On Karl Marx and Christianity. 1st June 2019. Revd Dr N.K. Gardner
In the 19th century, popular Christianity in Europe had become fixated upon the instillation of a sense of the importance of piety, morality and obedience in its congregations. In other times in the history of the Church there would be an emphasis of the Kingdom of God, preached on by Jesus, arriving eventually on earth and with the contribution of God given human talent. In such circumstances Christian people, seeing salvation as within their grasp, might begin a struggle to achieve it. Such hope and expectation might encourage especially the poor and downtrodden, to work to change, not just their personal life, morality and spirituality, but the structures of their world: its politucal, social and economic power structures, as well as anything else.
From the perspective of the Victorian ruling class, a sense that God’s Kingdom might be brought into being on earth and through the co-operation of human action would, would encourage a radical and potentially anarchic challenge to structures of economic and politucal power of the 19th century world. Plainly the ruling classes considered this to something that would lead, not to salvation in the form of the kingdom, but to the hell that they had already been witnessed in the French Revolution.
And so the Church, in this period, propagated a notion of salvation obtained for the individual (rather than, say, by God through a mass movement), via conscientious adherence to piety, prayer and obedience and reaching its fruition in the departing of the soul after death into heaven. It dampened down any potential enthusiasm for precipitating salvation on earth by almost ignoring interpretations of scripture, reason and tradition that might be seen as pointing to that, especially in the popular propagation of doctrine, and substituted for this a notion that heaven was a matter wholly and solely in the hands of God without any human aspect in its achievement. In which case the people were taught to accept their lives and continue to work and obey diligently. God alone brings a man to heaven and will, at the end of days, bring the kingdom into being on earth. In the meantime we must cultivate the virtue that qualifies us for God’s reward: we must except our God-given rulers, our place in society and, if it is necessary, our penury.
So, the whole focus of the Christian man or woman was outside of the world. Their hope was directed to a life after death, in a form that was a dis-incarnate, disembodied, peaceful rest that was little different to an endless, passionless quiescence, in the Greek, apatheia . But what is important to bear in mind is that this is by no means the only way of interpreting Christ’s message and the apostles elaborations through the Spirit, and historically it was not the only way in which the Christian Faith was understood and preached.
Christianity in every period of history is ‘inculturated’, which is to say it is never pure, pristine Christianity as Word of God with no human interpretationary ‘pollution’. In every age the people of that age have tended to some extent to read into the faith a form that reflects their own times, their difficulties and priorities. So, it has taken on a particular form in which certain things are emphasised, and certain things are tending to be forgotten, in accordance with the main concerns of a people in their particular struggle to make a life in the world. The 19th century was an age of the most enormous social, political and economic upheaval. Some of that upheaval took the form of violent revolution and hopes of freedom ending in the reign of terroristic regimes such as that of the French Jacobins and the ‘Committee of Public Safety’. In these circumstances many people in England, and elsewhere in 19th century Europe, sought a relatively conservative Christianity emphasising universally valid moral and spiritual teaching that acted as a kind fixed point, something immovable that could be clung to in a world of rapid and disorientating flux. And, of course, that would encourage social order and the obedience of the lower orders.
If we narrow the point somewhat we should say that the priorities of the Church in every age fit in with the priorities of that class of people that have disproportionate influence over the shape of the Church’s culture. The wealthy and better educated in every age have greater access to writing its doctrines and dogma, its liturgies and prayers, its hymns and liturgical settings. The wealthy and better educated families, especially in the socially, hierarchically conscious 19th century, supplied the priests, the theologians and especially the bishops. These inevitably formed a notion of Christianity that reflected their priorities, perhaps their particular sense of sin and guilt as well as their self justifications as a class with certain privileges. This is not to say that they were aware of doing anything other than telling of the truth about Christianity. This was not some cynical conspiracy by the ruling order to stupefy the masses by peddling interpretations of Christ’s teaching just in order to breed social passivity. That did go on, but the majority of those – some of them great names – who developed the doctrine and dogma of the Church, did so as part of a conscientious attempt to lay out an accurate interpretation of the teaching and life of Christ. Any set of theologians, liturgists etc, write and compose through a set of unconscious biases that to some extent direct their thinking without their being aware of it. So, whatever culture we belong to, we home in on certain aspects of the Christian faith without realising, necessarily, that this is what we are doing. The values and priorities of the social group to which we belong form a kind of lens through which we see everything and particularly read something like scripture.
