I'm a Marxist and an Atheist But I Don't Think Religion Would Wither Away Under Socialism (UNLOCKED)

Religious beliefs can be objectively false and also speak to permanent features of the human condition. We're never going to stop arguing about this--nor should we.

“Religion is the opiate of the people.”

That’s the part that fits on a bumper sticker. Marxists who don’t want Marx portrayed as a simplistic religion-basher often emphasize that he surrounds this line with a bunch of poetry that puts religion in a better light.

And, yeah, he does.

But also, read in context, the overall point is very anti-religion.

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.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.

Karl Marx was one of the greatest prose stylists of the 19th century and, reading this passage as someone who agrees with a lot of his premises, my natural response is to want to stand up and cheer. But I’m going to try to turn off that impulse and read this like an analytic philosopher—trying to figure out exactly what Marx is saying and which parts make sense.

His most obvious starting point is that religious beliefs are false.¹ That much I’m on board with—as you’ve probably gathered if you regularly read this Substack.

A thing that Very Online Atheists often say is that there’s “no” evidence for the existence of God, which is silly. Fine-tuning considerations, for example, surely amount to some evidence. But it’s possible to overreact to the swaggering of the VOAs by bending the stick too far in the other direction and portraying the debate about God’s existence as way more evenly matched than it really is.

Take the First Cause argument. I actually think the point the most obnoxious 19-year-old atheist will raise about this argument—”OK then what caused God?”—is, at bottom, a pretty excellent response. It’s a decisive response to the ‘folk’ version of the argument, the one people are expressing when they say, “Well, I just think something can’t come from nothing. If anything exists, something must have caused it!” And, sure, any philosopher or theologian who spells out a First Cause Argument with labeled premises is going to see this kind of self-refutation worry coming a mile away so they’ll present the first premise in a more careful way to evade it. Instead of “everything has a cause” they’ll always say something narrower like “everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence” or “every contingent being has a cause” or etc. And there really are technically complicated bells and whistles that will come up when getting into the weeds of any of these more narrowly-constructed premises. But I tend to think that when you’re done navigating your way through the bells and whistles that annoying 19-year-old will be more or less validated.

More generally: You can rightly criticize the philosophical shallowness of much of Hitchens-era New Atheism and the present-day VOAs who continue that tradition while acknowledging that just about all of the big theistic arguments are, on close inspection, pretty bad.

The reason I’m belaboring this point is that, beyond “religious beliefs are false,” an important thing Marx is assuming here is that intellectual arguments aren’t the main thing that generates those beliefs. You can refute the arguments all day long without ending the popularity of belief in God because, while different people with different dispositions will care to differing extents about “the args”—some people, after all, are nerds²—most people’s reasons for belief have relatively little to do with the args.

Marx is right about this part too! But things get murkier at the next step. The obvious question is, “OK, so what are the non-rational reasons for belief?”

Most believers were raised in households with at least some degree of religiosity, of course, and most people continue throughout their lives to have at least some degree of allegiance to the things they grew up believing. But there’s a hard limit to how much these facts can explain.

For one thing, the point about upbringing just pushes back the question. If you believe because your parents taught you to believe and they believe because their parents raised them that way, etc., how far back does that go? It’s not as if every Orthodox Jewish family, for example, has an unbroken chain of piety going back to the Kingdom of David and Solomon. On close inspection, you’ll often find patterns of drifting-away and coming-back to faith playing out over many generations, plus the infusion of the occasional outright convert.

And even in those cases where you really do get unbroken chains of belief going back to a time when everyone (or close enough to everyone as to hardly matter) believed, the persistence is itself a fact in need of explanation. All of our ancestors were monarchists, for example, but somehow in the contemporary western world that’s all but disappeared. Religion hasn’t. Why not?

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To understand Marx’s answer, a good place to start is with one of his most widely misunderstood lines. In the Theses on Feuerbach, he says “philosophers have merely interpreted the world” but “the point is to change it.”

Marx’s best writing has a way of stirring even readers who don’t completely get what he’s saying, and a lot of people who love that line basically parse it is, “Merely interpreting the world—boo! Changing the world—yay!”

And some of the people who don’t like the line interpret it in basically the same way. The reason they don’t like it is because it sounds perversely anti-intellectual. Doesn’t interpreting the world have value? Shouldn’t we expect a guy who spend as many thousands of pages interpreting the world as Marx did to agree?

The most insightful take I’ve seen on what’s going on here—and by extension, in the “opiate of the people” passage—comes from G.A. Cohen. Some of this comes from his Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence and some of it comes from If You’re An Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?

Marx sees religious beliefs, like many other kinds of persistent false belief, as being less like hallucinations that dissipate once you come to understand that what you’re seeing isn’t real and more like desert mirages that still look every bit as real even if you fully understand what’s going on. That’s also his account of “commodity fetishism” in Capital. When we think about commodities and their value, the social relationships between people feel like autonomous relationships between the commodities themselves and—this is the crucial part—reading Capital and understanding and agreeing with Marx’s analysis won’t make that impression go away. This kind of illusion is just a function of life under capitalism.

One of the confusing things about the “philosophers have merely interpreted the world” line is the implication that changing the world is the job of philosophers. Is it a problem that poets have merely written poetry about the world when the point is to change it? Is it a problem that electrical engineers haven’t overthrown capitalism—that they’ve merely done electrical engineering?

