What is God?

Why does the Christian who believes in turning the other cheek cheer for bombs falling on children in distant countries? Why did Buddhist Kings who professed detachment from all earthly things own slaves? Why does a Muslim ruler who believes in the Ummah work with Israel? Why did Sikhs never eliminate caste?

Everywhere we look in the world of religion, we see glaring paradoxes that, on the surface, seem like personal failures. But when we begin to understand what religion is, we can see why this is not a failure of individuals but a result of religion’s structural origins. Because when man worships God, what they actually worship is their own class society and alienation reflected unto heaven.

In Critique Of Hegel’s Philosophy Of Right, Marx wrote that

Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being encamped outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world…It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. 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.

To abolish religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness. The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, the halo of which is religion.

Like Feuerbach before him, Marx took a radical inversion of Man’s relationship to God. Rather than God creating man, man created God, man projected himself to the heavens. However, Marx goes even further, Man is not just an abstract, but all of the concrete social relations within which they exist. King and peasant, slave master and slave, capitalist and worker. When man worships God, that is to say, they worship their own alienation.

Alienation is a material reality of a class society. The coercion of human beings into labor by a ruling class, in which they produce not for themselves but for the ruling class. The objectification of this social relation is the good or commodity produced from it.

In capital man worships not God but their own condition as wage labor in the service of capital’s expansion. Man sells their labor power in exchange for a wage, and in return, capital is able to receive a great use value, a commodity (labor) that produces more value than it is bought for.

Just like how human labor was inverted (taken from man and objectified into money, commodities, ect), human agency to change the world is taken out of its hands and placed into a God figure. Man’s lack of justice in a class society is given to a heavenly system of justice; man’s lack of intelligence and creative activity in the face of a numb, mindless position of producing value is placed within the all-knowingness and creativity of a god figure. Religion becomes a pain medication (opium) to escape the condition of alienated labor.

Therefore, when an evangelical Christian worships Jesus and bombs at the same time, they not only worship their position in wage labor, American capital’s needs to expand and conquer new world markets, but also soothe the pain of being a wage laborer and the stagnation of human creative activity that comes from such a condition.

The Christian who works at Raytheon worships not God but the accumulation of Raytheon’s capital itself, while at the same time soothing the alienation of having to sell their creative activity for 8-12 hours a day to another, and produce weapons for the expansion of value, not self-fulfillment. A theological justification post hoc of the social relation.

Progressive and socialist religious people do not escape this either. They worship the class relation between the proletariat and capital just as much as the conservatives, but rather stake their claim on the side of the proletariat. That is to say, they project the proletariat’s condition as wage laborers to heaven but have God speak not for the ruling class but theirs.

Religion, of course, did this phenomenon too; it did not just take the voice of the ruling class into heaven but also incorporated the voices of the ruled, in order to then rule them. It is how the Bible can talk of the rich man’s entrance into heaven being harder than a camel through the eye of a needle, and also be the favorite book of capitalists. You cannot rule a ruled class without a concession to their voice; the whole of class society must be projected to heaven, not just its ruling class, but it must be in service of said ruling class. Dog bones in essence.

When man is told to hate the other (Christian and Muslim, white and black, citizen and undocumented), even when secular, it is a moralist religious framework that externalizes man’s alienation onto the other. The dissatisfaction and anger at man’s position in class society as coerced labor, wage-slave, is made to lie in the body of their fellow proletariat or lumpen. Hate is, in essence, an externalization of one’s alienation within a class society unto the other. A false consciousness that serves class society from having the proletariat realize its true position across race, religion, gender, and ethnicity as producers of new value, and therefore as the revolutionary subject that can bring it down.

Western society has been secular for only a couple of hundred years and therefore sees these religious frameworks throughout its secular movements. Politics, especially in which belief in a particular party, ideology, or individual becomes a moral dogma, where allegiance matters above all, and the ‘enemies of God’ are cast as migrants or some other scapegoat. The illogical hatred of the enemies of God is now cast in a secular framework onto the other. Religion as a framework that existed as an expression of material social relations in society, then had those frameworks evolve within secular civil society as a result of said society itself transitioning from feudal to capitalist. Hence, why the growth of atheism has not gotten rid of religious frameworks or illogical results itself.

Secular man in neoliberal societies’ priest is the commodity form and fetish, their God is consumerism, but they kneel before it in almost strikingly similar ways to the worshippers in church before them. Their belief in the commodity’s marketing hype and their bourgeois political party is just about parallel to man’s faith in God. Because it is largely the same framework now evolved in tandem with a new hyper-commodified society.

So often, atheist movements (new atheism especially) have treated religion as simply a failure of education and logic that can be debated away. While modern Marxists have treated it as something above our schema’s ruthless critique, or something to be extinguished through atheistic force. But religion is not abolished through debate and logic, as it is not a result of the personal failure of individuals; it is borne out of the very structure of the class society.

The total wholesale accommodation of religion, modern Marxism seems to want to fundamentally misunderstand its origins as an expression of class society. While someone who’s religious should not be oppressed or ridiculed, their relationship to God must be understood as an expression of their relationship in class society itself, as a post hoc of class society’s existence. And the Marxists who seek to crush it through some sort of soviet state atheism likewise fail to recognize how religion is extinguished.

Through the abolishment of class society and alienation, wage labor and the commodity form, man no longer has a need to seek their salvation in heaven or consumerism. When man is no longer coerced into labor but wholly master of it, there is nothing left to project to heaven because Earth is now satisfactory for the human condition. The real abolition of religion begins not in the debate rooms of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens’s books, but in the streets of the workers’ movement. By changing the world around us, we change ‘heaven’ itself and cause it to fall back to earth.

I will be brutally raw and honest. Sometimes, when I’m scared, I pray. Do I believe in God? No, not really, but the act itself gives me some comfort. But in doing so, I give myself the very opium I need when I feel as though my world is out of control. We are all human; religion is not an act of moralism, it just like class society exists, and will be abolished through the negation of class society itself.