At first glance, Marx’s works appeared to me crudely atheistic, pre-occupied with tearing down illusions which lead us away from seeing things as they really are: flat, objective, material. This appearance is not entirely inaccurate—his project is highly doubtful of religion writ large and is influenced by Enlightenment rationalism and science. However, Marx’s texts do not merely seek to reduce all things to material, objective realities; they also seek to discover and understand the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” present in the everyday phenomena of the capitalist world. Marx’s dual maneuver: naturalize that which is apparently unnatural and denaturalize that which is apparently natural.

In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx discusses German anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach’s conception of religion. According to Feuerbach, once religion is resolved “into its secular basis” there is no more to be done. Marx, in contrast, urges us to halt our pursuit of such generically atheistic approaches. Religion, he tells us, is not the primary issue at hand: “[Religion appears] as the manifestation of secular narrowness . . . . for the fact that the secular basis detaches from itself and establishes itself in the clouds as an independent realm can only be explained by the cleavage and self-contradictions within this secular basis.” Transcendence emerges from immanence, but that does not make it fictitious: it simply makes it contingent, something produced and experienced under particular social, material circumstances. On this view, religion does not express its own truths—it cannot, for example, express truths about the universal morality of the cosmos—but instead expresses the incapability of the material and social organization of the world to justify itself without divine intervention.

In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx & Engels describe religion as no more than a series of “bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.” This passage, at first glance, appears primarily as a critique of religion. Now, however, we can see that it is bourgeois morality itself that is first and foremost indicted, while religion is criticized only secondarily as expressive of the capitalist mode of production’s failure to justify itself on its own basis. It is the soulless, callous, and egotistical reality of capital and its bourgeois standard-bearers which demands religion to emerge and construct for society a soul outside of itself.

Marx & Engels pose a challenge not to religion but to the structure of human society as a whole. Why, they ask, do we need religion in the first place? It is not first and foremost mere superstition or lack of intelligence amongst the religious. After all, our ideas change “with every change in the conditions of material existence, in social relations and in social life.” We need religion because capitalist society fails to provide for the physical and spiritual flourishing of those within it. What precedes the abolition of religion is the creation of a world which no longer needs it.