Note: This post is an unfinished draft and likely will not be finished for quite a while as I’ve mostly moved on from the essay.

This is an addendum to a major piece I was writing from 2020-2022,The Protestant Work Ethic and Its Consequences. The contents here were in line with the themes explored there, but really warrant its own separate train of discussion.

Through this essay, I’ve given a lot of focus to defending Marxism from a Christian angle, but the reverse is often just as contentious a topic.

I want to make it clear that first and foremost I am a Christian. The paradox of the cross is the a priori axiom through which I understand everything else. I am concerned first and foremost with the salvation from mankind from itself,

Often in these sorts of arguments, you’ll see Christian Marxists go on about the ways in which Christianity benefits Marxist ends, their shared principles, or how what a person believes doesn’t matter. This is incredibly shortsighted, and only exacerbates the dissonance, even if it gets other Marxists off their back about their faith. After you’ve sufficiently performed apologetics for the faith, what actual substance is left of the faith?

How much simpler it would be not to deal with all this! But our Marxist Christians would not dream of abandoning their faith; they feel a sentimental attachment to God’s revelation, and would suffer traumatically if they eliminated the label from their lives. They prefer to reconcile and rationalize. Falling prey it) a process repeated throughout history, they claim to safeguard Christianity’s authenticity by selecting from it those elements that can be made to coincide with the prevailing ideological movement of the day: in this case, Marxism.

Ignorant of history, they fail to realize that this process has been tried a thousand times, for the purpose of restoring Christianity’s authenticity. Always it has appeared extremely helpful, but without fail it has produced catastrophe for faith and the revelation. How much better it would be to blot out the Bible and Christ, abandon them once and for all, and thus be able to limit one’s efforts to “serious matters”: politics, the economy, revolution, the Third World, and the oppressed classes. (Ellul)

If Christianity is supposed to be merely some liberatory myth, some tool to advance a political cause, then the next question is what do we even mean by Marxism? Do we mean the ideological tradition of proletarian revolution as espoused by the likes of Marx, Engels, and Lenin?

If so, then how do we grapple with the fact that this tradition has long been, in Lenin’s words, “atheistic and positively hostile to all religion”. And for those who reject Lenin, we can even point straight back to Marx in his famous quote:

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.

Even when we look at the broader context of this passage there is no getting around the fact that religion cannot be merely used as a tool for liberation.

When Marx states that “the struggle against religion is a struggle against the world”, he does so with an understanding of Religion as the consecration of all things worldly. This is not a metaphysical but an anthropological statement: the point of interest is how religious institutions and ideas integrate into mainstream society. Whether or not a God exists or what form that God takes is besides the point for Marx, because irrespective of that answer, the world is the world. We can see how the world functions for ourselves, the church doesn’t need to tell us how our eyes work. Marx’s aim is not to disprove the existence of higher truths, but to show how refusing a material analysis to material reality only amounts to obfuscation regarding said reality.

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.

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

All of this so far only testifies to the negative essence of Marxism. We can see what Marx recognizes as existing and how he criticizes that which exists. But what fills that void? Is it some belief that the material is somehow superior or “more real” than the spiritual? Is it that the political programme of the proletariat is some supreme good to which individuals are morally obligated to subject themselves? No, because if we were to distill some sort of “pure Marxism”, it would be fundamentally negative in nature. It can explain tensions, it can show contradictions, it can provide tools for analysis but Marxism alone is not a metaphysical or existential prescription.

That’s not to say Marx didn’t have a philosophic foundation. His arguments against capitalist society were downstream from a secular humanist tradition which stretched from the beginnings of the Enlightenment to the Hegelians of his time. This philosophy was implicit through his writings, as the values espoused by them were taken for granted by both the people he was interested in engaging with and the larger cultural environment in which he existed. He did not need to re-litigate the inherent goodness of humanism, that would only be redundant. Instead, his concern in this respect was showing how the mechanisms of capitalist society are an obstacle to the humanist ideal.

Socialism is a means to an end, rather than the end in and of itself. The mistake in these discussions is that the framing essentially puts the cart before the horse. Christianity when treated as something ancillary becomes little more than a cultural or political mantle-piece, its entirely gutted of any sort of subversive content. Marx witnessed this in his time, and we see it in our time with the countless “conservative” and “progressive” Christianities which are near indistinguishable from their secular counterparts.

Socialism when treated as an end unto itself denies agency to the individual; it defers any hopes of meaning or fulfillment until their external environment has changed. It demands the individual view himself as a historical subject as opposed to a historical agent, waiting upon history to happen to him rather than making his mark upon history. It justifies atrocities and compromises by deferring the question of fulfillment or meaning to an arbitrary future state. It produces martyrs, not human beings. Ironically, this approach to socialism is the epitome of what Marx characterizes as religion; a social opiate which renders men passive by detaching themselves from their present situation and self.