In a very class divided society such as that of the Victorian era, there was a need on the part of the ruling class to justify their privileges, instil popular conformity and get the majority to accept their rather less privileged lot. A simple message that God rewards obedience and punishes dissent in a society still highly religious is a powerful ideological force, that is, it is a message that helps implant social conformity. Preaching ideas such as that God creates hierarchy as a natural order of things justifies structural ‘trees’ of power and privilege. Again, we must be careful of thinking that the ruling class were peddling such ideas cynically. Our liberal ideas and our sometimes blind adhesion to notions of equality, disable our ability to see this but it is important that we try. At a time when many western cultures were being convulsed by violent revolution, breaking out at various times and in various places since the 17th century, and bringing down different ruling regimes, the Church in England played its part in instilling the virtues of just getting on with your work, accepting your place in the order of things and waiting upon your reward outside of this world rather than agitating for it now, and within it.
It was into this environment that Karl Marx emerged as the voice for what were, in many ways, themes of justice and equality, a just redistribution of wealth and hope of living in a better world, that belonged to Judeo-Christianity, but from a position outside it. This is something that we find increasingly where the Church does not sufficiently take up the message and fight for a ‘this world’, living, embodied hope in God through Christ. Human beings cannot live without this hope. So if the Church will not preach it, other people tend to be raised up to do the job from outside of it.
Marx, famously declared, in the introduction of the ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’, in 1843 – but which was not published until after his death – that religion is ‘the opium of the masses’. However, it is worth quoting the whole sentence, ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”. Quoting the whole sentence shows it in a slightly different light; religion is not so much some drug peddled to the masses to keep them supine and stupid, as it is the expression of the heart of an oppressed people.
In any case Marx was undoubtably an atheist in the sense that he considered the Christianity of the period as offering a kind of faux liberation after death rather than a true salvation, one wrought by revolution, human effort and skill, and by which they spiritually matured in the process, and in building a new world thereafter. What tended to happen, as Marx saw it, was that productive technologies – for example, farming technologies, machinery for plowing the land or for building factories and producing commodities etc – in any society might mature to a point that the old social hierarchy starts to be seen as unwilling and unable to make the fairest and most just use it, It is most often the peasantry or industrial workers who agitate for an order that they see as working more fairly, in other words generally giving them a better ‘slice of the cake’. This may or may not lead to a series of crises and conflicts between the ruling order and those who they rule. They may morph into violent revolution until out of this conflict of classes a new order arises with a new way of organising economy and society, as they see it, more justly and fairly. Marx claims that this sort of thing has happened throughout history and had already happened to bring about the liberal, capitalist society he lived in (some people argue that the English civil wars constituted a revolution in which the rising middle classes overthrew the privileges and monopolies of the old feudal order). Marx called this ‘dialectical materialism’.
Such a crisis of the working class against the ruling class of England would come about once people could see better ways of using existing technology to house, feed and clothe everyone more widely and adequately than the present order was able to do. It would happen once the mass of people became aware of this better world potential, and their own potential to achieve such a world together, but also find their way blocked by a ruling class that wanted to hang on to their privileges.
So Marx also considered the Church Christianity of his time to be a bourgeois (the French for burgher, middle class etc), fiction. It was designed to get people to lose consciousness of such a potential, and tolerate an intolerable situation. That situation was not just one that was about being poor and economically hard pressed, but in reality also spiritually impoverishing.
We must not misunderstand Karl Marx’s attitude to capitalism in the way so many have and do. For Marx capitalism represented a stupendous advance in the progress of human beings in the long march to freeing themselves from bondage to poverty, disease and squalor. The technological advances that it sponsored, including advances in medicine and public health, represented a new stage in the reconstruction of the world in terms of reason. It paid for this, however, with the physical and spiritual lives of the poorest and most vulnerable in society, and the spiritual lives of everyone. We need not list the brutalities, the pain of the poor in the 19th and 20th centuries, this is already an infamous, violent story.
We have to realise that each epoch in the history of human civilisation brings with it not just external changes – technology, social and economic administration and fashion – but internal, social psychological changes as well. It also brought about what Marx would consider to be spiritual orientations. Capitalism brought with it changes in the way that people think about theirselves, their relations with each other and the world they lived in and this amounted to Spiritual reflection on things like what is good, true, lovely and loving, and what is sacred.
Marx believed that internal, conscious life, as well as what we called the human Spirit, was a reflection of the way that a people worked to produce a world. Let’s take life in medieval times for most ordinary people. This was undoubtably often very harsh. Nevertheless also people lived within a form of connectedness to each other, their world and their God which Capitalism seemed to have left behind. The medieval economy was rooted in the ownership and cultivation of the land. The ordinary sort were poor, but because of the way the economy and technology was arranged, they each at least owned and controlled a strip of land, the tools they used to farm it, and as long as they gave service or portion of produce to the manor, had the freedom to exploit their land as they would.
