ABSTRACT
“Religion is the opium of the people”—this would have been the most well-known statement by Karl Marx concerning religion. To provide a more comprehensive and nuanced picture, this chapter outlines the main points of Marx’s thoughts on religion in relation to philosophy. It deals with the ambivalence of the opium metaphor in the context of the passage in which it appears. The context into which Marx was born was the backward economic and political status of the German states. Although he studied theology at the gymnasium, Marx never felt any religious commitment. Indeed, he found the connection between the churches and the ruling classes obnoxious. One text from Marx’s engagement with Feuerbach has caught the popular imagination in relation to Marx’s theory of religion. The chapter concludes with the most interesting and significant of Marx’s arguments concerning religion, namely, the fetish.
