As interesting and insightful as Marx’s analysis and critiques are, they are not without their problems — historical and economic. Because of these problems, it would not be appropriate to accept Marx’s ideas uncritically. Although he certain has some important things to say on the nature of religion, he can’t be accepted as the last word on the subject.
First, Marx doesn’t spend much time looking at religion in general; instead he focuses on the religion with which he is most familiar: Christianity. His comments do hold for other religions with similar doctrines of a powerful god and happy afterlife, they do not apply to radically different religions. In ancient Greece and Rome, for example, a happy afterlife was reserved for heroes while commoners could only look forward to a mere shadow of their earthly existence. Perhaps he was influenced in this matter by Hegel, who thought that Christianity was the highest form of religion and that whatever was said about that also automatically applied to “lesser” religions — but that isn’t true.
A second problem is his claim that religion is wholly determined by material and economic realities. Not only is nothing else fundamental enough to influence religion, but influence cannot run in the other direction, from religion to material and economic realities. This is not true. If Marx were right, then capitalism would appear in countries prior to Protestantism because Protestantism is the religious system created by capitalism — but we don’t find this. The Reformation comes to 16th century Germany which is still feudal in nature; real capitalism doesn’t appear until the 19th century. This caused Max Weber to theorize that religious institutions end up creating new economic realities. Even if Weber is wrong, we see that one can argue just the opposite of Marx with clear historical evidence.
A final problem is more economic than religious — but since Marx made economics the basis for all his critiques of society, any problems with his economic analysis will affect his other ideas. Marx places his emphasis on the concept of value, which can only be created by human labor, not machines. This has two flaws.
First, if Marx is correct, than a labor-intensive industry will produce more surplus value (and hence more profit) than an industry relying less upon human labor and more upon machines. But reality is just the opposite. At best, the return on investment is the same whether the work is done by people or machines. Quite often, machines allow for more profit than humans.
Second, common experience is that the value of a produced object lies not with the labor put into it but in the subjective estimation of a potential purchaser. A worker could, in theory, take a beautiful piece of raw wood and, after many hours, produce a terribly ugly sculpture. If Marx is correct that all value comes from labor, then the sculpture should have more value than the raw wood — but that is not necessarily true. Objects have only the value of whatever people are ultimately willing to pay; some might pay more for the raw wood, some might pay more for the ugly sculpture.
Marx’s labor theory of value and concept of surplus value as driving exploitation in capitalism are the fundamental underpinning upon which all of the rest of his ideas are based. Without them, his moral complaint against capitalism falters and the rest of his philosophy begins to crumble. Thus, his analysis of religion becomes difficult to defend or apply, at least in the simplistic form he describes.
Marxists have tried valiantly to refute those critiques or revise Marx’s ideas to render them immune to the problems described above, but they haven’t entirely succeeded (although they certainly disagree — otherwise they wouldn’t still be Marxists. Any Marxists reading this are welcome to come to the forum and offer their solutions).
Fortunately, we are not entirely limited to Marx’s simplistic formulations. We do not have to restrict ourselves to the idea that religion is only dependent upon economics and nothing else, such that the actual doctrines of religions are almost irrelevant. Instead, we can recognize that there are a variety of social influences upon religion, including economic and material realities of society. By the same token, religion can in turn have an influence upon society’s economic system.
Whatever one’s final conclusion about the accuracy or validity of Marx’s ideas on religion, we should recognize that he provided an invaluable service by forcing people to take a hard look at the social web in which religion always occurs. Because of his work, it has become impossible to study religion without also exploring its ties to various social and economic forces. People’s spiritual lives can no longer be assumed to be totally independent of their material lives.
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