Contextualizing “religion” of young Karl Marx: A preliminary analysis

Abstract

Like any other social category, the meaning and conceptual boundary of “religion” is ambiguous and contentious. Historically speaking, its semantics have been transformed in highly complex ways. What is meant by “religion” reflects the specific norms and imperatives of the classifier. This article critically reflects upon the idea of “religion” employed by Karl Marx in the early 1840s. Marx reimagined the encompassing notion of “religion,” which was predominant in his time, by privatizing it in his attempt to critique the theological foundation of the Prussian state. In this process, young Marx’s discourse siphons what is claimed to be “religious” out of the categories of “philosophy,” “science,” and “politics.” In this way, Marx constructs the realm of nonreligion where he associates his own discourse with natural reason, against the reified notion of “religion” as fantastic illusions.

Keywords

Karl Marx religion–secular distinction religion politics science philosophy

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. (Marx, [1844] 2002c: 171)

The above is the famous quotation from Karl Marx’s Introduction to “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” It was written in 1843, when Marx was in his mid-twenties, and was published in 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. What did the young Marx mean by “religion” here? This is the question this article tries to address.

In his article entitled “Reading ‘Opium of the People’: Expression, Protest and the Dialectics of Religion,” Andrew McKinnon (2005: 15) claims that Marx’s famous phrase “Religion … is the opium of the people” is “the starting point for most Marxian analyses of religion, as well as a key phrase for the exegeses of Marx on religion.” McKinnon (28) comments that Marx inherits from the Left-Hegelian intellectual tradition of his time the conceptual scheme in which “religion” was treated “as a relatively unproblematic category.” Whereas McKinnon states that Marx’s notion of religion points toward “mostly Protestantism and Catholicism in Germany and England” in his own time, I would like to note that Marx’s category of religion also includes Judaism, as it is indicated throughout this article. Nonetheless, McKinnon (30) is right to caution the twenty-first century readers that what Marx says about religion (whatever he means by this category) cannot be applied “equally to every other time, place and set of social relations.”

Trevor Ling (1980: 29–30) also expresses a similar concern:

it has been assumed by some Marxists that this critique applies automatically to any other system of belief and conduct which goes by the name of ‘religion’. … This is a vast assumption, and one which can only be made confidently by those who are unaware of the many important differences which exist within the broad, undefinable, and simplistically conceived category ‘religion.’

These are very important remarks. We cannot uncritically assume that “religion” in nineteenth-century Europe means the same as what the twenty-first century readers assume by the same term. It is more likely, given the specific social context in Marx’s time and place, that Marx’s “religion” carries meaning and nuances subtly different from what is generally meant by “religion” in the twenty-first century. This article first historicizes the term “religion” and clarifies its meaning in the nineteenth-century European context. This section also examines the religion–secular distinction implicit in Marx’s discourse. This is followed by analysis of the ways in which Marx distinguishes the terms such as “philosophy,” “science,” and “politics” from “religion.” Prior to “Towards a Critique” (Marx, [1844] 2002c), the term “religion” frequently appears in “The Leading Article of No. 179 of Kölnische Zeitung” (Marx, [1842] 2002a) and “On the Jewish Question” (Marx, [1843] 2002b). The second half of this article critically examines “religion” in these two pieces of work. This will give us the conceptual foundation to reread the opening pages of “Towards a Critique” where “religion” is equated with opium. The article concludes with some critical remarks on the ideological function of “religion” in young Marx’s writing.

Historicizing “religion”

The aforementioned McKinnon’s article demonstrates the radical shift in connotation of “opium” during the nineteenth century. While it was a “largely unquestioned good” in the beginning, by the end of the century, it was “aggressively demonized” (McKinnon, 2005: 16). When Karl Marx was writing the line “Religion … is the opium of the people,” what could be meant by opium was “ambiguous, multidimensional and contradictory” (12). McKinnon suggests some connotations of “opium,” which would have been relevant in mid-nineteenth-century Europe: “opium was a medicine (albeit one with significant, newly discovered ‘problem’); it was a source of enormous profit (which also provoked protest and rebellion); finally, it was a source of ‘utopian’ visions” (14). Given this, he warns twenty-first-century readers of Marx not to project their twenty-first-century understanding of “opium” uncritically onto the mid-nineteenth-century context in which the text was written. The term “religion” also experienced a similarly dramatic semantic transformation during the nineteenth century. What was meant by “religion” in nineteenth-century Europe is equally “ambiguous, multidimensional and contradictory.” The mid-nineteenth century coincides with the turning point of the meaning of “religion.”

McKinnon, however, does very little to historicize and destabilize the other half of the religion–opium equation. The deconstruction of “religion” is not the purpose of his article. This is partly because, as he has demonstrated elsewhere (McKinnon, 2002, 2006), McKinnon does not agree with many aspects of the deconstructive project of “religion.” In contrast, this article echoes the so-called critical religion perspective (e.g. Fitzgerald, 2015; Martin, 2015), which would not agree with McKinnon’s analytical use of the term “religion” in his writing. Nevertheless, I do not intend to be another critique of “religion” in McKinnon’s writing.¹ The aim of this article is primarily to complement McKinnon’s work by focusing upon the other half of the “religion–opium” equation: to historicize the idea of religion and the employment of the term by young Marx in the mid-nineteenth-century European context.

