Eight theories of religion second edition

Marx’s explanation of religion has had great influence in our century, in part because it is not just another remote scholarly theory. It is tied to a philosophy of political action that, until recently, was embraced by nearly a third of the contemporary world, including not only nations as great as the Soviet Union and mainland China but many smaller ones as well. For countless people born in these cultures, Marxism and its relentless critique of religion are the only philosophy of life they have ever known. It is partly because of this political success, of course, that Marxism has had its equally great impact on modern intellectual life. During most of this century, Marxist thinkers and theorists have played a leading role in virtually every modern field of study outside the natural sciences. Forty years ago, more than a few serious intellectuals were convinced that communism had caught the flow of history’s irreversible tide. To them, its ultimate triumph was assured. In the last astonishing decade, however, the world communist experiment has undergone an almost total collapse. And the not surprising consequence is that, in the current moment, communism’s own “ideology”—including its view of religion—stands in almost universal discredit. Marx himself, however, might not have been as disturbed by all of this as we may suppose, for in his dialectical view of history, today’s capitalist triumph can still be read as preface to its later

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collapse amid the great proletarian revolution of a more distant future. Nonetheless, the almost blindly enthusiastic approval Marxist theory enjoyed in past decades has been replaced by an almost equally emphatic rejection in the present.

Although he began writing more than half a century before either of them, Marx’s general approach to religion is similar in form to the functional explanations we have observed in both Freud and Durkheim. What interests him is not so much the content of religious beliefs—not so much what people actually say is true about God, Heaven, the Bible, or any other sacred writing or divine entity—as the role these beliefs play in the social struggle. He agrees with Tylor and Frazer that the main religious beliefs are, of course, absurd superstitions. But he also agrees with Freud and Durkheim that we still have to explain why people hold to them. Like them, he insists that we find the key to religion only when we discover what its function is, only when we discover what its beliefs do for people either socially or psychologically or both. Marx’s stress on society puts his view in one respect closer to Durkheim than to Freud, for Freud’s emphasis, as we saw, falls mainly on the individual rather than the group. On his view, the neurotic needs of the individual personality are the main cause of belief. Even so, the contrast is not a sharp one because Freud’s theory also has social features, with the individual personality being shaped by the influences of the family and community.

At the same time, Marx and Freud are closer together—and farther from Durkheim—on another side of the issue. Since, for Durkheim, religion is in a very real sense simply the worship of society, he thinks it impossible to imagine human social life without some set of either religious rituals or their near equivalent. Marx and Freud, by contrast, believe no such thing. Both think religion expresses a false need for individual security, and they are perfectly happy to predict the disappearance of religion once the cause of its fantasies has been detected and removed. Freud thinks people would be much better off without the neurotic illusions of faith, but he seems to realize many

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From this comparison, we can see that Marx’s explanation is not just functionalist but aggressively reductionist as well. The tendency of his thinking throughout is to describe religion always as an effect, an expression, a symptom of something more real and substantial that lies underneath it. Even if he sometimes speaks of religious ideas as having some independence, his predominant emphasis is always the other way. His strategy is identical to that of Freud and Durkheim in that beneath the surface of religious beliefs and rituals, he is always seeking out the hidden cause of these things, which is to be found in something else. For Freud, that something is a neurotic psychological need; for Durkheim, it is society; for Marx, it is a reality beneath both of these—the material facts of the class struggle and alienation.

Whatever our judgment on Marx’s reductionism, one thing is beyond debate. His emphasis on economic realities has now made it impossible to understand religious life anywhere without exploring its close ties to economic and social realities. In the century since his death, Marx’s disciples have brought great insight to our understanding of relationships between the spiritual and material dimensions of life. They have cast a whole new light on the connections between economic needs, social classes, and religious beliefs, especially in the case of such pivotal events in history as the Protestant Reformation, the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and similar social upheavals of other times and places. In addition, they have produced provocative studies of the connections between religion and such subjects as modern imperialism, colonialism, and slavery. In this respect, whatever happens to Marxist political regimes, Marx’s materialist economic perspective will no doubt endure and continue to bear fruit wherever theorists address the role of religion in economic, social, and political affairs.

