ABSTRACT
Much has been written about Marxist criticism of religious alienation or the struggle of materialist atheism against Christian idealism. What interests the author in this chapter is rather something else: the contribution of Marx and Engels to the sociology of religious facts and their interest in Protestant religion and/or the revolutionary role of religion. An attentive exploration on these bases can furnish some surprises. The most striking example is Engels’s analysis in The Peasant War (1850) of the sixteenth-century Anabaptist movement in Germany and of Thomas Münzer’s “revolutionary theology,” as such, as a utopian anticipation of modern communism.
