Sheffield: Equinox, 2024, 81 pages. Reviewed by Paul Overend.
Paul-Francois Tremlett is a senior lecturer in religious studies at the Open University. This short book is introductory, written for both A-Level sociology students (p.vii) and a general reader, and takes a sociological approach to its material. It has accessibility in mind, referencing key sociological concepts and figures (in shaded blocks), with a helpful short glossary of terms from Marxist writers and cultural theory (pp.65-68), and questions at the end of chapters for group discussion.
Chapters include (1) Introducing Marx; (2) Marx’s ideas of Religion, Power, iIdeology, and Change; (3) Engels: The First Marxist Historian and Anthropologist of Religion; (4) Hegemony, Ideology, and Religion: Althusser, Gramsci and the Embrace of Uncertainty (5) The Frankfurt School: Horkheimer, Habermas, and Religion.
Apart from passing reference to the diversity of religions in the preface, it is a Christianity which “effectively stands for other religions” (p.ix) and the writers considered are western. The concept of religion might have been problematised for students with reference to Mao Zedong, for in spite of his antipathy to religion Maoism took on some religious characteristics, rather like the way Lenin’s tomb/relics provided a place for pilgrimage, or the Marxist texts have a tendency to become sacred scripture (which is Stuart Hall’s observation, noted on p.40, which references Halls call for “relative indeterminacy” for Marxist theory.)
Chapter 3 on Friedrich Engels includes a valuable consideration of Edward Burnett Taylor’s problematic evolutionist anthropological understandings of religion, from primitive religion to monotheism. The chapter also explains that Engels drew on radical religious figures and movements, viewing Thomas Müntzer to be a proto-communist, for example, so indicating how religion can be a vehicle of social protest. (For a fuller development of the theme of marxists’ indebtedness to the bible and theology, see Ronald Boer’s substantial work referenced below, or recent Marxist interest in St Paul). This example is echoed in Chapter 4 in the section on Louis Althusser, which notes that Althusser was a Catholic who recognised that in religious institutions, such as schools, religion could be a medium through which people find meaning in everyday life. Althusser was actually associated with the Catholic left wing worker-priest movement for a time and in an interview in 1980 stated that “I became a communist because I was a Catholic.” The chapter on political Liberation Theology also shows that religions are not homogeneous bodies but involved in resistance.
The concise and introductory nature of the material necessitates difficult decisions, but a fuller explanation of Marx’s understanding of religion would have been helpful. When a question at the end of the first chapter (p.9) asks, ‘Are religions the opium of the people?’, it is difficult to answer at this point given the lack of explanation of Marx’s understanding of religion and without the context of this quotation, which is from ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ (1844):
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. 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… [Therefore] the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition
is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, the embryonic criticism of this vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Religion as ‘the heart of the heartless world’ nuances the idea that pacifies a society, simply preventing their responding to material conditions, so serving to mystify real material relations. But the illusory nature of this happiness is only mentioned two chapters on (p.28).
Or again, Chapter 2 considers various texts in which Marx references religion, but these are not unpacked theologically to give insight into Marx’s understanding of religion. So when mentioning Ludwig Feuerbach’s notion of alienation and Marx’s ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ (1844), it might have been noted that Feuerbach’s idea that theology is a form of anthropology (Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 2nd ed 1843) is echoed by Marx, who opens the Critique by stating ‘Man, … has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he sought a superman’. Marx opposes religion in this text, as he understands it to be ’an inverted’ or false consciousness of the world:
Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Introducing students to primary sources with a longer quotation such as this—to break down, engage with and debate—would have pedagogical benefits, developing their critical skills, while explicating this humanist point in Marx’s approach to religion, which is the early humanist Marx that Althusser moves away from in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970, in Lenin and Philosophy).
Nevertheless, the book deals with its complex and vast subject matter in a very readable and intelligible way, and as with any good introduction leaves a reader interested for more.
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Ronald Boer’s five volume work so far includes Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology, 2007; Criticism of Religion: On Marxism and Theology, II, 2009; Criticism of Theology: On Marxism and Theology III, 2011