Encompassing religion and confessionalism

When the young Marx was writing his critique of “religion,” the term “religion” in the German and wider European contexts generally referred to the all-encompassing Christian Truth, which Fitzgerald (2007) calls “encompassing religion.” In this idea of religion, “nothing properly exists outside religion since it represents Truth, which is all-embracing” (234). For centuries since the Reformation, the term “religion” “referred mainly to Christian Truth, especially in the form of Our Christian Faith” (Fitzgerald, 2011: 2). This notion of religion was contrasted with the category of “pagan irrationality and barbarity.”

In the German context, this encompassing notion of religion also reflected the norm of confessionalism. “Confession” [Konfession] is the term through which nineteenth-century Germans negotiated their “identities, rights, and conflicts.” In the 1840s, it meant “the sectarian division of society and nation” as well as “the insistence that the state retain a Christian foundation with privileges for the established churches” (Weir, 2014: 1). These confessions were also called “religious societies” [Religionsgesellschaften].

In addition, “religion” in the sense of the encompassing Christian Truth constituted the foundation of people’s conceptual framework. Hugh McLeod (2000: 25) explains:

While the poor tended to be infrequent church-goers, religion [meaning Christianity] remained an important part of the language of social protest, answering the equally frequent use of religious language by those in authority. … Christianity and especially the Bible still provided a common language, accessible to all social classes and those at most points of the political spectrum, and for this reason it was potentially more effective than any more sectional discourse.

There were some thirty German states, including Prussia, each with their own arrangements for relations with the churches. All these states were “explicitly Christian” and they all “recognised in principle ‘parity’ between the three major Christian confessions (Lutheran, Reformed and Roman Catholic)” (McLeod, 2000: 19–20). In practice, most states favored one of these confessions. In a number of states, the Protestants had formed a United church. For example, by 1817 in Prussia, where Marx lived, King Friedrich Wilhelm III had forcibly united the Lutheran and Reformed confessions, in spite of fierce opposition from many Lutherans. Some of those who had refused to join the new church became Protestant dissenters, and until the 1840s, the formation of free churches faced legal difficulties.

At the top of the Prussian confessional structure were the Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed Churches. These “religious societies” were the privileged ones, “whose rights and dispensations had been anchored in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia” (Weir, 2014: 31). Beneath these, there existed the so-called tolerated religious societies, which consisted of the Jews, the Mennonites, Bohemian Brethren, and Greek Catholics, as well as other groups that did not receive official sanction. According to Weir (310): “Their rights varied historically according to the accommodation each reached with the Prussian state. Some were allowed to hold public services; some had to meet in private.” This is, for example, the social context in which Marx wrote his “On the Jewish Question.” Jews were “tolerated.” Yet, Jews’ special legal status gave them fewer rights. For instance, “Prussian Jews could neither perform state acts nor hold high state office” (31).

In Prussia, the monarch was the highest official of the confessional structure. The monarch’s position was authorized by Protestant theology and the terms of the Peace of Augsburg (1555). The monarch was the protector of the churches, charged with maintaining the peace of the confessional order, and, at the same time, was “responsible for ensuring the interests and extension of the Protestant faith” (31). King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who ascended to the Prussian throne in 1840, “dreamed of a reuniting of the German confessions in a return to the apostolic constitution of Early Christianity” (36). He also attempted to unite the Protestant and Catholic churches. The King was convinced about the need for the Prussian monarch to secure new sources of legitimacy, so that “he asserted that the Prussian monarchy was divinely ordained and he was king ‘by the grace of God’” (Levinger, 2000: 205).

It seems that “religion” in this sense constituted the realm of Christian civility. What lies outside “religion” would be regarded as heresy and barbarity, which could become subject to the state’s suppression. This is indicated by the Prussian Censorship decree of 1819, which is quoted in one of young Marx’s writings. The aim of the 1819 decree “is to check all that is contrary to the general principle of religion, irrespective of the opinions and doctrines of individual religious parties and sects permitted in the state” (quoted in Marx ([1843] (1998)). Soon after, the notion of “the general principle of religion” is rephrased as “Christian religion.” The decree proclaims: “ ‘Anything aimed in a frivolous, hostile way against Christian religion in general, or against a particular article of faith, must not be tolerated’ ” (quoted in Marx [1843] (1998)). In addition, the Prussian state in the 1840s legalized “confessionlessness” by allowing “individuals to formally quit the state churches without injury to their civic rights, as long as this act was not against state interests” (Weir, 2014: 29, emphasis added). These dissidents outside the formal confessional structure were still recognized as “religious” “as long as this act was not against state interests.” Therefore, the realm of the nonreligious was imagined as opposed to the value orientations of the confessional state. What “religion” signified was the totality of social order and the norms and imperatives of the state, whose foundation was claimed to be Christianity. More specifically, if we consider the Prussian monarch’s close association with Protestant theology, “religion” or “Christian religion” seemed to indicate the idea of Protestant civility.

Generic religion, religions, colonialism

At the same time, by the mid-nineteenth century, “religion” had also been regarded as something universal and cross-cultural. Historically, Europeans’ colonial exchange in the Americas, Africa, and India from sixteenth to nineteenth century generated the idea of the world divided into different “religions” (Masuzawa, 2005; Nongbri, 2013: 106–131). The term “religion(s)” in this context was the heuristic devise that was employed by Europeans to come to term with the variety of “new” peoples whom they were encountering in their colonies.