The key point is that Marx sees the task of philosophy (and science) as eradicating illusions so we can see the world as it really is. Rational investigation, he repeatedly tells us, is only necessary when there are gaps between the way things are and the way they seem to be. But sometimes intellectual arguments aren’t enough to get rid of the illusions, because sometimes illusions are a result not of intellectual mistakes so much as deep facts about how society is organized. And in these instances, the only way to fulfill the illusion-smashing mission of philosophy is to change the world.

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I think this analysis is probably correct when applied to many subjects. Take racism. Lots of people believe racist things and get over it due to personal experiences, args, or some combination of the two. But in a big-picture sociological way, I’m pretty skeptical of the idea that racism is ever going to go away through any combination of args or everyone happening to have the right experiences or (God help us) everyone sitting through a sufficient number of hours of DEI trainings.

That doesn’t mean racism can’t go away. It just won’t go away like that.

Sometimes when people say “racism,” especially if they put words like “structural” or “systemic” in front of it, what they really mean are material disparities between racial groups—the racially uneven distributions of wealth and poverty and thus the racially uneven distribution of all the social ills that accompany poverty. That can certainly go away. But what about racism in the sense that most ordinary speakers usually mean that word—racial prejudice?

A few years ago, I was on a podcast with Doug Lain and I made the point that if someone could press a magical button that would make all the racial prejudice disappear from everyone’s heads, the material disparities would still be there. The effect of capitalist property relations functioning normally is to preserve the consequences of past systems of discrimination even in the absence of ongoing discrimination.

”That’s true,” Doug said. But he added something insightful and important—that if you kept the disparities, within six months the prejudice would be back. Every society where poverty and the accompanying ills are concentrated in some group with identifying “racial” or religious or linguistic markers learns to tell itself some kind of bullshit story about how these problems aren’t the result of any sort of injustice we need to feel bad about. Those People are just like that. In so far as this pattern of rationalization is pretty reliably going to play out, to eliminate the source of the illusion, you need to do something about the material conditions.

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OK, but is religion like that? Will it lose its appeal once we’ve abolished the “condition that requires illusions?” I’m skeptical.

Marx is surely right that one of the deep sources of belief in a world beyond the one we can see is a desire for consolation for the suffering around us. He’s also right that capitalism is a source of a great deal of suffering. Putting those premises together, it’s at least plausible that there would be less religion in a flourishing socialist society. If a time traveler from a future century that had achieved Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” told me that the rate of atheism under FALC was way higher than it is even in e.g. Norway in 2023, I wouldn’t be shocked. But I would be shocked if he told me that religion had ceased to exist.

First, consolation-for-suffering isn’t the only wellspring of religiosity, although it’s certainly a big one. There will always be people who have experiences that give them a powerful sense of transcendence and connection to something beyond mundane reality—and religious beliefs are going to help some of them make sense of those feelings. And even in the absence of these powerful experiences, many people are going to be gnawed at by an intuitive sense that there must be more than this. Beyond that, religions provide an emotionally powerful network of symbols that help a lot of people navigate reality, and the network of symbols come packaged together with metaphysical beliefs. You can try to disentangle the symbols from the beliefs—there have been various attempts over the years to start Humanist Temples or whatever that provide some of the trappings of religion without the metaphysics—but such attempts never seem to have much traction. Too much of the emotional power is drained in the disentangling process.

And the biggest problem with the idea that religion would completely wither away under socialism—because we’d no longer have a “condition that requires illusions”—is that the human condition in general involves a lot of suffering. And, sure, plenty of people are able to bear that suffering without consoling metaphysical illusions, but you could say the same thing about the more historically contingent forms of suffering that come from poverty and exploitation and capitalist alienation. Plenty of people have lived in grinding poverty and remained adamant atheists. But for plenty of others, the belief in another life is an important form of consolation—whether the suffering the consolation addresses is a function of class society or just being a person.

Do you think no rich people have sought out religious consolation for their suffering? Really? Even if you’re born into the Walton family, people you love will get sick, have accidents, or just die of old age. Even if you’re a Walton, your life comes with an expiration date, and that can be hard thing to come to terms with regardless of the size of your bank account. The suggestion that someone is in charge, that all the horrible unpredictable things in life are part of a grand plan, and that it’s all going to work out in the end? That’s still going to have a lot of power.

Lillian Cicerchia once told me she thinks that “if anything, people will probably get even weirder with” religion under socialism. That could well be true! If everyone has their material needs met and much more time on their hands and much more ability to do things like drop everything to go meditate in an ashram for a few months, who knows where that could lead?

Here’s a prediction of my own I made here a while back:

If I’m somehow lucky enough to live to see a flowering socialist society where I’d no longer be particularly interested in doing debates about politics—and, maybe even more implausibly, I’m not too old and senile by then to participate in debates—I’d keep doing them on religion, and honestly my prediction would be that there would be bigger audiences for such debates in an egalitarian post-scarcity future.

I’m interested in thinking and arguing about religion not because I think it’s politically important—honestly, as long you’re on board with the separation of church and state, your metaphysical beliefs are your business—or because I’m on a quest to get everyone in the world to agree with me about God’s non-existence. As we’ve just established, I don’t think that outcome is in the cards. I’m interested in it because the questions themselves are of immense and obvious human importance. And I don’t ever expect to stop arguing about them.

1. “Religious beliefs” is being used in a slightly vague way here but it should at least include (whether or not it’s limited to) the cluster of religious beliefs that are foundational to standard versions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

2. For example, given that you’re reading a Substack about philosophy and I’m writing one, it’s a safe bet that you and I are both huge nerds.