Religion as Lie: Gervais (4)

The supposition at the heart of Ricky Gervais' (2009) The Invention of Lying is that religion is so closely linked to story-telling and historical embellishment that it is understood as lying.

Here, the distinctions made by Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche in their critiques of religion (see here, here and here for "Atheism for Lent" Course material) between appearance and reality, or manifest and latent meanings, becomes that between lies and the truth. But in the world within The Invention of Lying there are no such terms; there are simply “things that are” (the truth) and “things that aren’t” (lies), just “the way things are” and Mark’s new-found ability to say “something that wasn’t.” This language of being or existence denotes Gervais’ scepticism: ‘God doesn’t exist… Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true' (Gervais, "Why I'm an Atheist"). 

But Gervais’ suspicion is also apparent in the ways that Mark’s theological inventions function as psychological wish-fulfilments (Freud's critique of religion), oppressive ideologies (Marx's critique of religion), and vengeful morality (Nietzsche's critique of religion).

Framed in the sceptical language of falsehood and lies, is it possible to more clearly see the functions that critics suspect religion plays?

If religion existed in a world where we (like Mark) knew it to be deceitful, which of our religious beliefs and practices could we more readily identify as harmful?

In other words, if religion is a lie...

...what happens to my faith?

Atheism for Lent: Marx

Tonight there were sixteen of us exploring "Atheism for Lent" at Journey and we looked at Marx's critique of religion.

I started the discussion off by giving a brief overview of the reading material that I put together (see below for links to the relevant posts): how Marx's historical materialism differs from Freud's essentialisation of psychological conflict and common unhappiness (last week) such that there remains the possibility of struggle and revolution in the face of contingent social hopelessness; how Marx can be understood to radicalise Feuerbach's atheist theory of religion as projection (see this post) such that the critique of religion presupposes the critique of current material socio-economic relations; and how both religion and the state function as ideologies, serving as imaginary relationships between theology and politics (on the one hand) and people's real existence in sin and self-interest (on the other) (see here and here).

We then discussed a range of topics, from the cult of capitalism, consumerist desire, and materialism in this sense to historical materialism, immanence, and responsibility. Commenting that we need to get rid of this idea of a "good God" that will solve our problems, one group member argued for the notion that a transcendent God absolves us of our social, economic and political responsibilities, and that instead of looking "up to heaven" or "after life" for answers we should act together in community in the here and now of material relationships.

The notion that church can sometimes function as a social club arose, and we talked a little about the dangers (coccooning or ghettoisation, for example) and opportunities (identity, belonging, etc) of that understanding of church. This discussion really peaked my interest, thinking in particular about Tony Jones' thesis that emerging Christianity can be likened to a new social movement. I wondered about the possibility of thinking about church as a co-operative, or union, or Party. In other words, as another Course participant said, as operating in a non-commercial environment. The possibility or impossibility of functioning outside western capitalism aside, it proved food for thought. Particularlity since Journey is in the process of transitioning away from being a "church" (albeit one they built themselves under a railway arch) to a "vegetarian cafe."

Anyway, here's a collection of links to the material I wrote introducing Marx's critique of religion:

Religion as Ideology: Marx (1)

Religion as Ideology: Marx (2)

Religion as Ideology: Marx (3)

Religion as Ideology: Marx (4)

Religion as Ideology: Marx (5)

Religion as Ideology: Marx (6)

Nietzsche starts tomorrow!

Religion as Ideology: Marx (6)

Because Marx gives to religion ‘an enormous responsibility for the political and economic shape of human life’ (Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p.165), it is possible, however, to also read in his critique of religion the prospect of religion as a form of social protest. But having introduced early on in his career the possibility of religion as ‘at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering’ (Marx, "Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right,"), Marx himself them ignores it quite completely thereafter.

His scathing observations of the history of Christian social principles quoted earlier perhaps indicate the main reason for his cynicism, but Karl Mannheim also points to the privatisation of religion, when he writes that ‘[t]o live consistently, in the light of Christian brotherly love, in a society which is not organized on the same principle is impossible’ (Ideology and Utopia, pp.194-195). But whilst such pessimism may be a function of his sceptical atheism, Marx’s hermeneutic of suspicion provides an opportunity to ask some hard questions of our own faith.

How do our religious beliefs and practices function materialistically? In other words, what sort of material social relations do they legitimise?

How do our religious beliefs and practices functino ideologically? Or, how do they act as the legitimation of an imaginary or unreal relationship with our own and others’ real conditions of existence?

