ABSTRACT
Marx, Weber, and Freud. Even as religion ourished at the time of their writing, each of these master thinkers predicted that it would eventually “wither away.” Marx claimed, of course, that religion was the “opium of the people,” in the twofold sense of dulling their perception of (bourgeois) reality and making that reality somewhat more bearable than it would otherwise be. It is less well known that he also called religion “the soul of soulless conditions,”2 by which he meant that religious belief and practice express needs for human solidarity that, as we have seen, he believed could not be satised in an alienated capitalist society. It followed, for Marx, that the elimination of capitalist alienation and the creation of a dis-alienated socialist society would eliminate the need for religion. Max Weber argued that modernization entails the instrumentally rational “disenchantment of the world,” a world in which questions of ultimate meaning or ends are increasingly supplanted by technical questions or questions of means that squeeze out any room for religious reection.3 And Freud also argued that religion and science are inversely related, that even as religion satises essentially infantile needs for parental, especially paternal, protection the slow but steady maturation of society, facilitated by the diusion of psychoanalytic awareness, would eventually enable science to supersede religion.4
