Ideology and Religion
This excerpt is from To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse. Copyright (c) 2024 by Carl R. Trueman. Used with permission of the author and publisher, B&H Academic.
Perhaps the most dramatic example that Marx gives of ideology is that of religion. In this area he draws on the concept of alienation that is found in Hegel but developed in a specific way by Hegel’s younger disciple, Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach is important for Marx because he shifts the philosophical discussion away from the idealism of Hegel toward a more strict materialism. Thus, when it comes to religion, Feuerbach sees the question of God as not being a matter of theology—Does a god exist? What kind of a god is he? Rather, he gives an account of the phenomenon of religion as arising from humanity’s material circumstances. We might cast the question this way: Why do people believe in God, even though there are no metaphysical grounds for so doing? The answer for Feuerbach is that religion is a sign of human alienation. Alienation, like ideology, will become an important concept in the formation of critical theory. We will discuss this in more detail in the next chapter, but it is worth noting here that one of the symptoms of alienation in Marx is the persistence of religious belief.
Feuerbach considers the concept of God to be a psychological projection of all the things that human beings see as good in themselves onto a cosmic being who embodies all of these in unchanging perfection. For this reason, Feuerbach declares that theology is really anthropology. What he means is that the concept of God is simply the divinized essence of humanity: God’s attributes are really human attributes, projected in an idealized form. They seem different because real human beings never embody the idealized form of human nature as represented by the idea of God. And this has an inhibiting effect: human beings have come to respect and to worship this projection and in so doing cement the difference between themselves and “God” in a way that means they no longer aspire to qualities they now consider divine. In so doing, they are alienated from their own nature. Religion, in other words, prevents them from realizing their potential and from being truly human. Religion also has for Feuerbach a sinister, manipulative dimension that has clear affinities with Marx’s position:
Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established. I can found morality on theology only when I myself have already defined the Divine Being by means of morality. . . . To place anything in God, or to derive anything from God, is nothing more than to withdraw it from the test of reason, to institute it as indubitable, unassailable, sacred, without rendering an account why. Hence self-delusion, if not wicked, insidious design is at the root of all efforts to establish morality, right, on theology.
These similarities indicate that Marx is deeply indebted to Feuerbach on religion. The element of suspicion is key to understanding both. Like other post-Enlightenment modern thinkers—Nietzsche and Freud being two further examples—Marx is not particularly interested in whether religion is true. He assumes it is not. Rather, he (again like Nietzsche and Freud) is interested in why it persists. And this is where Feuerbach is useful to him, supplemented by his own critical philosophy. For Marx, as for Feuerbach, religion is symptomatic of alienation, of the fundamental dehumanization of man.
The Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law contains Marx’s most famous description of religion as “the opium of the people.” But this comment needs to be set within the broader context of the passage within which it occurs. Marx starts with the Feuerbachian point that man makes religion and that religion is “the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again.”19 Marx then proceeds to argue that the struggle against religion is central to the political struggle because it is in effect the struggle against the alienating illusions that religion represents, “the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.” This then set the stage for Marx’s famous description of religion:
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The point Marx makes here is that the existence of religion indicates that all is not well with the world. It is an expression of suffering and a protest against the same. Thus, he interprets the religious commitment of, say, poor peasants or impoverished industrial workers as indicating two things: that they are not happy and comfortable in their current condition and that they aspire to something better. They know that hunger and want are not good and so they look to find something that will provide a rationale for their circumstances and some hope for the future—maybe a sovereign God who works all things for good, and a heavenly rest when they finally leave this vale of tears. The problem for Marx is that this prevents individuals from facing the reality of their conditions and then doing something about them. This places the criticism of religion at the heart of the revolutionary project Marx is developing:
To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is reli- gion. Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man to make him think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been disillusioned and has come to reason, so that he will revolve around himself and therefore round his true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
If the purpose is to change the world, not merely to describe it, as Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach claims, then here we see something of what that means: the critique of religion is not simply for the purpose of demystifying or disenchanting the world. Rather, it is part of changing the world, of tearing down the illusions by which men and women shield them- selves from having to face reality. For Marx, religion is indeed an opium— an analgesic and a hallucinogenic that defuses the felt need to change the world. It facilitates man’s abdication of his own responsibilities to himself and alienates him from what he truly should be. Revolution thus demands that religion be criticized—not merely debunked as false but also exposed as manipulative, as serving broader class interests, and thus as oppressive. It is ideology. When believed by the poor, it is false consciousness. It represents the basic alienation that lies at the heart of an unjust society. And critiquing it as such is to be part of the basic revolutionary move toward social justice.
In connecting religion to suffering caused by the economic inequities of the capitalist system, Marx also points to the fact that the alienation which it represents is intimately connected to how human beings relate to the products that they make. In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, another set of notes that were not published until long after his death, Marx applied the concept of alienation to labor. This theme will become very important in the development of Marxism in the early twentieth century, as we shall see in chapter 3. Suffice it to note at this point that alienation, and its manifestation in religion, was a key theme in the early, Hegelian Marx, a point to be rediscovered by his successors, most notably Georg Lukács and then the Frankfurt School.
Image by FrameAngel and licensed via Adobe Stock.