What kinds of injustice and suffering do our beliefs and practices legitimise by tolerating the economic and political ways in which the social order is currently structured?

Does Christianity mask special interests as the common good? ‘Whose wars does it bless? Does it leave unchallenged the nationalism and consumerism that lie at the heart of so much of the world’s suffering?' (Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p.171). How might our beliefs and practices do this? Does, for example, ‘spiritualizing, allegorizing, inwardizing, and futurizing the Kingdom of God’ make Christianity latently compatible with the social evils that it otherwise manifestly disavows? (p.198).

How else is the critical potential of Christianity – the critique of idolatrous religion and unjust politics inherent to the Christian religion itself – neutralised?

How can our beliefs and practices be more than a painkilling opiate? How can they be more than a deodorant to mask the bad aroma of today’s capitalistic society?

To rebut the charge of being the “opium of the people,” in which Marx and later Lenin summed up an irrefutable historical experience, is more than a matter of theory: it is a matter of political and social practice. And it is for Christians and their Church to give this practical proof (Roger Garaudy, Marxism in the Twentieth Century, p.163)

If religious beliefs are projections of humanity’s highest attributes that simultaneously justify their lowest – by ideologically validating oppressors and consoling the oppressed and thereby encouraging social complacency...

...what happens to my faith?

Religion as Ideology: Marx (5)

Marx has a materialist conception of history, which came to be referred to as his “historical materialism.” Just as suspicion is directed at the historical question of the extent to which beliefs self-deceptively hide our own operative motives and not the metaphysical question of the “truth” of those beliefs, so Marx’s materialism is not an answer to the metaphysical question of ‘whether mind or matter is the basic stuff of the universe’ but expresses an historical concern to ask about the material relations ‘between economic, political and intellectual factors in social structures and their transformation’ (Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, pp.154-155).


His materialism exposes another illusion of both religion and the state, “The Illusion of Autonomous Origin,” which relates to the conditioned character of religious and political beliefs and practices.


Marx writes that,

[t]he ideas of the ruling class [or classes] are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production… The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships (Marx, Selected Writings, p.176).

When we lose sight of the contingent and conditioned nature of ideas and practices, which according to Marx express the dominant ordering of relationships between classes, we are trapped in The Illusion of Autonomous Origin. We are, in other words, unaware of the way in which ideas and practices are expressions of certain “ideologies.”

The term “ideology” refers to ‘any interpretation of history which is based on… ideas divorced from the social-economic realities in which those ideas originate’ (Louis Dupre, The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism, p.146). Further than this, however, these interpretations are characterised not only by ‘our unawareness of their origin in social conditions’ – The Illusion of Autonomous Origin – but by our ignorance of ‘the part they play in maintaining or altering those conditions’ (Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol.1, p.154) – what Westphal calls “The Illusion of Neutrality.”


That we are unaware of the social impact of ideas and practices is the key to the operation of ideology, ‘[f]or to the degree that [The Illusion of Neutrality] prevails the victims of political power will feel less resentful and the perpetrators of political power will feel less guilty’ (Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p.160). The Illusions of Overcoming the World and of Autonomous Origin therefore function to support the central illusion at work in ideology, the Illusion of Neutrality, and together these illusions act to mask the fact that ideology is ‘the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ (Louis Althusser, "Ideology and the State," p.162) and forestall questions from both the perpetrators and victims of political power about its injustices.


For Marx, both religion and the state perform this ideological function, serving to mask the contingent ordering of society that benefits some whilst oppressing others.

Religion as Ideology: Marx (4)

Religion attempts to overcome evil and sin with ‘high-sounding stories’ of love, justice and forgiveness (Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rainbow, Michel Foucault, p.108), just as the state’s narrative of common good will attempts to overcome individual self-interest. And since religion is the archetype of politics’ (Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p.151), the critique of religion is the presupposition of the critique of the state and of socio-political relations in general.

But, as Westphal summarises, ‘Marx is telling the story of the ways in which religion not only endures but eventually embraces evil’ (p.152).

Marx writes, clearly bitterly, that

…[t]he social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of Antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages and equally know, when necessary, how to defend the oppression of the proletariat, although they make a pitiful face over it.

The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and all they have for the latter is the pious wish the former will be charitable.

The social principles of Christianity transfer the… adjustment of all infamies to heaven and thus justify the further existence of those infamies on earth.

The social principles of Christianity declare all vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either the just punishment of original sin and other sins, or trials that the Lord in his infinite wisdom imposes on those redeemed.

So much for the social principles of Christianity (Marx and Engels, On Religion, pp.83-84).