The historical emergence of the generic notion of religion can be seen in young Marx’s writing, for example, in his reference to “fetishism.”² In his publication in 1842, Marx critiques the claim that fetishism is “the ‘crudest form’ of religion,” but insists that it is “the religion of sensuous appetites” (Marx, [1842] 2002a: 33). Here, Marx takes for granted the idea that “fetishism” is “religion.” Marx first came across the concept of fetishism in his reading of Charles de Brosses’s 1760 work Du culte des dieux fétiches ou Parallèle de l’ancienne religion de l’Égypte. In this book,

De Brosses had taken the idea of fetishism, first developed as an alternative to the inadequate category of idolatry by Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century from their encounters with people on the West Coast of Africa, and sought to apply it to ancient Egypt. (Boer, 2010a: 99)

Having integrated the notion of “fetishism” into his generic category of religion, by the year of 1842, young Marx’s idea of religion appears to indicate a huge variety of cultural practices across the world (Boer, 2012: 177–206).

In his early writings, therefore, alongside the notion of religion as Christian civility, Marx also articulates “religion” as a universal and cross-cultural category, which constitutes the foundation of different cultures and civilizations in the world. In this light, Marx’s early discourse on “religion(s)” carries the so-called world religion paradigm (i.e. Masuzawa, 2005). By utilizing “religion” as a universal and cross-cultural category, Marx identifies multiple religions in the world as foundations of different civilizations. In his writings in the 1840s, we can find frequent references to “Judaism,” along with “Christianity,” as an independent class of religion. Outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, we can find an indirect reference to Buddhism when Marx ([1842] 2002a: 42) names “Tibet” as an example of theocracy. Nevertheless, it was not until 1850 that the reference to “Islam” appears in his writing (Marx and Engels, [1850] 2008: 93), followed by “Mahomentalism” (Marx, [1854] 2007a: 53) and “Islamism” (Marx, [1854] 2007b: 56).

It is Marx’s writings in the 1850s that we can find the most extensive reference to “religion” outside Europe. Marx refers to Hinduism in his critique of the British colonialism in India.³ For Marx, “the religion of Hindustan,” meaning Hinduism, is a category of irrational barbarity. Marx ([1853] 2007c: 213) claims that Hinduism “is at one a religion of sensualist exuberance, and a religion of self-torturing asceticism.” He attributes Hinduism to “semi-barbarian, semi-civilised” (217) village communities which he believes to be the foundation of “Oriental despotism.” Marx denounces Hinduism by claiming that it restrains “the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies” (218).

Marx is critical of the British colonialism in India. In his mind, however, the apparent barbarity of “the religion of Hindustan” outweighs the barbarity of British colonialism. Marx ([1853] 2007c: 218) exclaims:

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her matter of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

Although Marx does not agree with the British colonial rule in India, he reluctantly accepts its supposedly unintentional consequence of rooting out “the religion of Hindustan.” In India, Marx believed, colonialism ironically emancipated people from religion. He seems to suggest that human misery under colonialism should be still better off than lives dominated by religion. In his writing on India, Marx speaks of “the religion of Hindustan,” in the words of Turner (1991: 18), “with a cultural arrogance towards other societies which is no longer acceptable in serious journalism, let alone in serious scholarship.” His application of the category “religion” to the Indian context has unintentionally “reproduced the language of cultural dominance.”

Religion–secular distinction

At this point, it must be stressed that Marx lived in an era when the modern notion of religion, one which twenty-first-century readers are familiar with, was becoming more visible. This is a generic notion of religion, which became paired with its binary opposite “the secular.” It needs to be highlighted here that the religious–secular dichotomy is indeed a modern distinction. Brent Nongbri (2013: 5), for example, explains:

In late medieval Latin (and even in early English), these words described different kinds of Christian clergy, with religiosus describing members of monastic orders and saecularis describing Christian clergy not in a monastic order (the usage persists among Catholic to this day).

Nongbri (7) further stresses: “The idea of religion as a sphere of life separate from politics, economics, and science is a recent development in European history.” This new semantics defined “religion” against the emerging notion of the ostensibly nonreligious secularity (of politics, economics, and science, for example). The nonreligious secular rationality was contrasted with religious irrationality. “Religion” in this sense was an object of “secular” knowledge. “Religion” as fantastic illusion is imagined to banish in the light of “secular” rationality.

In order to analyze the generic idea of religion in young Marx’s writing in the context of nineteenth-century Germany, it is important to note that the term “secular” (säkular in German) does not appear in Marx’s early writing. According to Hölscher (2013: 36): “In Germany it was only after World War One that the dichotomy of ‘religious’ and ‘secular,’ i.e. the opportunity for institutions, people, mentalities to be either religious or secular, become popular with the wider public.” Marx, instead, uses the German term weltlich in his text, which is generally translated as “secular” in contemporary English translations. More accurately, Marx employs the concept of weltlich (“worldly” or “temporal”), in a different sense from the modern notion of the secular (as “nonreligion”). In his early writings, therefore, Marx does not necessarily conceptualize the term “religion” as the binary opposite to the generic category of secularity.

According to Hölscher (2013: 40), “the term weltlich was used when the opposite of church was at stake.” From the negative connotation of weltlich (“earthly,” “carnal,” “fleshly,” etc.), it was often used when referring to a presumed sense for earthly and sensual affections. As early as the 1830s, a growing number of radical left-wing intellectuals had denounced Christianity as immoral, irrational, and outdated. As the young Marx asserts, “materialism” was the new keyword for many of them in search of an alternative (Foster, 2000). By the 1840s, the Christian churches had already lost most of their former support from the enlightened middle classes (McLeod, 2000: 17–28). In this context, the young Marx in the early 1840s developed a critique of the Christian state, whose theological foundation was regarded as illusionary.

