The Gospel of Marx: A False Religion Explained

Commentary from Daniel Davis on The Daily Signal.com:

Karl Marx once called religion the opium of the people—an imaginary coping mechanism that makes suffering in this world more bearable. His vision was a secular, atheistic one. But my guest today argues Marx’s vision was still intensely spiritual. In fact, he says Marx hijacked key themes from Christianity to create a false religion. Theology professor Bruce Ashford joins me in today’s episode.

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Daniel Davis: I’m joined now in the studio by Dr. Bruce Ashford. He is the dean of faculty and provost at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary down in North Carolina, where he also serves as a professor of theology and culture. He also blogs at “Christianity for the Common Good.” And as a note of personal disclosure, he is a professor of mine. I’m a part-time student at Southeastern.

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Davis: Bruce, you’re an interesting blogger and writer because on the one hand, you’re kind of like waist-deep in historical theology and philosophy and writing the journal articles and all of that. But you’re also writing contemporary books for your audience, which is largely Christian, and you’re also blogging about contemporary political issues.

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You’ve written about not just socialism, but the Marxist underpinnings of it. You write about how Marxism as an ideology is actually a false religion. And I think that’s an interesting angle.

I think a lot of folks, even conservatives, think of Marxism as just a set of bad ideas, but you’re saying it’s actually false religion and even idolatry. Why do you frame it that way?

Ashford: Yeah. And so you know, I’m not the first person to bring this up. The great French philosopher Raymond Aron, who’s a contemporary of [Jean-Paul] Sartre, explored this in a book that he wrote called “The Opium of the Intellectuals,” which is a play off of Marx’s “opium of the masses.”

He argued that structurally and existentially, Marxism functions more like a religion than just kind of a mirror ideology that’s been picked up on by some contemporary political scientists and philosophers like David Koyzis and Peter Kreeft.

The critique is really Augustinian, and Augustine argued that any time you take some aspect of the natural order and elevate it to a level of ultimacy, absolutize it, you’ve got yourself an idol or a false religion. And I think Marx did that with material equality.

What happens is when you take any one aspect of reality and you elevate it that high, you absolutize it, it becomes a cudgel with which you beat down other good aspects of reality. And we can talk about this later, but that’s exactly what Marxism has done, is taken this drive for material equality and beat down other good aspects of reality. It induces poverty and decreases liberty. [read more]

I agree with Sartre. Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.