or ideas. Hegel believed that the material reality of human history
was an expression of a nonmaterial World Spirit.
2. Marx was a committed materialist. He believed that only physical matter
and energy had any reality, and that ideas were expressions of physical
reality.
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3. An idealist might say that thoughts arise within the human brain but are not
produced by the brain’s physical structure. A materialist would say that these
thoughts would be nothing but electrical impulses within the brain.

4. An idealist would argue that God’s spirit and ideas first brought material reality
into existence. A materialist would deny any spiritual realm outside of the physical
world and interpret God as just a concept that occurred within the material structures
of the brain.
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B. Using what he called the “transformative method,” Marx reversed Hegel’s
assumption that ideas preceded material reality.
1. This transformation amounted to a direct inversion: “Ideas manifest in material forms”
became “Material forms bring ideas into being.”
2. Rather than affirming that “ideas create the mind and all things,” Marx would say that
without a full- formed brain, there can be no ideas at all.
C. His change to materialism made him look at the material and economic realities of
life for the majority of workers during the European Industrial Revolution.
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences, and Spirituality

III. Marx’s ideas about the economic basis of human life led him to attend to the
social processes that lead to the distribution of material goods.
A. This led to his division of social functions into base (or substructure) and
superstructure.
B. Base, or substructure, social functions indicated the physical necessities of life
such as food, clothing, and shelter.
1. These items were deemed of primary importance because nothing else could happen in
society if these were not present and available.
2. Marx’s idea went against the prevailing religious ideas of his day, which generally held
that the life of the spirit was primary, and that physical needs belonged to a lower,
“animal” reality.
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences, and Spirituality

C. Superstructure social functions designated those items that had no independent
reality and were not necessary to life but were added on only after “base” social
functions had been met.
1. Functions in this category included art, philosophy, culture, and religion.
2. These pursuits were less important in Marx’s analysis.
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences, and Spirituality

D. Marx came to regard superstructure elements in society as somewhat sinister.
1. He saw human history as a story of unending class struggle between workers and owners.
2. Superstructure elements could be co-opted by owners in order to create an ideology which
could be used against workers.
3. Religion was a component of this ideology.
4. The function of religion was to justify the theft of a worker’s labor (the “surplus value” of
their products) by promising a future compensation.
5. Religion thus helped keep workers docile and compliant.
6. Religion could be used to justify the political order and the class structure.
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Religion as Oppression

PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences, and Spirituality

E. For Marx, religion was always bad and had to be opposed if progress was to occur.
F. As a materialist, Marx would never grant that religion’s own account of itself held
any truth. There was no God, so God could not have revealed it.
1. Marx accepted the theory put forward by Ludwig Feuerbach that religious realities
were projections of human qualities. God was simply a human conception of an idealized
humanity and embodied qualities—wisdom, justice, mercy—that humans ought properly
to embody on their own.
2. This meant that religion was fundamentally an illusion, a mistaken perception of a
reality that was not really there. In his essay, “Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy
of Right,” Marx called religion “the opium of the people.”
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Religion as Oppression

PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences, and Spirituality

G. Marx, however, saw no need to oppose religion directly, as it was merely an
epiphenomenon (a secondary phenomenon).
1. Religion, as part of the superstructure, rested on a particular base.
2. Once the base itself was transformed and the workers liberated, religion would wither
on its own.
3. Thus, Marx saw no point in expending energy trying to eliminate religion.
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences, and Spirituality

IV. Later Marxists saw Marx’s evaluation of religion as one-sided.
A. Engels (1820–95) saw a model for the ideal community society in early
Christianity.
1. In reading the Book of Acts, he saw how the community lived together and held all
things in common.
2. Engels saw that religion represented a stage in the march up to the worker’s paradise.
B. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) realized that Marxism had to fulfill spiritual
needs if it were to succeed.
1. He noted that, in looking at the prophetic tradition in Christianity, one could discern a
tool to rouse the peasantry to revolt and claim their rights.
2. Religion could be the amphetamine of the masses as well as its opium.
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences, and Spirituality

V. Later scholars and historians have observed that the Marxist critique of religion
runs into trouble on both theoretical and historical grounds.

A. Richard Comstock wrote that by simply inverting all religious notions, one still
ends up with something that looks very much like religion.
1. While Marx denied the validity of a Christian reading of history that saw all
things moving toward a final judgment, he also saw history as moving inevitably
toward a worker’s paradise governed by a dictatorship of the proletariat.
2. Marx never accounted for the source of the power that directs history toward
this goal.
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences, and Spirituality

B. James Boon noted Marx’s distinction between base and superstructure as too pat.

1. Religion as a set of ideas may be part of the superstructure and the ideology, but
the practice of religion involves a great number of material things.
2. Religion is an inextricable part of the economic landscape and provides a living
for a substantial number of people.
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C. Rodney Stark disproves Engels’s assertion that religion was a product of the
aspiration of Roman slaves.
1. Christianity during the Roman period was a religion of the middle and upper
classes; laborers were left largely untouched by it.
2. If the middle and upper classes do not need the “opium” the workers need to
keep them docile, then the Marxist analysis is wrong.

D. For many critics, the fall of global communism itself is a decisive demonstration
of the inoperability of Marxist theory.
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PHI 100 - Religions, Religious Experiences, and Spirituality

VI. Despite these criticisms, Marxist analysis does make some telling points.
A. Even though it reduces religion to economic functions, we cannot deny that
religion operates within an economic structure.
B. Marxism has the virtue of alerting students that there is indeed such a thing as
the “economics of religion.”