For many centuries, from the late Middle Ages up to the nineteenth century, the term weltlich (“temporal”) was paired with the term geistlich (“spiritual”).⁴ It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the German term weltlich underwent the semantic change from “temporal” to “nonreligious.” Marx’s critique of religion slightly predates this, and it was in the early twentieth century that the term weltlich as “nonreligious” was finally replaced by säkular (Hölscher, 2013: 39). Marx is not an exception from these semantics.

In his article published in 1842, for example, he sates: “Christianity, as the most capable and consistent of the Protestant theologians affirm, cannot agree with reason because weltliche and geistliche reason contradict each other” (Marx, [1842] 2002a: 35, English translation modified). These concepts, geistlich and weltlich, in the nineteenth-century German context can be generally translated as “the spiritual” and “the temporal,” respectively. German social order was based on this semantic distinction for a long time, including the whole of the nineteenth century. Hölscher (2013: 37) explains: “The whole world was divided into two realms, the spiritual and the temporal.” The “spiritual” and “temporal” powers were symbolically embodied in the Pope and the Emperor, respectively. These two realms complemented one another. Even when there were rivalries between the two, they could not do without one another. In the quotation above, Marx claims that weltlich (“the temporal”) and geistlich (“the spiritual”) contradict each other. However, they are not conceptualized against each other. Both “the spiritual” and “the temporal” still complement each other in the sense that weltlich is the material foundation of geistlich.

Elsewhere, Marx replaces geistlich with the term “religion” and posits the idea that religion reflects the contradiction of material reality (weltlich). It was in the writing of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the 1820s that “for the first time in German philosophy the semantic pattern of ‘geistlich/weltlich’ (spiritual/temporal) was transformed into the new semantic paradigm of ‘religiös/weltlich’ (religious/secular)” (Hölscher, 2013: 42). Marx was under the influence of this semantic change, and this religion–weltlich distinction is still largely complementary. In the words of Charles Taylor (2011: 34): “both sides are real and indispensable dimensions of life and society.” In other words: “The dyad is thus ‘internal,’ in the sense that each term is impossible without the other, like right and left or up and down” (Taylor, 2011: 34). For Marx, weltlich is the material foundation of society from which “religion” emerges. Given this, he argues that what is to be critically studied is not religion but its material foundation, the realm of the weltlich. In his “On the Jewish Question,” he states:

We no longer see religion as the basis but simply as a phenomenon of weltlichen narrowness. We therefore explain the religious restriction on the free citizen from the weltlichen restriction they experience. We do not mean to say that they must do away with their religious restriction in order to transcend their weltlichen limitations. We do not turn weltlichen question into theological questions. We turn theological questions into weltliche questions … We criticise the religious weakness of the political state by criticizing the political state in its weltlichen construction, regardless of its religious weaknesses. We humanize the contradiction between the state and a particular religion … by resolving it into the contradiction between the state and particular weltlichen elements, and we humanize the contradiction between the state and religion in general by resolving it into the contradiction between the state and its own general presuppositions. (Marx, [1843] 2002b: 49, English translation modified)

Here Marx repeatedly states that religion is a phenomenon generated by a material condition of human lives. Material problems in society cannot be resolved theologically, but what to be addressed is the material condition of the state and society. In this context, religion and weltlich are distinguished from each other but not against each other. One is not superseded by the other.

However, the semantic structure of the religion–weltlich distinction undergoes a mutation in Marx’s paradigm of “worldlification’” [verweltlichung]. In the words of Charles Taylor (2011: 34), “the dyad becomes ‘external’; secular and religious are opposed as true and false or necessary and superfluous.” Marx’s critique of religion in this discursive framework envisions “to abolish one while preserving the other” (34). For example, when Marx argues that the king of the so-called Christian state is “still religious” in the sense that the king “is in direct communication with Heaven, with God,” Marx assumes that the “religious spirit” of the king is something to be “secularized” [verweltlicht] (Marx, [1843] 2002b: 56). Here the religious is expected to be superseded by temporality or worldliness.

The replacement of “religion” as other-worldly illusion, with weltlich as this-worldly reality, is imagined by Marx as part of the historical process from the Christian state to the political state. Marx (56) argues that the “religious spirit” of the Christian state will “never be truly secularized [verweltlicht]” since it is the precondition of the Christian state. Instead, he proposes the emancipation of state from religion altogether, by acknowledging no religion as its foundation. Marx calls this type of state, the political state.

Here Marx imagined the epochal process of “secularization” (in the modern sense of the term) in which a culture based on “religion” was transformed into one based on nonreligious reason. In Marx’s time, however, the meaning of the term “secularization” [Säkularisation or Säkularisierung] was generally limited to “the expropriation of ecclesiastical goods by the state” (Hölscher, 2013: 40). More specifically, it referred to “the transfer of ecclesiastical property and jurisdiction to civil ownership and authority” (Hunter, 2015: 3). Instead, the modern notion of secularization was expressed by Marx’s contemporaries by the term “worldlification” [verweltlichung]. What is implicit in Marx’s paradigm of “worldlification” is the notion of weltlich. In this he assumes, borrowing words of Ian Hunter (2), “an epochal transition from a culture of religious belief to one of rational autonomy.” However, this reified realm nonreligion is not describe as weltlich or “the secular” in a generic sense, but Marx applies the more specific categories of “philosophy,” “science,” and “politics.”

