In light of the dominant trend to condemn all forms of religion within “vul-gar” Marxism, as well as liberalism’s thorough attempts to privatize and/
or functionalize religion in the post-secular society, the Critical Theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, as well as the Frankfurt School in general, have made an important distinction between prophetic – or critical/
negative/humanistic – religion and what they define as affirmative-positive and/or authoritarian religion. The prior form of religion, through its nega-tivity, escapes positivism’s semantic deflation of religious potentials and its priestly upholding of the world-as-it-is found in the positive religious tradi-tions. The act of witnessing and professing by way of a negative theology, a negative religion that roots itself within the prophetic and Socratic soil, is qualitatively different than it is within positive religions. In order to under-stand these competing trends within the Abrahamic religious traditions in the context of the post-secular society, we must first return to Marx, who represents the second push towards secularization after the ascendance of the Bourgeoisie.
Affirmation and Negativity: Marx
Marx’s analysis toward religion was dialectical in nature; while he understood, following Voltaire, that religion often allied itself to those who had the big-gest battalions, i.e. those who held temporal power, he also understood that religion preserves within itself the genuine hopes, desires, and longings of the oppressed, exploited, and denigrated masses; it was at once the record of suf-fering and at the same time the illusion that anesthetized of such sufsuf-fering.
This dialectical understanding can be witnessed in Marx’s most famous defini-tion of religion, found in his Contribudefini-tion to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,
Religious suffering is at the same time an express of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed
creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless con-ditions. It is the opium of the people.1
If one refuses to translate Marx’s philosophy of religion into a simple anti- religion slogan, one can read within this passage the true nature of Marx’s ob-servation; religion is both a protest against an oppressive and violent world and a source of affirmation (or at least a subjective acquiescence) of that world.
For Marx, it is the distorted and oppressive conditions of the world that create the need for a religion that dulls the consciousness, to make life bearable, to anesthetize the wound of a damaged life, but those conditions simultaneously produce the need for resistance to that damaging and crippling world. What Marx observed was that religion has within itself certain potentials that can either aid in the liberation of mankind or can reconcile mankind to his oppres-sion, although he believed the later to more accurate in terms of the history of religion.
Marx was not the first to reject a form of religion that would dull the con-science in favor of one that would sharpen it. Following the great enlightener Immanuel Kant, he applied such a critique to the realm of political economy, whereas Kant confined it to personal morality. In his book Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant writes,
The aim of those who have clergyman summoned to them at the end of life is normally to find in him a comforter, not on account of their physi-cal suffering brought on by the last illness or even by the natural fear in the face of death (for on this score death itself, which puts an end to life, can be the comforter) but because of the moral sufferings, the reproaches of their conscience. At such time, however, conscience ought rather to be stirred up and sharpened, in order that whatever good yet to be done, or whatever consequences of past evil still left to be undone (repaired for), will not be neglected, in accordance with the warning, ‘Agree with thine adversary’ (with him who has a legal right against you) ‘quickly, while thou art in the way with him’ (i.e. so long as you still live), ‘lest he deliver thee to the judge’ (after death), etc. But to administer opium to conscience instead, as it were, is to be guilty of a crime against the human being himself and against those who survive him, and is totally contrary
1 Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” in The Marx & Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1978), 54.
to the purpose for which such support given to conscience at life’s end can be held necessary.2
Despite the bifurcated conception of religion, which Marx accepted, it does not mean that Marx himself believed in the metaphysical claims of religious traditions. Indeed, he believed that Feuerbach’s “projection” thesis had already answered the question of the origins of religion, which were entirely within the psychological and material conditions of man himself. He states, ‘the basis of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion; religion does not make man.
Religion is indeed man’s self-consciousness and self-awareness so long as he has not found himself or has lost himself again.’3 For Marx, man creates god in his own image and not the other way around, but that consciousness is itself a creation of the material world; a world in which suffering and oppression is created and/or exasperated by the condition imposed on humanity by modern capitalism and other historical forms of oppression.4 Nevertheless, religion, as a social phenomenon created by the unjust conditions of society, not only expresses a protesting voice of man, but also has the potential to impel him to-wards action against the very conditions that oppress him. The inherent – but often neglected – negativity within religion, especially the Abrahamic tradi-tions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, stresses the “fallenness” – the “it is not as it should be” – of this world. It is not a world that manifests justice, equality, and fairness, but a world that is driven by lust, greed, wickedness, and unwar-ranted violence, and therefore it is a world that demands its own negation via a conditions-changing nemesis: a messianic figure, group, or movement.
