[What we have here is an excerpt from the most capable Christopher Caudwell expounding the Marxist position on religion. Marxism doesn't play the abstract game with religion because it recognizes that its ideas are the result of a social process which is entangled in class antagonisms. This was Marx's axiom which he derived from Feuerbach, "The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man."]


Marx, however, developing in his revolutionary activity Feuerbach’s and Morgan’s pioneer work, had shown nearly 100 years ago the correct path to follow – not as a new ‘fad’ derived from a limited sphere (the psycho-analytical, evolutionary, or functional approaches) but as part of a consistent world-view, the arrival at which meant that one had ceased to be bourgeois.

(i) ‘Religion is a fantastic reality’.

Fantastic, because the statements it makes about existents are incorrect, because the ideas of outer reality incorporated in it do not correspond with outer reality. Real, because these ideas are causally linked with material reality, and are not only determined but also determine, in their turn exerting a causal influence on their matrix. Thus by acknowledging that religious ideas are not spontaneous but form part of active reality, Marxism is able to analyse more deeply the real causes which produced them. The analysis of religion becomes also an analysis of society.

(ii) ‘Religion is consciousness of self and the self-feeling of a man who has not yet found himself or has lost himself again.’

The animals are not religious, and religion thus becomes a badge of man, not as mere animal but as distinct from animals, and man distinct from animals is man in association as a functioning group, a group engaged in economic production. Religion is seen to be, like the consciousness of which it is a part, an economic product. Because it is conscious it is ‘higher’ than the blind unconscious knowledge of reality shown by the animal in its actions, the animal whose ‘notions’ of causality exist implicitly as mere conditioned or unconditioned reflexes. Yet religion is a distorted knowledge of reality. It is a consciousness of self which is lawless and unattached – which has not yet found itself or has lost itself. Such a man is conscious of himself, but projects this consciousness outside himself, unaware as yet of his own necessities or of the universe of causality in which his existence is grounded.

(iii) ‘Man is not an abstract being existing outside the world. Man – that is the world of men, the State, society.’

This consciousness is not the consciousness of an abstract average man. It is the self-feeling of a man in the world of men, living in active social relations with other men, and forming a distinctive society. It is the self-feeling of a particular individual in a particular society at a particular time, and hence the study of religion is inseparable from the study of society.

(iv) ‘This state, this society, produces religion – an inverted consciousness of the world – because the world itself an inverted world.’

The religious distortion of consciousness is produced by the structure of the society in which it is generated. It is the outcome of an illusion, a flaw, an infection, in that society. Thus the criticism of religion is also the criticism of the society that produced it, and this does not mean a criticism of that society in the abstract but of its concrete reality, a criticism of all the social relations engendered by its level of economic production.

(v) ‘The struggle against religion is therefore, indirectly, the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.’

Since the criticism of religion becomes, to Marxism, the criticism of the concrete social relations which produced it, the struggle against its errors and its distortions can never be a struggle against religion as such – a kind of armchair atheism – because such a struggle is not a real one – it is ideal truth fighting ideal religion and both, when abstracted from action, are unreal. The very criticism of religion, as soon as it becomes criticism of concrete religion, becomes criticism of the social relations that engendered it, and when this criticism emerges creatively as a struggle, it will not be an ideal struggle against religious ideas but a concrete struggle against real social relations. There is no absolute truth to set against fantastic lies, but fantastic reality whose fantastic content is exposed in real living.

(vi) ‘Religious misery is at once the expression of real misery and a protest against that real misery. Religion is the sigh of the hard-pressed creature; the heart of a heartless world.... It is the opium of the people.’

But what we have previously said does not mean that the struggle against religion is merely the struggle against the non-religious social relations that produced it, and that religion is exempted from the field of battle. The struggle is against the real, concrete, social relations which produce these beliefs, and some of these relations are religious relations. The whole of concrete society is the domain of Marxism, and religion is included in concrete society now. The religious beliefs, and those social forms that are religious, are part of the existing superstructure of society. Active criticism of that society involves the transformation of its social relations, and therefore encounters the resistance of all those men for whom the superstructure is the expression of their special status and privilege in society. This resistance makes use of all the forms of the existing superstructure, including the religious forms. Religious beliefs are part of the form in which ‘men become conscious of the struggle and fight it out to an issue’.

Yet religion is at once the expression of real misery and a protest against that real misery’. It pictures an inverted world which just because it is inverted, will also be a criticism of the real world. A religion expressive of the social relations of a virile and active age may, as those relations emerge more and more clearly as the bulwark of an exploiting class now grown parasitic, finally find some of its content in antagonism to that exploiting class. Conversely the religion which embodies the protest of an exploited class may, as that class becomes revolutionary and creative, itself grow vital and insurgent. Religion, because it is the opium of the people and not the pride of the exploiting class, may at some time give rise to a revolutionary religion, the weapon of the people.

(Here we find individuals such as Dr. King, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich.)

Source: Christopher Caudwell. From Further Studies in a Dying Culture I. The Breath of Discontent: A Study in Bourgeois Religion https://www.marxists.org/archive/caudwell/1949/further-studies/ch01.htm