Marx’s use of these categories as nonreligion is probably counterintuitive for his contemporaries in the early 1840s. In the dominant discursive field in Marx’s time, the theological language encompassed “science,” “philosophy,” and “politics.” It was also the semantic foundations of Hegel and Marx’s Left-Hegelian predecessors, including Feuerbach. Breckman (2001: 4) explains:

For the discussion of civil society in the early nineteenth century cannot be disengaged from the theologico-philosophical discussion of the period. Or, to put it simply, the constellation of concerns involved in the question of civil society – the relationship between society and the state, individual and community, economics and politics, the private person and the public citizen, self-interest and altruism – were intimately tied to religious questions.

In contrast, the young Marx siphons out the theological from the categories of “science,” “philosophy,” and “politics” in his discourse, and the theological was put together with the category “religion.” The reified realms of nontheological “science,” “philosophy,” and “politics” were claimed to be “real” and “true,” while “religion” and the theological were denounced as fantastic illusion.

Philosophy versus religion

Marx’s articulation of philosophy as nonreligion is probably most evident in his “Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung” (Marx, [1842] 2002a). This was Marx’s sustained response to Karl Hermes, who was an editor of the Kölnische Zeitung. Hermes was a conservative Roman Catholic and “agent of the government of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV” (Boer, 2010a: 84).

In the context of the German ruling order in the early 1840s, according to Boer (85), “German intellectuals could hardly avoid fighting their battles with and through theology.” The supreme authority of the Prussian king hinged on Christian theology. Therefore, in order to challenge the structure of power, a common strategy was to wage furious controversies over the Bible, especially the New Testament and its Gospels. The young Marx, on the other hand, attempted to “step out of the quagmire of public theological debate in Germany” (86).

Marx’s assertion of philosophy as nonreligion, or more precisely nontheological, is part of this effort. In “Leading Article,” Marx complains that “religion polemizes … against the philosophy generally of the definite system,” while he shows the sense of discomfort toward “the religious trend in philosophy” (Marx, [1842] 2002a: 39). Here the term “religion” refers to the theological semantics that underlay the philosophical discourse in Germany in his time, which would include Hegel and Feuerbach. The theological language and themes were so all-encompassing and embedded to the degree that the young Marx feels they constitute “the only field of ideas in the value of which the public believes almost as much as in the system of material needs” (39).

Quotes from Hermes in “Leading Article” indicate that Hermes uses the terms “philosophical” and “religious” complementary to each other when he says, for example, “spread philosophical and religious views … and combat them.” In his critique against Hermes, in contrast, Marx separates “philosophical” and “religious,” and reconceptualizes them as binary opposite from each other. Marx accuses Hermes of combating “philosophical views” and spreading “religious ones” (Marx, [1842] 2002a: 30).

For Marx, philosophy and religion (more specifically, theology) must be separated from each other. Marx seems to be denouncing “the religious trend” (39) in German philosophy in his time as if the purity of philosophy has been contaminated by religion. “Religion” is perceived as an alien entity that needs to be removed from “philosophy.” In order to establish a distinction from “religion,” Marx repeatedly associates “philosophy” with ideas of “the world,” “the present,” and “worldliness” [Welt and weltlich]. Marx also seeks the foundation of philosophy in human labor: “The same spirit that builds railways by the hand of the workers builds philosophical systems in the brain of the philosophers.” Marx claims that “truth philosophy is the spiritual quintessence of its time” and “the living souls of culture” which come into “contact and mutual reaction with the real contemporary world” (38). Importantly, for Marx, the “spirit” of philosophy is distinguished from “religion.” He claims that while philosophy is “the wisdom of this world,” religion is “the wisdom of the other world” (41).

Marx locates his own discourse in the category of philosophy. He has cleared out the theological from the category of philosophy, and classified the theological as “religion,” which is represented as other-worldly illusion, in contrast to this-worldly philosophy. From this vantage point, “religion” is now observed as a social pathology caused by human suffering at the level of material production. The ontology of theology is now transformed from the all-encompassing ideology via categorization as “religion,” to a mere social ill that will disappear once its cause is eliminated.

Religion versus science

In “Leading Article,” Marx also conceptualizes “religion” against “science.” For example, Marx criticizes the following words of Hermes: “A sharp distinction must be made between what is required by the freedom of scientific research, which can but benefit Christianity itself, and what is beyond the bounds of scientific research” (32); and “The best conclusions of scientific research have so far served only to confirm the truths of the Christian religion” (34). Marx disagrees with Hermes’s assumption that “science” should serve Christian “religion.” In contrast, Marx conceptualizes “science” as a realm independent from “religion.”

Hermes’s notion of science is encompassed by the idea of religion as Christian Truth, supposedly, as opposed to the irrationality of pagan barbarity. In another quote, when Hermes says that “scientific development” in the ancient world disclosed the error of people’s “religious views,” for example, he contrasts this with the integration of “science” in Christian theology (33). It seems that ostensibly “scientific” characteristics of Christianity were believed to be the proof of its civility against apparently “unscientific” pagan barbarism.

From the beginning of the seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, what was central to the “scientific” enterprise was “the idea of contrivance or design, along with the concept of divinely imposed and universal laws of nature,” and a vital unifying theme was provided by natural theology (Harrison, 2015: 149). From a twenty-first-century perspective, this notion of “science” “looks like a rather odd amalgam of the physical, ethical, and theological – natural science mixed up with moral edification and pious sentiments about the Creator” (152). The twenty-first-century idea of “science” as a study of nature that excluded the metaphysical and theological was “profoundly at odds” (148) with the common understanding of “science” that had prevailed until well into the nineteenth century. In addition, the German concept of science Wissenschaft includes Naturwissenschaft (natural sciences) and Geisteswissenschaft (humanities).⁵ This adds another nuance that is generally absent in the English term “science.”