Yet for Marx, the negativity of Judaism and Christianity (he wasn’t too famil-iar with Islam) was negated when religion reconciled itself to the world, when it became “of the world,” thus it legitimates the world and the unjust powers that ruled the world. In this sense, religion, as it is reconciled to the world as it is, became the ideological mask that veiled the class interests of the ruling elites;
it legitimated their rule, it sanctioned their actions, and it absolved the sins of their transgressions. That is why he believed that ‘the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism,’ as one must first tear asunder religious legitima-tion from the terror of history’s oppressors that it often sanctifies.5 Temporal power must be evacuated of its divine legitimation as to liberate mankind from the religio-existential anxiety and fears about social and political rebellion. In
2 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge, ma: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 93.
3 Marx, Contribution, 53.
4 Ibid., 53.
5 Ibid., 53.
order to move towards universal emancipation, the equation of state and the divine had to be broken to unleash the liberational potential of the masses.
Additionally, the identification of religion with power – as opposed to the pow-erless in Abrahamic thought – inevitably repressed religion’s emancipatory potentials in the cage of conformity, as it shifts the divine’s blessing from the victims of nature and history to the victors within nature and history. For Marx, in order for human emancipation to be achieved, religion had to be transcend-ed as it had been perversely transfigurtranscend-ed into a positive-affirming force in the world, i.e. it affirms and upholds the torturous status quo and rejects any radi-cal attempt to overthrown the world as it is. Positive religion is religion that has abandoned its essential negativity, i.e. its ability to determinately negate the world of suffering, the world of antagonisms, and the world of oppression. For Marx, religion’s insistence on suffering peacefully the injustices of the world, and not radically transforming them, is a powerful tool in the hands of those who do not want political-economic and cultural opposition, whose fortunes are tied to the status quo, and whose existence are affixed to the ruling elites.
Therefore, mankind must be unshackled from its religious chains if it is to once again become acquainted with its true human nature, which is free. Marx says,
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 con-dition is a call to abandon a concon-dition that requires illusions. The criti-cism of religion is, therefore, the embryonic criticriti-cism of this vale of tears of which religion is the halo…
The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act and fashion his reality as a man who has lost his illusions and regained his reason; so that he will revolve about himself as his own true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long as he does not revolve about himself.6
This sense of religion’s abandonment of his its own humanistic and liberation-al potentiliberation-als is liberation-also echoed in the writings of Max Horkheimer, the intellectuliberation-al initiator of the Frankfurt School for Social Research. He writes in his Thoughts on Religion, which is his reformulation of Marx’s “opiate of the masses” pas-sage, that,
The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and
6 Ibid., 54.
society give expression in their operation. Dissatisfaction with earthly destiny is the strongest motive for acceptance of a transcendental being.
If justice resides with God, then it is not to be found in the same measure in the world. Religion is the record of the wishes, desires, and accusation of countless generations.
But the more Christianity brought God’s rule into harmony with events in the world, the more the meaning of religion became perverted. In Ca-tholicism God was already regarded as in certain aspects the creator of the earthly order, while Protestantism attributed the world’s course di-rectly to the will of the Almighty. Not only was the state of affairs on earth at any given moment transfigured with the radiance of divine justice, but the latter was itself brought down to the level of the corrupt relations which mark earthly life. Christianity lost its function of expressing the ideal, to the extent that it became the bedfellow of the state.7
For Horkheimer, learning from Marx, the ‘image of a perfect justice’ that early Christians embraced – and so often died for as martyrs – in the face of the injus-tice of the Roman Empire and nature itself, evaporated when it was legalized by Emperor Constantine via the Edict of Milan (313 ce), and later transformed into the official ideology of the state by the Roman Emperor Theodosius in his imperial decree Cunctos Populos, also known as the Edict of Thessalonica (380 ce). Constantinian Christianity – the strange reconciliation of Christ and Roman (state) power – depleted Christianity’s potential for revolutionary change as well as its ability to substantively express the real possibility of a fu-ture reconciled world.8 What came from this marriage of religion and state was not the long-awaited messiah and the messianic age, but only the institution of the Roman Catholic Church – the priestly administration of a once revolution-ary but now politically conservative message. For the first generation of Chris-tians, the Kingdom of God was not the Empire of Rome, but for later ChrisChris-tians,
7 Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 2002), 188.
8 See James A. Reimer, “Constantine: From Religious Pluralism to Christian Hegemony” in The Future of Religion: Toward a Reconciled Society, ed. Michael R. Ott. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2007. One should remember that even in Constantine’s time, Christianity was still marginal-ized if not oppressed within the Roman Empire. By merging their religion with the power of the state, Christians gained not only gain a legal status but also the protection of the state.
The more corrupting moment of Christian history is when Emperor Theodosius made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the state, in the year 395 ce. At this moment Christianity downed the power of the state and therefore betrayed its critical-prophetic role. After this, Christian authorities, including the Emperor, set about the systematic destruction of pre-Christian religions as well “heretical” forms of pre-Christianity.