This situation, of what we now term a feudal economy created a setting for a strongly developed sense of vulnerability, as well as dependence, and interdependence. This is reflected in a powerful sense of the fear of, and dependence upon, the sacred in an environment of constant attention to how things could almost instantly go wrong. The fragility of the environment bred an attention to the character of the physical world reflected in the multitude of spiritual presences that they saw occupying, for eg, wells and copses, saints bones and statues. There is a connectedness in this world of people both to the land and each other, that was all drawn into a sense of the immanence of the sacred and the mystical, the enchanted-ness of this world and people around them, in a unified, hierarchical, spiritual order ending in God.
Capitalism broke up this old order because it had its roots in, amongst other ways, a new way of making a living. The new middle classes – the yeoman, the gentleman, the burgher, the higher educated administrative staff of aristocratic estates and the merchants, amongst others – less and less made their living collectively. They became, over time, much more individualistic, not relying so much on blood ties (the aristocratic family), ties to the land and ancient prerogative and monopolies, nor upon common land tenure farming interdependencies or trade guild. Rather, they were wealthy enough to stride out on their own.
These presided over the enclosures of the 16th century onwards, where ancient grazing and farming rights on 1000’s of acres of common land, were cut across, ignored and just trampled on as powerful land owners seized the land to take it into usage that they determined were more efficient. Hundreds and thousands, perhaps millions were displaced over these years, they had to leave behind their little strips of land, their tools and so on, and become little entrepreneurs themselves in the new urban centres where the factories, the mills and the forges and mines now were. Of course these people now had nothing to sell in their little ‘enterprise’ but their own labour which they sold, in circumstances of huge power imbalances, to the owners and controllers of the machinery, the mines, mills and factory units.
The power of capital is one rooted in the economic requirements of individual entrepreneurs striding out to establish businesses. It puts businesses in competition with one another and individuals with one another competing for status and position within capitalist enterprises. Latterly making money has been dependent upon lots of customers striving individualistically to obtain what they can regardless of the needs or requirements of the rest of society.
And so we, under capitalism, we become much more disconnected, our economic reality has different psyche/spirituality in which the individual independent of the community, instead of the individual within and obtaining its identity within the community, is most important. With disconnection from each other and the land our intuitive sense of the sacred is inner/individualised, more emotional and fleeting. We feel ourselves to have become a much less spiritually sensitive and more alienated from God, our world and each other. If we go to church we chose our church like we chose where to shop. We have a highly individualised notion of salvation whereby the individual is either condemned for their unbelief or exalted for their belief, punished or rewarded by God, in abstraction from the fate of other people. And God himself is like a grand individual rather than the society of the Trinity, for instance.
Capitalists are those who used their money to generate more money, or capital. They used their money to invest in merchantable commodities or enterprises of production to make even more money. Those who had nothing to sell except their own bodies and labour worked for them. But everyone in capitalism is ultimately a slave to the market unless one they generate a monopoly and control the market.This ‘slavery’ is vital to grasp and important for understanding the sort of ‘spirituality’ left to people under capitalism.
The whole way in which people now worked – whether together or apart according to new divisions of labour – allowed for little self autonomy or creativity and was rigidly supervised and regulated according to abstract clock times in 14 or 12 hour shifts. This was because it was determined ultimately by shifts and movements in the market. Even nowadays, perhaps especially nowadays, people have little control over the greater portion of their waking time, but have to sell their labour to companies who manufacture according to what people are prepared to spend their money on in the market. What your skills or potential capacities are, what would develop you as a human being or especially bring you close to your neighbour and your God, is irrelevant. The only relevant thing is the requirements of the market and if that means ringing out the last vestige of your creative capacity by attaching you to pulling a lever up and down for 8-10 hours a day, then so be it.
The crucial matter for Marx in his understanding of human spirituality was the degree of freedom they had to make a life and living with each other, through a particular stage of technological development; to freely dispose of their work and creativity with one another in making a world, a way of life and an understanding of the meaning of things: what is good and true and sacred. This could be, according to capacities, anything from whittling a piece of wood into an ornament, to using thought and application to farm land, building a wall or a house; to writing a poem, drawing pictures on a cave wall, composing a symphony, designing a cathedral etc, etc – all of this put each human spirit in touch with each other, the world and God, in a way that drew from individuals potentially endless new capacities, abilities, skills, ways of thinking. It expanded the limit of one’s understanding, the sensitivity of one person to another, to their the world, and even to an appreciation of art and other various incarnations of the divine in the world.
So, for this potentially infinite series of capacities to have become reduced to pressing buttons on a production line or shifting pieces of paper from one desk to another according to the latest consumer fashion, represents the greatest spiritual deprivation in the history of humanity. It’s worse because for the first time in human history the capacity for changing the world in accordance with the requirements of human spirituality, now exist. But instead in this topsy turvy world human spirituality is made subservient to the mechanism that serves the market. Religion would never be the same again.