The term “scientific research” implies the notion of method that such research employs “scientific method.” In the first half of the nineteenth century, according to Harrison (2015: 168), “talk of a scientific method had initially meant simply a systematic plan of attack that could be applied to any number of activities from physiology to fishing.” In contrast, Marx implies a method that is the more restricted in application, which can be conceptualized as the method to define what is scientific about specific research.

What Hermes meant by “science” here is likely a general sense of systematic knowledge, which is inseparable from theology and metaphysics. Here, the category of science includes “natural philosophy” and “theology,” and this unity was manifested as “natural theology.” Such understanding of “science” was predominant in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and the theorization of the natural world in an atheistic and purely materialistic way, without any reference to the divine cause, was regarded as heresy. This was, for example, why Charles Darwin had been reluctant to publish his theory of evolution for some twenty years, since he had come up with the idea in the 1840s (see Foster, 2000). In contrast to Darwin’s silence, Marx expresses his rather heretical idea of science in the early 1840s, by separating the category from Christianity and religion, excluding the theological and the metaphysical from it.

The binary of religion and science is also related to the idea of historical progress. For example, in his “On the Jewish Question,” Marx ([1843] 2002b: 46) states:

Once Jew and Christian recognize their respective religions as nothing more than different stages in their development of the human spirit, as snake-skins cast off of history, and man as the snake which wore them, they will no longer be in religious opposition, but purely critical and scientific, a human relationship. Science will then be their unity. But oppositions in science are resolved by science itself.

Here “religion” represents a primitive phase of human development that is destined to be replaced by a more scientifically enlightened age. This seems to echo the view of history captured by the positivist philosopher Auguste Comte, who “saw religion as a primitive stage through which humanity must pass to achieve scientific maturity” (Harrison, 2015: 143). While Marx tries to siphon out the theological from the category of science, Marx’s idea of science here takes on its own metaphysical significance and becomes the goal toward which society naturally progresses and the spirit of his ideal society. Comte’s vision of the scientific stage of humanity also carries its own metaphysical significance, and Comte envisioned the establishment of the Religion of the Humanity in the coming scientific age. In contrast, Marx does not employ the category of religion to describe his historical materialist soteriology and the moral base of property-free society.

Together with “philosophy,” Marx’s employment of “science” as opposed to religion is part of his discursive strategy to demarcate himself from the dominance of theology. He has transformed the meaning of these categories, and utilized them to challenge a theological worldview, and the ideological foundation of the church state.

Religion versus politics

Again in his “Leading Article,” Marx frequently uses the adjective “political”: “political geography” and “political truth” (Marx, [1842] 2002a: 35), “political articles” (37), “political quality” and “political object.” In particular, the expression such as “If religion becomes a political quality, an object of politics” (41) posits the idea that “religion” and “politics” are by default qualitatively different from each other, constituting two independent spheres. The claim of “religion” becoming “political” or an object of “politics” only makes sense when we imagine a clear conceptual boundary between “religion” and “politics” and the possibility of its transgression. In general, Marx’s conceptualization of “politics” indicates the definitive quality of the state and its governance, as opposed to religion as the quality of the Church: “the political quality, not the virtue of the Church, was the highest quality of the state” (43).

Against the Prussian state

The religion–politics distinction in Marx’s writing is first directed against the Prussian state. Marx regards the Prussian state as an improper “religious” state, which is yet essentially different from the “political” state. Marx employs the term “Christian state” as a category of the religious state that “acknowledges Christianity as its foundation” (Marx, [1843] 2002b: 48). In contrast, the Prussian state is regarded by Marx as “the so-called Christian state,” in the sense that it is not the proper Christian state. According to Marx, “The perfect Christian state is rather the atheist state, democratic state, the state which relegates religion to the level of the elements of civil society” (53). Speaking on the “Christian state” of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, Marx points out that the Prussian state has Catholics and Protestants. In the Prussian context, Marx argues, the king Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s attempt to make “the general spirit of Christianity” the particular spirit of the state defines the general spirit of Christianity on the basis of his Protestant views that reject the Catholic as heretical (Marx, 1998 [1843]). For Marx, different Christian traditions are mutually exclusive to each other, and he claims the impossibility for the state to claim the generic Christian foundation that encompasses all different Christian traditions. Given this, Marx argues that the realized Christian state is the state that renounces Christianity as its foundation and relegates it to the inner realm of private individuals (Boer, 2012: 167–168; Marx, 1998 [1843]).

In his own time Marx regards the United States as an example of the perfect Christian state, “with the separation of church and state making religion a private affair” (Boer, 2010b). Given this, he claims: “The so-called Christian state,” meaning the Prussian state under the king Friedrich Wilhelm IV, “is simply the non-state” (Marx, [1843] 2002b: 53). As long as the ruling monarch seeks its foundation in Christianity, Marx argues, the Prussian state cannot be a proper Christian state.

At the same time, Marx also posits another view of the religious state, which is contradictory to the previous one. He suggests: “The truly religious state is the theocratic state.” This category includes “the Jewish state,” “Tibet,” and “the Byzantine state.” Marx characterizes “the truly Christian state” as the state that demands total submission to the church (42). In contrast, Marx insists, the Prussian state did not have a single Church it would submit to, but the king was charged with maintaining the peace of the multiplicity of confessions. In this context, Marx (Marx, [1843] 2002b: 42) argues:

Once a state includes several confessions with equal rights it cannot be a religious state without violating particular confessions; it cannot be a church which condemns adherents of another confession as heretics, which make every piece of bread dependent on faith, which makes dogma the link between separate individuals and existence as citizens of the state.