Augustine’s “City of God” became the consolation for the parousia-delay (“God with us” delay) – the fact that Jesus had not yet returned.9 The church as an institution of worldly power, for Marx and other critical religiologists, has the been primary purveyor of positive religion, as it itself became the object of faith, the crafter of dogma, the teacher who extolls the values of passive- suffering, and the final source of legitimation for the status quo. In his simple Christology, Marx accused the church of abandoning the ‘carpenter whom the rich men killed’ and thus perverting the revolutionary potential of Christian-ity’s essential negativity towards the world.10 Yet, such disappointment with the church was not his final word on religion. Marx could still see something of value within the church even if it was a flawed and corrupt remembrance of the revolutionary Rabbi Jesus. Marx, most sympathetically, taught his chil-dren ‘we can forgive Christianity much, because it taught us the worship of the child.’11 We can ruminate on the many things that the “child” may symbol-ize, but it seems for Marx to represent something within religion that must be preserved, emancipated from its dogmatic shackles, and be fulfilled within secular praxis. The “child” cannot be abandoned by revolutionary praxis even if religion has historically done so. The symbol of the child – the potential for goodness, innocence, and arguably even reason – is the very potential for Hegel’s notion of reconciliation: the ‘rose in the cross of the present.’12 Negative religion refuses to abandon this potential but rather preserves it at the core of its thought and praxis.
Affirmation and Negativity: Lenin
Marx’s Russian heir, Vladimir Lenin, also understood religion – in his case Russian Orthodoxy – to have abandoned its ‘image of perfect justice’ and had
9 Saint Augustine. The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods. Peabody, ma: Hendrickson Publish-ers Marketing, llc, 2014.
10 Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1981), 252–253.
11 Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, 252–253.
12 G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood (New York: Cam-bridge University Press, 2010), 22. Hegel states that ‘to recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thereby delight in the present – this rational insight is the recon-ciliation with actuality which philosophy grants to those who have received the inner call to comprehend, to preserve their subjective freedom in the realm of the substantial, and at the same time to stand with their subjective freedom not in a particular and contingent situation, but in what has being in and for itself.’
hence reconciled itself to this world’s injustice, represented by the corrupt op-pression of the Russian Czars. Echoing Feuerbach’s “projection” thesis, as well as Marx’s identification of positive religion’s function within society, Lenin un-derstood religion to be recalcitrant obstacle in the path of human liberation.
In his 1905 Socialism and Religion essay he wrote,
Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression, which everywhere weighs heavily upon the popular masses, crushed by their perpetual work for others, by want and loneliness. The impotence of the exploited classes in their struggle with the exploiters inevitably gives rise to the belief in a better hereafter, just as the impotence of the savage in his battle with nature gives rise to the belief in gods, devils, miracles, and the like. Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion to be sub-missive and patient while here on earth and take comfort in the hope of being rewarded in heaven. But those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practice charity while on earth, and thus religion of-fers them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploit-ers and sells them at a moderate price tickets to heavenly bliss. Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual home-brew [sivukha]
in which the slaves of capital drown the image of man and their demand for a life more or less worthy of human beings.13
Lenin did not dedicate much time to religion, as he believed it was a subject matter that was already resolved in the works of the Young Hegelians Feuer-bach and Marx. Yet Lenin’s 1905 article expressed an important distinction: the two different messages religion sends to the two competing classes, i.e. bour-geois and proletariat. First, the proletariat was to be ‘submissive and patient’ in dealing with the absurdity of class domination and they were to ‘take comfort in the hope’ of heavenly reward for their complacency with the status quo. In other words, they were to be passive in the face of human suffering and retreat into metaphysical ‘illusions’ and ‘delusions’ to numb the pain of human exis-tence, especially the pain exacted by class exploitation. Secondly, for the rul-ing elites, the only demand placed upon them was to practice “charity” – not solidarity – with those suffering beneath them. They were not to recognize the exploitative nature of their rule, on which they lived, to recognize it as an is-sue of morality, but rather as an opportunity to appear beneficent, i.e. to give
13 As quoted in Lenin and Religion by Bohdan R. Bociurkiw. Lenin: The Man, The Theorist, The Leader: A Reappraisal, ed. Leonard Schapiro and Peter Reddaway (New York: Frederick A.
Praeger, Publishers, 1967), 108–109.
charity. This ‘cheap way of justifying their existence as exploiters’ offers them a way of gain absolution for their “tainted” wealth; it offered them a way to ease the guilt that they may have had for their exploitation of the poor, the workers, and peasants. Additionally, this peculiar bourgeois form of “charity”
is a functionalization of poverty. It is crassly utilized for their own purposes but contributes nothing to its systematic alleviation. As such, it buys them the opportunity to appear pious in front of their peers (although secretly they all know it’s only for appearances). For Lenin, this guilt removing “charity” allows
is a functionalization of poverty. It is crassly utilized for their own purposes but contributes nothing to its systematic alleviation. As such, it buys them the opportunity to appear pious in front of their peers (although secretly they all know it’s only for appearances). For Lenin, this guilt removing “charity” allows