This Christmas, Radical Christianity and Marxism Can Inspire Us to Build a Better World
The conventional understanding of Marxism as doggedly anti-religious is wrong. In fact, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued, Christianity and Marxism have at times inspired in humanity a radical sense of hope to build a more just world.
Two Christmas icons. (Photo via Midwestern Marx)
That Karl Marx was an atheist is well known by both his friends and enemies. Even weirdos like me who don’t spend their days panting impatiently for David Harvey’s forthcoming book on the Grundrisse can recite Marx’s famous description of religion as the “opium of the people.” And in practice, many Marxist figures and movements, from Vladimir Lenin to French socialism, had a dim view of faith traditions. Often with great justification, Marxists saw institutions like the Catholic Church as bastions of reaction that had, at best, accommodated themselves to modern conceptions of equality and freedom.
But Marxism’s historical relationship with religion is far more complicated. Latin-American leftists infused the Catholic Church with liberation theology, and Christian theologian Paul Tillich urged humanity to have the courage to work toward socialism. In the United States, leading black leftists, from Martin Luther King Jr to Cornel West, have drawn on the legacy of both socialism and the Bible. And contemporary leftist intellectuals like Terry Eagleton and Reverend Angela Cowser continue in this tradition of dialogue and critique.
MacIntyre and Marx
Alasdair MacIntyre, the eminent Scottish American philosopher, is a fascinating figure in the Marxism-Christianity nexus. Hugely important on the Anglo-American right, MacIntyre has influenced countless “post-liberal” and socially conservative intellectuals drawn to his gloomy and even apocalyptic critique of liberal modernity (though most lack his sophistication and enduring disdain for capitalism’s injustices). To MacIntyre, modern society has turned right and wrong into matters of personal taste, leaving humanity adrift, nihilistic, and devoid of any sense of what ends are worth pursing in life. Without a teleological sense of what ends are worth pursuing, many ultimately give in to atomistic consumerism or find themselves attracted to destructive forms of the Nietzschean “will to power.”
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