Marx’s economic reductionism offers a wealth of insight into the ties that bind religion to socioeconomic life. Insight, however, is not persuasion. Insofar as Marx gives us a theory of religion, how compelling is it? That question is an especially large one in this case, because Marx’s judgment on religion is almost impossible to separate from the other aspects of his thought. We saw this to

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some degree also in the case of Freud, whose conclusions about religion rest heavily on his claims about psychology. In the same way, it is very hard to evaluate Marx’s theory of religion without at the same time making judgments on his claims about economy, politics, and society. So, in the following, we start with some critical comments on the role of religion as Marx sees it but then move to the broader contours of his thinking on nature, history, and human social endeavor.

If we focus specifically on the theory of religion as explained above, two problem areas in Marxist thought require special notice. First, what Marx actually presents is not an account of religion in general but an analysis of Christianity—and of similar faiths that stress belief in God and an afterlife. In part, this may be due to the influence of Hegel, who saw Christianity as the highest form of religion and felt that whatever he said about Christianity applied automatically to all “lesser” religions as well. Feuerbach took this position, and Marx, as we saw, closely follows Feuerbach’s analysis. But, more importantly, the main focus of Marx’s thinking is not so much world civilization as the culture and economy of Western Europe, which is of course the historical homeland of Christianity.

It is chiefly Christianity that Marx has in mind when he explains religion as an opium-like escape for the poor from economic misery and oppression. We can, of course, imagine a similarly Marxist explanation of, say, the Hindu doctrine of rebirth, which also offers people hope of a better next life, or the teachings of certain Buddhists who stress the joys of sheer nothingness over the miseries of the present world and life.²¹ But Marx’s thesis cannot be very well applied to certain primitive tribal religions, which have almost no meaningful doctrine of an afterlife, or to the religions of ancient Greece and Rome, which offered hope of an afterlife on terms just the opposite of Marx’s: immortality for the great and powerful and a mere shadow existence for simple folk. Further, according to Marx, the phenomenon of alienation— which creates religion—came about only as human societies were introduced to the division of labor and private property. It would seem to follow that there was a time in human history before all of these things when human beings needed no religion and, in fact, had none. But while it is possible that in some deep prehistoric age this was true, there is no historical evidence to support such an idea. Nor is there any evidence available from modern tribal peoples, whose form of life often comes closest to Marx’s idea of an original communism, that would show them to be without religion or even exhibit less of an inclination to it than others.

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Whether Christian or not, religion in Marx’s view is an ideology. Like the state, the arts, moral discourse, and certain other intellectual endeavors, it belongs to the superstructure of society, and it depends in a fundamental way on the economic base. Thus, if there is a change in economic life, a change in religion must follow. The problem with this position as stated is that Marx explicates it in an extremely elusive fashion. He insists that his own research is strictly scientific in nature, yet when he reduces religion to economics and the class struggle, he does so in terms so broad and variable that his theorems are exceedingly difficult to test in any systematically scientific fashion. For example, we could agree with Marx’s view that the rise of capitalism at the end of the Middle Ages caused a shift away from Catholicism and toward Protestantism. But then, what about more specific, small-scale changes? Does the religious superstructure change with them as well? When, in certain locations, we find evidence of capitalism earlier on, say in the medieval period, why are there no developments of a Protestant sort in the social superstructure to reflect that change as well? And why, after the rise of capitalism, do we find this new bourgeois economic system in some cities and countries that clearly did not become Protestant? Throughout the later Middle Ages and early modern era, certain of the Italian citystates moved toward capitalism, but they did not give up Catholicism. Why? Moreover, even in those countries where Protestantism did arise, can we be sure it was economics that changed the religion? Could it not be that the new religion actually changed the economics? Two decades after Marx’s death, German sociologist Max Weber, whom we will meet in our next chapter, framed an intriguing argument for just this point. We can consider it more carefully later. At the very least, it suggests that few such historical connections are as clear or certain as Marx supposes them to be. Moreover, outside the realm of religion as well, there are countless specific cases in which ideas from the spheres of art, literature, and morals as well as from politics and law have changed or shaped economics in important ways, rather than the reverse, as Marx contends. Indeed, the whole formulation of the problem, which suggests that in these complex cultural interactions one element —economics—must always be the cause while all of the others are simply effects, is overly simplistic. Religion fits into society as part of an intricate network of causes and effects which act and react on each other in complicated ways. To suggest, as Marx does, that economics is always the agent in these transactions and that ideologies are always mere expressions of it is to take a stance that does not square easily with the record of either culture or economics as they have evolved even in the Western civilization Marx knows,

