Secularism, religion and the problem of human emancipation in Marx

Abstract

The present article aims to investigate the relationship between secularism and religion in the bourgeois society in the light of the human emancipation problem based on the writings of young Marx, such as, for example, On the Jewish Question, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law – Introduction, among others, which concerned the initial moment of his critical thinking. In addition to The German Ideology, a later work in which Marx takes up some of the discussions initiated in that period. The newness brought by Marx to the traditional debate between secularism versus religion is that all such a matter might be only thought of, from human and not just from political emancipation. The survival of religion in modernity does not mean a deviation from secularization in modern history, a betrayal of the Philosophy of Light or even an antagonism towards political emancipation. It is the result of a secularization. Actually, that did not face the contradictions of a capitalist society. On the one hand, Marx considered religion to be the “opium of the people”, and that all criticism would have as a model the religion criticism. On the other hand, however, religion would not stop being, at the same time, a guilty cry against an exclusionary society and the misery of a world. Therefore, the hypothesis to be investigated in this article is that the analysis of religion in Marx should not be merely reduced to an anticlericalism of his time. It has, as a horizon, human and not only political emancipation. As far as Marx is concerned, it is not just a matter of a simple struggle, between the Lights and the Dark on the level of consciousness, but, above all, a criticism of the bourgeois society contradictions. Marx does not have a systematic critical theory of religion. We may, this way, systematize certain discussions, which Marx presented throughout his writings aiming to investigate the problem proposed in this article.