For Marx, both religion and the state are illusions, then, manifestly professing to overcome, yet latently preserving, current socio-economic divisions and injustices.

[T]he political illusion consists in the unreality of the community and general will, which is so prominent in political self-consciousness, and in the unrecognized reality of conflict among the classes generated by the division of labour…

Similarly, the religious illusion consists in the unreality of the happiness it promises and in the unrecognized reality of the class interests at work in ethical-religious and metaphysical-religious ideas (Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p.157).

For Marx, ‘religion offers an illusory comfort and politics an illusory community’ (p.156), both forming unreal illusions that purport to overcome but actually sustain the real worlds of sin and self-interest.

Thus they are illustrative of what Westphal calls “The Illusion of Overcoming the World,” to which we shall return shortly.

Religion as Ideology: Marx (3)

In the opening paragraphs of one of his earliest philosophical essays, Marx writes that ‘[a]s far as Germany is concerned, the criticism of religion is essentially complete, and the criticism of religion is the presupposition of all criticism’ ("Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right"). Westphal explains that, here, Marx asserts that the critique of religion offered by philosophers like Feuerbach ‘has gone as far as it can go while concerning itself merely with religion,’ and that it must now ‘go on to play its proper role’ (Suspicion and Faith, p.136); namely, as illustrative of the critique of ideology more generally.

When Marx writes in the same early essay that ‘man has found in the imaginary reality of heaven where he looked for a superman only the reflection of his own self,’ he deduces that humanity ‘must seek his true reality’ elsewhere. Since religion is, for Marx, a ‘general theory of the world,’ the world’s ‘logic in popular form,’ its ‘moral sanction’ and ‘universal basis for consolation and justification,’ he concludes that, ‘the struggle against religion is indirectly the struggle against the world whose spiritual aroma [i.e. deodorant] is religion.’

This is why he writes that the critique of religion presupposes all criticism, since ‘[t]he criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the highest being for man, that is, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all circumstances in which man is humiliated, enslaved, abandoned, and despised’ (Marx, Selected Writings, p.69). The critique of religion must play its proper role in the critique of the world as it is currently socially, politically and economically ordered.

Marx’s critique of religion can thus be seen as intricately linked to his critique of the state, and understanding the latter can shed further light on the nature of the former.

Marx turns his attention to both the Christian and the secular states. Of the Christian state, he observes that religion merely operates as ‘a sacred cloak to hide desires that are… very secular’ (Selected Writings, p.17), since ‘[r]eligion is to support secular matters without the latter’s being subject to religion’ (Marx, Writings of the Young Karl Marx on Philosophy and Society, pp.77-78). The Christian state is, therefore, not really Christian but idolatrous since it forms, in practice, ‘the religion of domination, the cult of the will of the government’ (Marx and Engels, On Religion, p.36). Whilst manifestly Christian, the latent god of the Christian state is the state itself.

Of the secular state, Marx notes the schizophrenic ‘separation of man into a public and private man’ (Selected Writings, p.47). This dissection means that ‘we have a private, exclusive, self-seeking role to play and a public, communal, common-good-seeking role to play at the same time.’ These demands are functions of our dual existence within both civil society – ‘the capitalist marketplace of individual economic self-interest’ – and the political state – a domain in which we experience community and pursue the general good. (Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p.148). Privatised within the secular state, religion becomes ‘the spirit of civil society, the sphere of egoism, the [war of all against all];’ it is therefore ‘the expression of the separation of man from his common essence, from himself and from other men.’

For Marx, religion in a religious state is self-restrictive and oppressive, whilst religion in a secular state is self-alienating and repressive. In both forms of state, however, religion therefore plays a large role in legitimising the political status quo – the contingent, rather than natural, social order.

In a crucial passage linking his critique of religion to his critique of politics, Marx explains further the nature of the ‘double life’ – ‘a heavenly one and an earthly one’ – that we lead,

[Man] has a life both in the political community, where he is valued as a communal being, and in civil society where he is active as a private individual, treats other men as means, degrades himself to a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers… The political state… stands in the same opposition to civil society and overcomes it in the same manner as religion overcomes the limitations of the profane world, that is, it must likewise recognize it, reinstate it, and let itself once more be dominated by it (Marx, Selected Writings, pp.45-46)

In other words, in the same way that religion claims to overcome the profane (or sinful) world, yet remains dominated by it, the political state claims to overcome civil society, the (profane or sinful) world of self-interest, yet remains dominated by it.

