It takes him only a few sentences to create this definitive summary of man’s religious reality.Īfter a quick reference to the situation of religion in Germany, he declares: “.the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism”. He does it with a deft and sure hand, with bold, broad sweeps. The portrait of religion unfurled by Marx in the introduction to his critique of Hegel is nothing less than stunning. European societies who chose to get rid of the religious delusion, to firmly separate state from religion and governance from faith, raced to the top of the ladder of material and cultural progress. The often neglected fact is that the grassroots energy that spurred this transformation was the boundless power released by the secular deconstruction of Christianity that set millions of minds free. Instead it was a bourgeoisie-driven capitalist upsurge that created Europe’s economic (read colonial) domination of the world-as also its post-Second World War democracies. About Christianity, the then dominant religion of Europe, he said: “The social principles of Christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed.” True, the Marxian scenario of a proletarian revolution did not play out in Europe.
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