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quite apart from the paths of development that may have been followed in other societies.

A theory is only as strong as its assumptions. Since Marxist thinking reduces religion to economics, we cannot leave it without examining, at least briefly, the general theory of economy and society on which it rests. This is, to be sure, no simple task. In both communist and noncommunist countries, entire libraries are needed to hold all the interpretations and critiques of Marx and Marxism in its multiple variations. What we can do, however, is point to at least two central difficulties that bear strongly on the issue of religion and seem part of the very nature and fabric of Marxism. These are not just charges hurled by political enemies but apparently congenital disabilities that Marxists themselves, in candid moments, recognize the need to overcome.

The first is a fundamentally social and political problem, and to see it we must remember that Marx recommends his system not just as a theory but as a course of real action. The working class—the proletariat—is the great agent of revolution; it is the social group which, driven to desperation by its universal misery, must one day rise up to destroy bourgeois capitalism. Its leaders, whether they be the members of a communist party, self-styled revolutionary strongmen, or elected representatives, embody the singular, uniform interest of “the people” as a whole. They and they alone speak and act for the revolution. Moreover, because there can be only one such “collective will” of the people, there is no place for disagreement about its purposes. Though it is elected, there can be only one political party. Though they can do their work, there can be no such thing as “individual freedom” for artists, scientists, and intellectuals, since the only purpose in any of these pursuits is to serve the will of the proletariat. Though families exist, parents too must recognize that their children belong ultimately to the state. Religion, of course, cannot be tolerated because it saps revolutionary energies and demands an ultimate loyalty that should be given only to the cause of revolution.

If this is a fair portrait of Marx’s revolutionary social program, then it is very hard to see how it could ever achieve the end of a perfectly classless, harmonious community which he sets for it. Marx seems to assume that the workers in all of their millions will, on any important social issue, have only one point of view—a stance determined fully by their miserable position as the oppressed class. But why should this necessarily be so? At the outbreak of World War I, some communist leaders expected that proletarians in each of the European nations involved would actually refuse to fight their fellow workers in enemy lands. But this obviously did not happen: French, German,

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and British workers discovered that the ties of language, nation, and culture were stronger than any class loyalty that might have gone beyond national borders.

Marx spent the latter portion of his life writing on economics in the several volumes of Capital and other books. He regarded this as extremely important work, providing the solid foundation in economic fact and theory for his doctrines of the class struggle and worker exploitation. In Capital, as we have seen, he argues that human labor creates the only real value to be found in products and that exploitation occurs when capitalists pay workers just

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enough to stay barely alive and then “steal” for themselves the remaining surplus value in the products the workers have made. To Marxist theoreticians, this analysis seems fundamentally correct. Others are not so sure.

