The pieces gathered here span more than half a century, from a footnote in Marx's 1841 doctoral dissertation to Engels's essays on early Christianity written in the last year of his life. They were never conceived as a book. It was the Soviet editors who made them one, cutting extracts from Capital, Anti-Dühring, The German Ideology, the Manifesto and a dozen other works, adding letters and journalism, and framing the whole as a single doctrine. The Foreword states the purpose without embarrassment: these are "works in which Marx and Engels expound their views on the essence and origin of religion," and "these works lay the theoretical foundations of proletarian, Marxist atheism." The present collection, first issued by Progress Publishers in 1957 and reprinted in this revised form through the 1970s, is thus two things at once — an anthology of what Marx and Engels actually wrote about religion, and a monument to what a later state wanted that writing to mean.
The distance between the two is the subject of this introduction. The materials are genuine and often magnificent; the frame around them is a construction, and the construction tells its own story.
Read on their own, the texts are far richer than the label "atheism" suggests. Their core is a materialist explanation of where religion comes from — not a sneer at the credulous but an account of need. In the earliest human societies religious belief arose from helplessness before nature; in class society it is fed by "the social oppression of the working masses and their apparent helplessness in the struggle against their exploiters." Engels's definition, which the Foreword rightly places at the centre, is that religion "is nothing but 'the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces.'" Strip out the polemic and what remains is a theory of religion as a real response to real powerlessness.
Two things in the collection are stronger still. The first is Marx's own famous passage, from the 1844 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, and it is worth quoting in full because it is almost always quoted in half: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people." That is not contempt. It is close to compassion — religion as the protest of suffering as much as its sedative — and it issues not in a programme of unbelief but in a demand for a different world: the criticism of religion, Marx writes, ends "with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being." The second is Engels's late work on the origins of Christianity — the essays on Bruno Bauer, the Book of Revelation, and above all On the History of Early Christianity, which opens with a startling comparison: "The history of early Christianity has notable points in common with the modern working-class movement," both of them "originally a movement of oppressed people." Here Marxism looks at a religion not to debunk it but to understand it as a form the hopes of the poor once took.
The weakness of the collection is not in these texts but in the flattening they are made to undergo. The Foreword takes the "opium" sentence, detaches it from the sigh of the oppressed creature that gives it its meaning, and announces that "this saying has become the cornerstone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion." A dialectical remark about suffering is thereby turned into a slogan about narcotics, and the half of Marx that heard religion as protest is quietly dropped. Engels bears some responsibility too: his confidence that natural science had simply retired religion can read, in the framing, as a tidy Enlightenment optimism that his own subtler essays contradict. The anthology's fault, in short, is that it knows in advance what Marx and Engels are permitted to have meant.
Whether the state that printed this book was faithful to it is the decisive question, and the answer is no — twice over.
Marx's conclusion was that religion withers when the conditions that require it are abolished: remove the "heartless world," and the sigh falls silent of itself. The Soviet state did close to the opposite. It waged administrative war on belief — the League of the Militant Godless, churches shut and dynamited, clergy arrested and worse, the 1929 law that hemmed religious life on every side. This was not the disappearance of illusion as its social roots were dissolved; it was coercion by a state that had by no means abolished oppression, only changed its management. Marx had warned that a criticism of religion which stops at unbelief, and does not go on to overturn the debasing conditions, has misunderstood itself. Militant atheism as a policy of persecution was exactly such a stopping-short, dressed as its opposite.
The deeper inconsistency is the one this very anthology cannot help exposing. The book was assembled to reveal religion as "the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which control their daily life," in which earthly powers "assume the form of supernatural forces." But that is a precise description of what the Soviet regime was building around itself. The embalmed body in the mausoleum, kept on display over Krupskaya's protest; "Marxism-Leninism" recited as a catechism; the ritual pairing of Lenin and Stalin, and Stalin hailed as the Lenin of today; the founders' texts edited, purged and re-edited to fit the leader of the year — this is a fantastic reflection of an alien power exactly of the kind Engels analysed, the deification of a state that controlled its subjects' daily lives. The atheist state made itself into a church, with relics, saints, heresies and an infallible scripture, and printed Marx's critique of religion without once turning it homeward.
This is where the Fourth International reads the book. The point is not to defend religion against Marxism, nor to convict Marx and Engels of the persecutions carried out in their name; it is to insist, with Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed, that the cult was the property of a privileged bureaucratic caste, and that its idols measure the distance the revolution had been dragged from its own materialism. The tools of criticism the anthology sharpens are the very tools that expose the sharpener. A doctrine that can explain the worship of Lenin's corpse as one more fantastic reflection of an alien, earthly power is a doctrine the regime could not afford to let its readers apply.
Taken back from its frame, On Religion is more valuable now than the catechism allowed. Its materialism holds: belief has social roots, and the way to answer the sigh of the oppressed creature is to end the oppression, not to jail the creature for sighing. Its method turns in every direction, including the one its Soviet publishers forbade — onto the secular cults, the state religions of the twentieth century, the sacralised leaders and unquestionable creeds that manufacture their own supernatural forces out of very earthly power. And its finest pages, Engels on the slaves and freedmen who first carried the Christian hope, and Marx on the heart of a heartless world, are a standing rebuke to every reading, official or hostile, that reduces this tradition to a war on faith. Marx and Engels wanted a world in which human beings no longer needed to project their stolen powers into the heavens. The state that canonised them built new heavens of its own. Reading this collection against that betrayal — hearing the protest in the sigh, and refusing the reflection — is the only way to read it as its authors meant.