What Marx got wrong about religion

Due to circumstances beyond my control (and, as swiftly transpired, my doctor’s), I’ve spent the past week filling myself with opiates. Not, I grant you, a situation devoutly to be wished. But equally, not one without its recompenses either. For the intrepid scholar of atheism, you see, systematically dulling one’s senses with codeine offers opportunities for serious fieldwork – indeed, for participant observation. Religion, after all, “is the opiate of the people” (das Opium des Volkes): a Reader’s Digest-worthy Quotable Quote if ever there was one (not that, mystifyingly, they tend to feature much Marx).

This enduring and influential metaphor owes much of its force to its clear and arresting imagery. Conjuring up images of opium dens and heroin needles, “religion” is depicted here as addictive and damaging: a devastating social malady, cynically peddled to the weak by miscreants seeking profit and power. At least, that is what “opiate of the people” has come, more or less universally, to mean. Oddly and importantly, though, it is not at all what Marx himself meant by the phrase.

First off, Marx was writing in the 1840s (the famous passage comes from his otherwise fairly forgettable Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, published in 1843). Opium and its derivatives were held in high regard for their medicinal properties. Indeed, according to the scholar Andrew McKinnon: “Medicine, not recreational use, was the most common use for opium in the first half of the 19th century, and opium was a medicine of utmost significance; in the 1840s its importance is perhaps best compared with that of penicillin in the 20th century.”

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