In Prussia, young Marx found the mutual antagonism between Protestants and Catholics ran deep, to the extent that the exclusive particularity of each Protestant sects and Catholicism had ruled out any generic notion of the Christian religion (Boer, 2010b; Marx, [1843] 1998). One may imagine, however, the Protestant theocracy as an example of the religious state. For example, one of important roles of the Prussian king is to ensure “the interests and extension of Protestant faith” (Weir, 2014: 31). Against this kind of claim, Marx, however, regards the Protestant theocracy as fundamentally contradictory since, in his view, Protestantism claims no supreme head of the church. Given this, the domination of Protestantism would mean “the cult of the will of the government” (Marx, [1843] 2002b: 42).

For Marx, the truly religious state is, in his own terms, either “atheistic” (e.g. the United Sates) or “theocratic” (e.g. the Jewish state, Tibet, the Byzantine state, and the like). Conceptualizing “Christian state” in this way, Marx pushes the Prussian state out of the category of Christianity and religion. Yet, it is not a political state. Therefore, it is “nonstate.”

Implicit in Marx’s observation of the United States in his own time as the fully realized Christian (therefore, atheistic) state is the privatization of all-encompassing notion of religion and confessionality. The young Marx believes that the United States’ governments in his own time are, as expressed in their constitutions, indifferent to religion, having conceptualized it as a matter of personal faith, located in the inner, private realm of individuals. Marx articulates this privatized idea of religion through his idea of the emancipation of the state from “the religious” to “the political.” He seems to believe that the state ought to be emancipated from an all-encompassing “religious” foundation. The state, which has been emancipated from “religion” in this sense, is called the political state. More precisely, Marx anticipates that in the way in which the snake casts off its skin at different stages in its development, the Christian state casts off its “religion” to fully grow into the political state. In other words, the political state is “[t]he final form of the Christian state, which recognizes itself as state and disregards the religion of its members” (57). Marx believes that “the free states of North America” (meaning the United States) are the political state “in its fully developed form” (49).

Marx measures the “political” characteristics of state in terms of its disassociation with “religion.” In Germany, Marx claims, “there is no political state” because the state “acknowledges Christianity as its foundation.” In France, he continues, the constitutional state preserves “the appearance of a state religion … in the formula … of a religion of the majority” (48). Then, Marx concludes: “Only in the free states of North America” (meaning the United States) “the political state exists in its fully developed form” (49). The disassociation of the state from “religion,” in the sense of all-encompassing Christian Truth, was called “political” emancipation.

Yet, political emancipation is not human emancipation. This is because people in the most developed political state, such as the United States, are not yet free from “religion,” in the sense of privatized soteriological belief. Marx comments: “North America [the United States] is the land of religiosity [Religiösität] par excellence … ” (49). For Marx, the prevalence of privatized religion in a perfect political state reflects the persisting defects and contradictions of the human condition in the so-called civil society as opposed to “political society.”

Marx conceptualizes “civil society” as the binary opposite of “political society.” Whereas political society represents Marx’s ideal type of society where human beings can fulfill the specific character of one’s being, an individual in civil society becomes an alien being deluded by “the fantasy, the dream, the postulate of Christianity” (56). Civil society, for Marx, is also a bourgeois society dominated by self-interest. Individuals in civil society are characterized as “egoistic,” and they are separated from fellow citizens and the community (59). Marx uses the notion of privatized religion against the bourgeois civil society. He argues, it is the distance between the ideal of political society and the reality of civil society that is compensated by “religion” in the sense of a soteriological belief. Therefore by eliminating these gaps, he envisions, “religion” (whatever this means) would not be required.

Whether or not one agrees with this proposition of the young Marx is not the issue here. I am not assessing or evaluating young Marx’s vision of the disappearance of religion in his ideal society. What I am trying to highlight instead is the function of the category “religion” in young Marx’s discourse. Whatever classified as religion is labeled by him as a fantastic illusion, while the young Marx identifies his own soteriology against “religion.” He also reimagined the categories of “philosophy,” “science,” and “politics” as essentially distinct from “religion.” Then he associates his own value orientation to these ostensibly nonreligious realms. The young Marx’s utilization of the category “religion” authorizes his own soteriology against it. When “religion” means irrational, private faith in fantastic illusion, Marx mystifies his own discourse as a rational and objective analysis of empirical reality.

Concluding remarks

Marx’s “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” starts with the following sentence: “the criticism of religion has been essentially completed” (Marx, [1844] 2002c: 171). “Religion” which has been critiqued here is the all-encompassing Christian Truth, and the theological discourse deeply embedded in the social order and people’s conceptual framework in Marx’s time. In this light, “the criticism of religion” seems to refer to the nineteenth-century German theological critique of Christian ideology which had been represented by the philosophies of Strauss, Bauer, Feuerbach, and the like (Ling, 1980: 16). Therefore, what seems to have been “completed” in Marx’s mind is a critique of Christian theology. Hence, according to Breckman (2001: 5), Marx presented “his own socioeconomic critique as the real supersession of the preoccupations of the anti-theological Hegelians.” Thus, Marx pursues a critical study of the material condition of human lives without seeking any divine cause.

