Is My Rejection of Marx "Extreme"?

I had a nice email from a friend who wrote:

Your comment on Marx in the Mere Orthodoxy interview puzzles me because it seems so extreme. Shouldn't we avoid the simplistic postures of acceptance or rejection? Shouldn't we try to discern whether there are Christian uses of Marx's critique of religion?

I wonder if you'd change your mind if you read Merold Westphal's section on Marx in Suspicion & Faith, most of which can be read on Google Books. Click below.

Part III Marx and the Critique of Religion as Ideology

Here is my reply:

Thanks for the kind words. I appreciate your willingness to engage in dialogue.

I find your comment that you find my rejection of Marxism "extreme" to be difficult to understand. Marx's critique of religion is extreme in my view and to reject it seems like modesty itself. Marx is attacking your religion as evil and you as a culpable dupe.

I read Westphal's chapter and I still find it impossible to see anything profitable or true in Marx's critique of religion. It merely confirmed via a sympathetic reading of Marx what I already thought Marx was saying.

Marx is not really critiquing something abstract called "religion" that we can define in whichever way suits us. He is attacking the state church of Prussia and by extension all countries in which Christianity exercises any public role - as Westphal makes clear by his reference to Marx's comments on America. The problem is not the specifics of church-state relations; it is the influence of Christianity on public attitudes at all. And it is not any particular ideology or philosophy advocated by the church - as if the church could just get a better one - but rather the nature of the Gospel itself that offends. Marx is offended by the teaching that humans are sinners who cannot build Utopia themselves but must seek salvation by the hand of the Lord in God's own good time. This injures his pride and constitutes a barrier to his acceptance of Christianity.

As Westphal rightly points out, Marx's critique is not only metaphysical but primarily moral in nature. His comment that the moral critique would still stand even if the metaphysical claims of Christianity were true shows that Marx is not interested in submitting his will to God even if God exists. What Marx hates is that Christianity encourages patient endurance in the face of suffering and discourages the revolutionary roll of the dice. The comment on p. 152 is instructive: "Marx is telling the story of the ways in which religion not only endures but eventually embraces evil." This shows that Marx's real problem with religion is not that it causes oppression by doing evil (manifestly it does not always do that), but that it encourages patience with the world.

Christianity (especially in its Augustinian forms) is pessimistic about Utopia in this fallen world and counsels caution when zealots want to launch the revolution. The sword granted to the state is for the maintenance of justice but Christians know that even when there is injustice, it could be worse. How? If there was no longer any state, but rather a revolutionary vanguard liberated from law and functioning with no limits on their power, which is what we see in 20th century Marxist states.

Marx is a gnostic dreamer - like the Anabaptists of Meunster - who believes that to tear down the state, the family and the church will permit the goodness of human nature to surge to the fore in the classless society. He is right to view the Church as a bulwark against his dreams of revolution and in performing this function the Church is not oppressive or evil but rather a bulwark of freedom and the protector of humanity. I love the church for doing precisely what Marx condemns it for doing.

The 19th century, which Marx found so oppressive and evil, was the Victorian age of social reform led by Christians. It was an era of peace - in stark contrast to the bloody, dark 20th century in which the "bourgeois oppression" so scorned by Marx was replaced by the socialist revolution in many countries of the world. The result was the famines in the Ukraine, the Gulag, the cultural revolution and the killing fields of Cambodia - 100 million people murdered by their own governments all of which were the vanguard of the revolution.

Men released from the limits of law paying no heed to the "fairy tales of religion" felt free to impose their will on society without restraint and the result was worse than all the evils of 1500 years of Christendom all packed into one miserable century.

Religion is an obstacle to socialism. Amen to that.