**What was the opinion of Karl Marx on religion?**

Justin Schwartz has already provided on Quora an admirable exposition of Marx’s views on religion here.

Justin Schwartz’s answer to What was the basis of Karl Marx’s opinion that religion was the “opium of the people”?

However, there is more that can be added concerning Marx’s position on religion. Yes, he saw religion as serving as a kind of “opium of the people” but he saw that there is more to it than just that.

The American social democrat, Michael Harrington, provided a good development of the Marxist position on religion in his book The Politics at God’s Funeral: The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization. There, Harrington presented an analysis of religion in the Western world that built upon the analyses of Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, along with non-Marxists like Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, plus theologians like Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, Tillich and Hans Kung, whose work, in Harrington’s view deconstructed traditional concepts of God.

As Mark Lindley and myself in our essay, MR Online | Six Prominent American Freethinkers, pointed out concerning Harrington:

“. . .the Western world since the beginning of the modern era has been experiencing a process of secularization which in many countries has slowly but surely undermined religious faith. In Chapter 1, entitled “A Book Crying Wolf,” [Harrington] described how this process of secularization has been going on for more than three hundred years. Consciously echoing Nietzsche, he described the process as the “dying” of God, and he saw it as having profound consequences not only for religions and religious institutions but also for the social fabric of Western societies inasmuch as religion had often contributed substantially to social coherence:

With a few lapses into liberalism, or even radicalism, God has been a leading conservative in Judeo-Christian society. His death not only means empty churches and bereft individuals but also marks the rending of the social fabric.

He saw the decline of religion, and thereby the historical loss, in the West, of the sense of divinity, as having entailed a loss of

that [kind of] philosophy for non-philosophers that made an intolerable life tolerable for the great mass of the people and thus contributed both to civil peace and to the passive acceptance of injustice; God the conservative, who legitimized established institutions, and the much rarer persona, God the radical, who legitimized the overthrow of those institutions; transcendent symbols and sacraments of the human community; spiritual dimension for the pursuit of daily bread; [and a] major source of personal and social identity.

“Drawing upon Hegel and Marx, Harrington saw the decline of traditional religion as being rooted in the development of capitalist society. He said that capitalism has, in effect, entailed an “agnostic economy.” In this regard he stressed the commonalities shared by sophisticated Marxist analysts of religion and the followers of Max Weber. Although it is easy to contrast the “materialist” analysis perpetrated by vulgar Marxists with the “idealism” of Weber, the most sophisticated Marxists, such as Antonio Gramsci and Franz Borkenau, reached, on the basis of Marxist analysis, conclusions quite similar to Weber’s,

“as their analyses of the transition from feudalism to capitalism emphasized the role of Protestant theology as a means for articulating the interests of the rising bourgeoisie. In Harrington’s view, the rise of Protestantism had not been simply a reflection of the rise of a capitalist bourgeoisie or vice versa. Rather, “Protestantism and capitalism were reciprocally interacting causes and effects in a gigantic social transformation,”

and now, the more recent loss of faith in the traditional Judeo-Christian had not — or at least not yet — given rise to a new humanism capable of performing the functions which religion used to play . . “

And we went on to say concerning Harrington:

“For Harrington, the fact that both serious atheists and serious religious believers have a common enemy, namely a capitalism which has engendered an alienated and alienating amoral social order, provides a basis for a possible alliance between them. Harrington pointed out (correctly in our view) that Marx was not a militant atheist in the sense of someone calling for a war on religion. In Marx’s view, people turned to religion in large part because it offered succor in a dehumanizing world. Therefore, for Marx (and for Harrington) people could not be expected to abandon their religious beliefs until the social structures that oppressed them had been overturned or radically modified. But as Harrington well realized (in part from his experiences in the Catholic Worker movement), there are many religious believers who are just as concerned with battling social injustices as any atheistic socialists might be. The battle against social injustice could in Harrington’s view bring atheists and religious believers together in a common struggle on behalf of humanity. He therefore welcomed the moves that most European social democratic parties made after World War II when they dropped rules that had either barred religious believers from joining the parties or had blocked them from leadership positions.”

Karl Marx in 1875