Given this, Marx claims that “the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism” in the sense that the critique of the Prussian state requires the deconstruction of its Christian and theological foundation. Soon after, however, Marx regards “religion” as “the fantastic reality of heaven.” “Religion” in this sense seems to indicate both the idea of Christian (or Protestant) civility and a soteriological belief within the inner realm of individuals. It also seems to imply various non-Christian “religions” that are imagined to be the foundations of different civilizations in the world. Both encompassing and privatized ideas of religion, as well as “religions” around the world, are no longer regarded by Marx as the precondition of society and individuals. In contrast, he argues: “Man makes religion” and it is “[t]his state and this society” that produces religion. In other words, it is a “heartless” and “soulless” condition of the material world that requires “religion” (which is manifested in various ways as “religions” around the world) as a social ideology which naturalizes such a condition, and it also leaves people with no other option than taking “religion” (as a form of a soteriological belief), like opium, in order to endure suffering by reflecting themselves “in the fantastic reality of heaven.” Religion in the latter privatized sense is “the sigh of the oppressed creature” (Marx, [1844] 2002c: 171).

When Marx was writing the famous phrase “Religion … is the opium of the people,” the term religion could refer to the idea of Christian civility as opposed to pagan barbarity. In the specific context of Prussia in the 1840s, it was more likely to have meant Protestant civility. At the same time, when Marx equates “religion” with “opium,” he has also privatized the notion of religion. “Religion” in this sense is conceptualized as something taken by people for its euphoric effects. It means not only an ideological foundation of the state, but something like a commodity that is chosen and consumed by private individuals. Nevertheless, Marx assumes that “religion” as a private faith also has an ideological function to naturalize and legitimize injustice and suffering. At the same time, the same term is utilized as a generic category, denoting the apparent “essence” supposedly shared by all “religions” in the world.

In the religion–opium equation of the young Marx, the connotation of opium is ambiguous, as it could mean both positively (a “medicine”) and negatively (a “poison”). In contrast, the connotation of Marx’s “religion” is much less ambiguous. It seems clear in Marx’s early writings that, although its meanings are multilayered, “religion” is believed to be something to be attacked and abolished, and as something destined to disappear as society progresses. In the young Marx’s mind, what would be still left after the disappearance of religion is the ostensibly nonreligious realms of “philosophy,” “science,” and “politics.” In Marx’s time, all these three categories were deeply immersed by theological language. In his effort to construct nontheological discourse in “philosophy,” “science,” and “politics,” Marx reimagined “religion” as a fantastic illusion consumed by private individuals for its euphoric effect like opium.

The twenty-first-century readers may be familiar with this idea of religion and the classification of “philosophy,” “science,” and “politics” as nonreligion. Yet, we should not assume, even in the present age, that such classification is self-evidently clear. With regard to the science–religion distinction, for example, it is recently claimed that the rigid materialistic assumptions in modern science are surprisingly similar to so-called religious faith (Sheldrake, 2012), whereas the atheistic criticism against “religion” by the evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins is characterized as directly or indirectly “religious in nature” (McGrath, 2005: 158). Famously, Edwin A. Burtt ([1932] 2003) uncovers the metaphysical foundations of modern science. This further unsettles the assumption that supports the science–religion separation.

In terms of the “politics” of the modern state, its structural mechanism of nationalistic indoctrination and its ideological forces to mobilize the citizen are often described as “religious” (e.g. Gentile, 2001; Hayes, 1960; Marvin and David, 1999). Probably the biggest irony, however, is that in the late twentieth century and twenty-first centuries, the “philosophy” of Marx and Marxism is also often characterized as a religion (Miranda, 1980; Schumpeter, [1976] 2003: 5; Tucker, 1972). Fitzgerald (2011: 259) argues:

Marxism is a soteriological praxis aimed at the end of history through the liberation of human consciousness from ideological illusions. In this, it shares some important family resemblances with both Christianity and liberal capitalism. As soteriologies that are not themselves inductively derivable from empirical observation, all three ideologies could easily be classified as religions. They are all based on acts of faith in a metaphysically speculative endpoint in history. Both Marxism and liberal capitalism share many family resemblances to what are typically thought of as ‘religions’, despite claims made by their respective devotees that they are not religious but scientific.

This is not to say both Marxism and liberal capitalism should be regarded as religions, but to highlight the importance of paying critical attention to the category of religion. Marx utilizes the term “religion” as the category of fantastic illusions in order to define his positionality against it. It therefore mystifies his own discourse as somehow more “real” and “true” compared with “religion.”

Marx’s self-identification of his own positionality as “nonreligious” and the reification of “religion” in Marx’s discourse may be a shortfall in relation to his critique of capitalism. When Marx indicates the association between religion and capitalist interests, for example, he argues that religion as a soteriological belief serves liberal capitalism by diverting people’s attention away from the contradictions in their immediate material condition to the promise of future salvation in a fantastic illusion. However, when both Marx’s own philosophy and liberal capitalism that he critiques cannot claim an essential distinction from what is called “religion,” Marx’s notion of religion cannot have any analytical weight. In this context, “religion” is ultimately an empty category, and its connotation as fantastic illusion functions only to authorize Marx’s own soteriology as if it represents empirical reality.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers, Dr Haimo Schulz Meinen, Dr Karsten Lehman, and Professor Lucian Hölscher for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

Author biography

Mitsutoshi Horii is an associate professor at Shumei University, Japan. He is currently working at Chaucer College Canterbury, which is a Shumei University’s overseas campus in the United Kingdom. His current research explores the idea of 'religion' in various discursive fields, ranging from classical social theories in the nineteenth-century Europe to the contemporary Japanese sociological context. He also has a continuing interest in sociology of risk consciousness.

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