Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Religion in the Post-Secular Age: A Critical Philosophical Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24193/subbphil.2026.2.13Keywords:
Karl Marx, post-secularism, ideology, alienation, liberation theologyAbstract
The article revisits the critique of religion by Karl Marx in a critical philosophical perspective by both addressing the traditional understandings and current post-secular discourse. Though Marx is often characterized as having described religion as the opium of the people, this paper will point to the fact that, a more nuanced interpretation of his corpus, however, demonstrates that his dialectic is more nuanced than either the crude atheism or the political theology that he is said to have identified is able to offer. Relying on recent work by Hammer (2025), Vizcaiando (2024) and others, I would argue that the materialist critique of religion by Marx cannot be detached and disassociated with his larger social change agenda. But I also see a lot of philosophical contradictions in the stand of Marx, especially his inability to explain the existence of religious phenomena even in the post-revolutionary situations. This paper explores the need to supplement but not abandon the critique developed by Marx based on recent work by Habermas (2008), Žižek (2012), and Eagleton (2016). I suggest that religion is also ideological mystification and a reservoir of utopian wish a duality that, Marx acknowledged but not theorized. The paper concludes that a re-formed Marxist perspective on religion needs to drop any teleological notions concerning secularization and preserve the materialist emphasis on seeking to map religious consciousness into its socio-economic origins.
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