Marx also believed that religion was a force of the group, however he viewed it through the lens of class struggle and inequalities. He did not view religion as a necessary and natural part of society, as Durkheim did, but rather as a poisonous subjugating force. He was materialist in his approach to the world, which meant that he believed that any talk of the afterlife or supernatural forces were complete nonsense. There existed nothing beyond the material world, for Marx. He believed that human beings have always “been motivated not by grand ideas but by very basic material concerns…[such as] food, clothing, and shelter” (Pals 123).
Marx believed because of the privatization of property, people gradually get cut off from their own labor. Private ownership leads to a disconnect between people – they only way they can deal with each other is through exchanging property which they own. Those who own land or factories naturally end up with disproportionate amounts of power, so the laborer is alienated from his own work and from his fellow human beings. Society is permeated with unjust inequalities, and so even those philosophers, writers, or artists who claim “individualism and originality… depend on the accepted ideas of the age for their success, so even when they seem to protest, they in reality give unwitting, silent approval to society under the oppressors’ control” (Pals 131).
Religion, for Marx, is a deliberate attempt to delude the people into thinking that the unjust conditions in which they live is acceptable. Religion takes our own moral properties and attributes them “to an imaginary and alien being” called God (Pals 134). Religious beliefs and practices are not only exercises in delusion, they are “fundamentally destructive,” because they deprive people of the opportunity to improve their situations or struggle against the fundamentally unjust structures of society.
James did not share Marx’s view concerning class inequalities and religion being a force of evil in the world. As noted in the comparison with Durkheim, James was very interested in the accounts of individual people concerning religious experiences. Marx would no doubt consider this approach completely off-base and small-minded. Marx could care less about a person’s supposed encounter with God – these were signs not of a religious experience, but of yet another deluded person who was ignoring their own social oppression.