We thus end our encounter with Marx at a place apparently far removed from religion—in the details of economic theory. From the materialist perspective, however, any distance we claim to see between the two realms is mostly a matter of appearances and not reality. Marx, in fact, is certain of

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their connection. The key to religion, he confidently declares, is to be found in economics. He follows what is to him a clear and direct path from religious belief down through alienation and exploitation to the class struggle and from there to the root evils of private property and the theft of surplus value. If this explanatory road shows turns and twists similar to those followed by Durkheim and Freud, that should hardly surprise us. Like them, Marx is committed to the route of reductionism, though for him it ends at a different destination—with class struggle and economic alienation rather than the needs of society or the neurotic personality. In their differing ways, and sometimes taken together, all three of these ambitious reductionist theories have had an enormous impact on modern thought.²⁴ Their tide of influence on interpreters of religion can be said to have reached a crest in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, and it has certainly not disappeared today. Yet while they still have much to say, they certainly do not have the last or only word—as our next chapter will show.

1. Friedrich Engels, “Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works, tr. and ed. Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, 2 vols. (Moscow 1951), 2: 153.

2. Marx’s major work in economic theory, Capital, was published in 1867 as the first of three volumes to be printed by a German publisher in Hamburg; the initial edition was 1000 copies. Most of volume 3 and much of volume 2 had already been written before the first volume appeared. Marx continued his work on revisions of these volumes after 1867, but he never finished them.

3. For an appraisal of Marx from the long perspective of a century after his death, see Betty Matthews, ed. Marx: A Hundred Years On (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983); on the changing critical estimate of his system, see Paul Thomas, “Critical Reception: Marx Then and Now,” in Terrell Carver, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Marx (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 23–54.

4. There are, of course, numerous biographical studies of Marx. Among those of recent decades, the most authoritative work in English is David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973). An earlier and classic intellectual biography that analyzes the development of Marx’s thought in the context of the Europe of his day is Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx (New York: Time Inc., [1939] 1963).

5. Karl Marx, A Correspondence of 1843, in The Early Texts, ed. David McLellan (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 82.

6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House [1935] 1955), 1: 34.

7. A work that is especially helpful on such key concepts in Marxist theory as “mode of production” and “relations of production,” is Terrell Carver, A Marx Dictionary (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1987).

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8. Karl Marx, Capital, 3 vols., ed. Friedrich Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 1: 645.

10. The Class Struggles in France (1850); The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852); On the Civil War in France (1871).

11. For the meaning of the term see, again, Carver, Marx Dictionary, under “ideology,” pp. 89–92.

12. Karl Marx, “Doctoral Dissertation,” in McLellan, Early Texts, p. 13; see also McLellan’s comments in Karl Marx (1973), p. 37.

13. These were Preliminary Theses on the Reformation of Philosophy and Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, both published in 1843.

14. Karl Marx, “Preface,” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in T. B. Bottomore, ed., Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), p. 64.

15. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Religion, introduced by Reinhold Niebuhr (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), p. 41.

16. Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Niebuhr, Marx and Engels on Religion, p. 42.

17. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Niebuhr, Marx and Engels on Religion, p. 72.

18. Karl Marx, “The Communism of the Paper Rheinischer Beobachter,” in Niebuhr, Marx and Engels on Religion, pp. 83–84.

19. Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Niebuhr, Marx and Engels on Religion, p. 42.

20. One of the most thorough recent expositions of Marx on religion, accompanied by a penetrating analysis, can be found in Alistair Kee, Marx and the Failure of Liberation Theology (London: SCM Press, 1990), particularly chapters 1–5.

21. Marx did briefly address this in several articles written while serving as a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune; see Trevor Ling, Karl Marx and Religion in Europe and India (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 68–80.

22. On this point, see R. N. Carew Hunt, The Theory and Practice of Communism: An Introduction (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Pelican Books, [1950] 1963). A thorough study of this problem both in the French revolution and in other radical revolutionary movements in the West is J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952).

23. Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, “Unresolved Contradiction in the Marxian Economic System” [1896], in Shorter Classics of Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, tr. Alice Macdonald (South Holland, IL: Libertarian Press, 1962).

24. See the study by J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), which argues that the most convincing scientific, naturalistic explanation of religion to date is to be found in a combination of the theories of Durkheim and Freud.

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