Marx On Religion

Part IV: The Criticism of Religion

Many social scientists see in religion an indispensable instrument by which we humans make our sufferings more sufferable. Religion not only tells us of a different place where things will be better—heaven, paradise, nirvana—it supplies us with a set of ritual practices by which to express, both individually and collectively , our sorrows. And in expressing our sorrow—in saying our prayers, in doing our ritual washing, in imposing our acts of ascetic self-denial—we give order and coherence to chaotic emotions that result from suffering and would otherwise overwhelm us. For many social scientists, religion is what helps us manage the evils that assault our lives and, individually and as a group, help us get on with our lives. Karl Marx sees in religion a more active moral agency. Religion is for him less a device for pacifying suffering than it is a protest against that suffering. “Religion,” Marx says, “is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world.”1 Those who suffer seek not only solace but change—an end to their suffering, a way out! And Marx is quite ready to give religion a place in all of that. “Religious suffering ,” he says, “is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.”2 Why then does Marx finally turn away from religion , proclaiming it a useless tool? Because “the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.”3 167 P A R T IV The Criticism of Religion Initially, Marx gives religion a far more active, protest role, but then he takes it away. For Marx, religion must be seen for what it is—”an inverted consciousness.”4 Religion sees the real world, feels the real world, sorrows over the real world, but does all this upside down. Religion “descends from heaven to earth.”5 And that disempowers protest, because “the more of himself man gives to God the less he has left in himself.”6 For Marx, the task is to keep consciousness tightly and critically focused upon this world, and then change it. “The philosophers,” he complains, “have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”7 What Marx criticizes is the kind of philosophy and the kind of theology he saw being practiced everywhere by academic elites. In the face of suffering what these comfortable intellectuals do is transform concrete injustices, concrete evils, into a profound understanding of Evil (with a capital “E”). The sufferings we experience in everyday life, especially if we lack power and protection, are translated into “the Problem of Evil,” something that requires deep reflection and yields a self chastened by tragedy, and at the same moment elevated into an aristocracy of soul. Turning his back on such elitist self-indulgence, Marx insists: To arrive at man in the flesh, one does not set out from what men say, imagine , or conceive, nor from man as he is described, thought about, imagined, or conceived. Rather one sets out from real, active men and their actual lifeprocess . . . . [Then] morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness no longer seem to be independent . Rather, men who develop their material production and their material relationships alter their thinking and the products of their thinking along with their real existence. Consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness.8 Still, if consciousness was wholly determined by life circumstances, then the suffering of the oppressed would be determined by that negative experience, and protest would disappear into confession and self-blame. Of course that can happen , and has happened! But time and again the poor and the oppressed have used religion not only to survive but to resist, and eventually to rebel. Religion in the hands of those who suffer the injustices of society has been and is being used to challenge and to change the world. I will not repeat here what I pointed to in the introduction concerning the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s. Much of history —yes, even that memory of the past written by those who dominated their respective times—is full of subversive memories that became movements and ushered in a different future. Take patriarchal religion as an example. Women have been marginalized almost everywhere in world religions. They have not simply been excluded from institutions of religious hierarchy, but...