Overture Left Out in the Cold War

Marx occupied a peculiar space in the academic study of religion right from the start. There has long been a modest consensus that everyone, in principle, should know something about him. After all, what C. Wright Mills (1959) called the “sociological imagination”—the recognition that individuals are simultaneously constituted through and constrained by collective practices and impersonal social structures—is itself almost unimaginable without some reference to the “Holy Trinity” of Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim.

Thanks to the work of figures like Mary Douglas and Clifford Geertz, it is relatively easy to see how Durkheim and Weber have shaped what could be generously called the field’s “classics” (Alexander 1987). That is, scholars of religion have used Purity and Danger as well as Interpretation of Cultures to establish the basic contours of the modern academic enterprise. It is far more difficult to take a measure of Marx’s impact. A sense for Marx’s traditional non-presence in the field can be gathered from Jacques Waardenburg’s much read and rightly esteemed Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion—where he is mentioned, in passing, once. A book like The Devil and Commodity Fetishism belongs next to those from Douglas and Geertz in my estimation. Yet, Michael Taussig’s (1980) study of the proletarianization of rural laborers in South America remains inexcusably under-read. Ask around and the typical “method and theory” seminar which fails to include Durkheim-Douglas or Weber-Geertz is exceedingly rare; one that snubs Marx-Taussig appears to be par for the course. Paradoxically, Marx is both important and irrelevant for the academic study of religion.

There are exceptions, of course. Bruce Lincoln’s enduring scholarship on religious cosmologies and the reproduction of socio-political asymmetries is among the very best work the field has ever produced—and emerges from a perspective deeply informed by his reading of Marx (e. g., Lincoln 1989). Burton Mack’s still-fertile work on mythmaking and social formations deserves to be mentioned in this context as well (e. g., Mack 2014). At the same time, though, Lincoln and Mack are the exceptions validating the rule. Sure, Marx has been one of the seven, eight, nine, or ten figures featured in Daniel Pals’s widely used Theories of Religion textbook—but when compared to the rest of the humanities and social sciences, it is noteworthy that the field has never had a noteworthy “Marxist” contingent.1 “In the contemporary study of religion,” Alberto Toscano observes: “Marx is treated as a marginal reference at best, a ‘dead dog’ at worst” (Toscano 2010, 3).

I suppose part of the problem is that Marx never bothered to clarify what he was talking about when talking about religion (Saxton 2006). He never even stalled for time by suggesting à la Weber that definitions can only be ventured after one has thoroughly examined the phenomena—as if one could study something without already knowing how to identify it in a line-up.2 He sometimes used the adjectival form as a synonym for meretricious. “The German bourgeois is religious even when he is an industrialist,” he suggested in 1845: “He shies away from talking about poor exchange values, over which he lingers, and speaks of productive forces; he shies away from speaking of competition and talks instead about a national confederation of national productive forces; he shies away from addressing his private interest and so speaks about the national interest” (MECW 4: 266/Marx 1945; my translation; emphasis added). Other times he deployed the term as a stand-in for conceptual myopia, as when he criticized David Ricardo for treating capitalist production as production per se: “much like a guy [Kerl] who believes in a particular religion and sees it as religion per se, while all the rest are only false religions” (MECW 32: 158/MEW 26.2: 529; my translation). More often than not, he usually meant something rather pedestrian: Human beings trafficking with more-than-human intentional agents or “metapersons.”3

Many scholars now reject this way of doing business because it lacks the requisite amount of theoretical “nuance” (Healey 2017). Yet, if this clumsiness explains why Marx is on the periphery, it fails to explain why Weber has been at the field’s center. Two questions present themselves at this point: Why has Marx been a dead dog in the academic study of religion? And should something be done about it?

The simplest explanation for Marx’s irrelevant significance is that scholars of religion never found a reliable anchor point in his work, mostly because he wasn’t all that interested in the subject. Legends of his “militant atheism” simply get him wrong (Blankholm 2020, Devellennes 2016, Lobkowicz 1964, Megill and Park 2017). Yes, as a young man, Marx observed that “criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism” (MECW 3: 175/MEGA2 I.2: 170). By this he meant it is somewhat liberating to discover that there are no ontologically necessary, cosmically enforced rules for organizing individual lives or collective orders. Human beings mostly live in worlds of our own making—a point which is, perhaps, easier for us to grasp from our perilous Anthropocene perch than before. At the same time, Marx did not see how there was much more that needed to be—or even could be—said beyond this. The memorable line about religion as “the opium of the people” was written when he was only twenty-five years old. He never once returned to the trope. Honestly, how essential could that aperçu be for understanding Marx?

More generally, he concluded quite early on that what previous generations treated as religious concerns regarding order, purpose, and meaning were better understood as aspects of political and social contests. “One can no longer talk about religious interests as such,” he writes in The Holy Family: “Only the theologian can still believe in religion as religion” (MECW 4: 108/MEW 2: 115; my translation). Because of this, both he and Engels concluded that the critique of religion begun in the eighteenth century was, by the mid-nineteenth, “flogged to the point of exhaustion” (MECW 5: 235/MEGA2 I.5: 214 – 215). For Marx, religion was a bit like a lover’s regrettable taste in music—the sort of thing one tries to politely ignore, all the while hoping it gets better with time or just goes away. He thus advised that until ancestors, gods, and spirits are only a cultural memory, everyone should be free enough to ignore opaque metaphysical demands about how the world must be arranged—while those who cannot walk away from these sorts of metapersonal agents should be able to satisfy their idiosyncratic religious needs “without the police sticking their noses in” (MECW 24: 98/MEGA2 I.25: 24).

Given this indifference to the spooky beings and fantastic powers which harass collective life, Marx left behind very little source material for scholars narrowly focused on religion per se. This not only helps to explain why so many in the field have ignored him; it also sheds some light on why those who do wish to engage him end up talking about the need to reconstruct “Marx’s theory of religion” (e. g., Siebert 1979). But here’s the issue: there is no theory of religion written in his own hand for anyone to retrieve, rehabilitate, resurrect, or re-construct (Bertrand 1979). The closest Marx ever came to articulating something like a theoretical first principle is stuffed away in a raucous footnote from Capital. “Darwin has directed our attention to the history of natural technology, i. e., to the formation of plant and animal organs as tools for producing the lives of plants and animals,” he begins:

Doesn’t the history of the formation of the productive organs of social agents [Gesellschaftsmenschen], the material basis for each particular organization of society [Gesellschaftsorganisation], deserve equal attention? Technology reveals the active attitude or demeanor [Verhalten] of human beings toward nature, the direct process by which they produce their life and thus also the conditions of social life and the mental representations and concepts that spring from them. Every history of religion which abstracts from this material basis is uncritical. Indeed, it is much easier to locate the earthly core of nebulous religious formations [Nebelbildungen] by analysis than it is, conversely, to develop these glorified [verhimmeln] forms out of the actual conditions of life. The latter is the only materialistic, and therefore scientific, method (MECW 35: 376/MEGA2 II.6: 364; my translation).

Translated into a more contemporary idiom, Marx’s point is that top-down, ethnographic thick descriptions are useful inasmuch as they make human appeals to metapersonal agents and forces a bit less puzzling. They allow us to see more clearly, for example, why those...