Marx and Religion

The political economist and philosopher Karl Marx (1818–1883) viewed religion as the very basis of the self-conscious knowledge of oneself as [Page 753]a social being; thus, the criticism of religion was the required starting point of all social critique. Marx's understanding of how religion is closely coupled with political economy renders him crucial for considering how global religions and global economic forces intersect and may become interdependent on one another for their expansion. Such a critical perspective has been central to anti-globalization social movements and has informed anticapitalist religious movements such as the Base Communities of Latin America. This short entry describes the distinct functions Marx attributed to religion and then explores Marx's relevance to discussions of global religion.

First, religion functions as a consolation and otherworldly compensation. Religion works in this way for those deprived of material comforts and agency—those whose numbingly repetitive and underpaid labor alienates them from the hope or capacity of exerting control over their destinies. Religion expresses alienation, since the gods’ control over humanity mirrors and replicates people's impotent suffering in earthly life, yet it also protests alienation by trying to transform its conditions, even if, from Marx's perspective, such religious protest misrecognizes the real sources of oppression.

Second, for the ruling classes—formerly the land-owning nobility and, later, capitalists who own the productive infrastructure—religion functions as an ideological justification. Religion provides a language and rationale justifying unequal distributions of wealth as providentially ordained or as the reward of moral virtue. Just as European kings once presented themselves as not only the agents but also the very vessels of God's presence on earth, ruling classes and nation-states of the modern period present, and may actually perceive, their favored positions as a manifestation of divine favor. Furthermore, the “ruling ideas” of a given period that typically institutionalize the rights of the powerful (who are also those ideas’ authors) may be claimed to reside in a transcendent authority beyond political contest. The “right to private property” is a key example.

Third, Marx understood religion and political economy to be intimately related. Like the sociologist Max Weber after him, he viewed certain religious ideas as providing fertile ground for specific economic forms. For example, in the first section of Das Kapital (Capital), Marx described Christianity, with its “cult of abstract man,” as the perfect religion for societies based on the production and exchange of commodities abstracted from any particular local meaning. In this sense, Marx remains salient for the discussion of global religions. For example, Marx pioneered the by now commonplace recognition not only that the West's Christian missionary projects were closely imbricated with colonial demands of economic reform, but that conversion to Christianity and conversion to capitalism were frequently two facets of a single social process.

Christianity and other global religions are easily transmitted in part because they are abstracted from any particular territory and context of meaning. Commodities exchanged in capitalist economies share this ease of circulation. Both capitalism and global religions acquire their vitality from the prospect of relentless expansion into new markets, and both transform the very meaning of human social exchange and relations with their arrival. Thus, Marx viewed capitalism as itself akin to a global religion, a religion best opposed by a different “specter,” namely, communism.

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