As Westphal explains, ‘this is what makes politics so “heavenly.” For it is in the same way that religion overcomes the evil in the world, in theory but not in fact’ (Suspicion and Faith, p.151).

As an example, Marx asks, ‘[d]o you offer your right cheek when you are struck upon the left, or do you not institute proceedings for assault? Yet the Gospel forbids that’ (Marx and Engels, On Religion, p.35).

Religion as Ideology: Marx (2)

Marx can be said to radicalise Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of religion.

Feuerbach’s theory of religion involves the central assertion that religion is a projection – not, as Freud suggests, of humanity’s shameful desires and needs, but of humanity’s own best attributes, ‘that which is worthy of adoration’ (Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, p.12).

What man praises and approves, that is God to him… Religion is a judgement. The most essential condition in religion – in the idea of the divine being – is accordingly the discrimination of the praiseworthy from the blameworthy, of the perfect from the imperfect (p.97).

For Feuerbach, then, ‘[m]an first unconsciously and involuntarily creates God in his own image, and after this [it is believed that] God consciously and voluntarily creates man in his own image’ (p.118).

However, rather than the unconscious projection of individual desires, religion for Feuerbach is the unconscious projection of collective ideals. He writes that ‘God is the idea of the species as an individual’ (p.153) and that, ‘[t]he divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective’ (p.14). In other words, ‘while the perfections we represent to ourselves as divine are really human, they belong not to the individual but to the species,’ or to ‘the human spirit in some collective sense’ (Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p.125-126).

This means that, according to Feuerbach’s theory of projection, ‘[t]he secret of theology is anthropology’ (Feuerbach, The Fiery Brook, p.153), such that ‘[c]onsciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge’ (The Essence of Christianity, p.12). As the unconscious projection of the self-consciousness of humanity, then, ‘religion is man’s earliest and also indirect form of self-knowledge.’ It is a necessary, albeit juvenile, stage in humanity’s self-discovery, one which Merold Westphal suggests is analogous to the ‘discovery of the true ontological status of Santa Claus, who turns out to be but the personification of the human spirit of giving’ (Suspicion and Faith, p.127).

But Feuerbach, like Freud, naturalises or essentialises the unhappiness against which religion is a defence and escape. As such, Marx writes, ‘I approve of Feuerbach’s aphorisms, except for one point: he directs himself too much to nature and too little to politics’ (in Schlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, p.10). For Marx, this unhappiness or hopelessness is not an inevitable condition of the essence of human nature but a social circumstance that is historical and contingent and, as such, capable of being altered. In other words, happiness and hope are possible.

It is in reference to Feuerbach’s critique of religion that Marx writes, therefore, that, ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx, Selected Writings, p.158). His atheistic project makes explicit the links between religion and social complacency, between the critique of religion and the critique of ideology, and, therefore, between religion and the possibility of protest.

Religion as Ideology: Marx (1)

Abridged from Karl Marx, "Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction," cited in Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, pp.134-140:

Man has found in the imaginary reality of heaven where he looked for a superman only the reflection of his own self. He will therefore no longer be inclined to find only the appearance of himself, the non-man, where he seeks and must seek his true reality… The foundation of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion, religion does not make man…

Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances. 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. The demand to give up the illusions about their condition is a demand to give up a condition that requires illusions… Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chains not so that man may bear chains without any imagination or comfort, but so that he may throw away the chains and pluck the living flowers…

It is therefore the task of history, now the truth is no longer in the beyond, to establish the truth of the here and now. The first task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, once the holy form of self-alienation has been discovered, is to discover self-alienation in its unholy forms. The criticism of heaven is thus transformed into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.

From Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p.159:

The idea that our political, legal, economic, moral, religious, and metaphysical theories are deeply conditioned by the world into which they are born, in which they live, and from which they die, especially by the economic class struggles of that world, is expressed by Marx in a single word, “ideology.”

It is a familiar Marxist commentary upon religion that it is ‘the opium of the people,’ a comparison also made by both Freud, for whom religion and ‘intoxicating substances’ are alternative strategies for dealing with the human predicament (Freud, The Complete Psychological Works, vol.21, p.75), and Nietzsche, who refers to Christianity and alcohol as ‘the two great European narcotics’ (The Portable Nietzsche, p.507).

These substances to which religion is likened are, for these critics, addictive painkillers that treat symptoms of disease rather than the disease (or dis-ease, i.e. ‘common unhappiness’ ) itself.

But Marx differs from Freud and Nietzsche in his diagnosis of religion as distracting from not a necessary and natural or essential hopelessness but from an unnecessary and social hopelessness.