Marx saw, in this sense, that Capitalism was rapaciously sacrilegious and represented the very heart of the process of secularisation. He wrote in ‘The Communist Manifesto’
“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe”.
Anyone who studies the period has a vision of some of the horror of industrial Manchester or Birmingham, or the fiery Hades that became of the green valleys of South Wales as coal, copper and the iron in its veins were mined to be commodified and sold.
Interestingly many conservatives of the period, such as Matthew Arnold and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were also extremely concerned by what they saw as the philistinical rapaciousness of capitalism as de-sensitising and de-spiritualising human beings, rather than honing their sensitives to the appreciation of beauty. Coleridge, seeing that the Church was not able to capture the imagination of most of these new industrial urbanites, actually advocated forming a new Church that evangelised a canon of the greatest expressions of national literature and poetry – Milton, Dryden and Donne for example – with its own priests to go out and civilise, by these means, this new, coarsened industrial proletariat.
Arguably the Church was making little progress and losing its position at the centre of British cultural life, at least in part because it was seen as representing a ruling class that just wanted to lecture and hector about behaving properly, working hard and being obedient. But there was also something more subtle going on. The sensitivities of people to some kind of transcendent presence in and as the world around, was fading through the coarse of modernity, and the imagination saw the spiritual less in and as things as in an invisible reality running parallel to material reality. For ordinary people the earth reality they lived in felt spiritually evacuated, it was a banal, grey industrial landscape. It was not only the smoke from the factory chimneys that did this. Since so few ordinary people were able to apply their actual powers of creative engagement, and realise potential powers, by actually engaging with one another to freely create a world, they became alienated from that world. It was like something that was inevitable, that went on without them and had little to do with them.
The romantic movement also baulked at the reduction of material reality to a spiritually evacuated husk in which everything was reduced to things that can be measured, quantified, assessed for monetary value, packaged and commodified. They tried to re-enchant the world with art. They saw a superficiality spreading out over the world, with the absence of beauty as coarsening the human spirit and making it less receptive to moral formation. Art would revivify this drab, scientifically, industrially and capitalistically, reduced world and open the human spirit to greater sensitivity, greater spiritual sight, and an appreciation of the spirit immensity in and as the material.
There was something of this in Marx as well. But while the romantics sometimes seemed to live and speak as though you could beautify and re-sensitise the world whilst retaining the same economy based on private ownership of the means of production – perhaps legislate for better conditions of education, for instance – Marx considered that while a society was still based on private ownership of essential things, there would always be pressure to sacrifice the spiritual betterment of the majority, to the owners need to compete. They would need to carve out new markets, and obtain more labour for less investment, either making human beings work harder for less money and worse conditions or making them redundant altogether in favour of new machinery. The only answer was some form of public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, where surpluses from what is produced could be directed toward the the spiritual development of the whole society, starting with basic physical conditions of work and rest, and ending with plowing resources into education, instruction, experimentation and so on, all in the effort to help develop humanity toward full maturity.
Christianity has always, also been about the utilisation of God’s gifts in bringing all humanity to salvation. From its beginning, the Church was orientated to hope of an imminent new heaven and a new earth in which there would be social and economic justice for all. If there is a call for obedience and hard work it is ultimately for these ends. It is about one day entering the promised land, which one Iesua-Ben-Iusef preached in terms of “the Kingdom” and thus did he pray,‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’. Do we hear that ‘on earth’? Marx was an atheist because of what he saw as the impoverishment of the Christianity of his time. They talked of heaven as a disembodied state after death. They talked of the Kingdom come but as something impossible for human beings to produce, way beyond human imaginative capacity to picture. Then and now it was too often a dry, moralistic, pious ‘Churchyality’ that leaves world pretty much as it found it. Does the Church preach a salvation, then, that really speaks to the longings and hopes of ‘the oppressed creature’?
I’ll end with a difficult question: does our Christianity take the form it does, run by people more or less like us, for people more or less like us, because we and especially the people who run the Church are actually pretty well off and therefore in no hurry to have the world fundamentally change in the way that someone at the lowest end of our society would be? We are basically satisfied that our Christianity is just about worship and charitable social action (all very important in itself), and so were the Victorian Christians who taught a Gospel message of good behaviour, obedience and piety, as Christianity per se, rather than just the expression of the Christianity of one group in society. But these also benefitted enough from the way the economy was arranged not to fundamentally want to change it. Perhaps there are many, who don’t even think about the Church at the moment, whose lives are poor, crime ridden and hard, or stressful, drab and meaningless, living two steps away from penury, working all the hours just to satisfy bullying bosses etc, etc, – who may respond more positively to a Christianity that preached the kingdom as something that God wants to come now, is imaginable and possible by our hand through the power of God? I still think Marx might have something to teach us?
