Communism: A Secular Humanist Ideology Incompatible with Religion
From the Marxist-Leninist perspective, religion wasn't just wrong, it was an active obstacle to revolution, a tool of class oppression, and incompatible with scientific socialism at every level: philosophical (idealism vs. materialism), political (division vs. unity), epistemological (superstition vs. science), social (hierarchy vs. equality), and economic (sanctifying vs. abolishing exploitation). When people call for the protection of religion or say that communism was not antitheist or antireligion, they are ignoring communist theory and showing signs they do not fully believe in dialectical materialism or to greater extent material continuity, the second law of thermodynamics, and human evolution.
Here I have communist statements sorted into 5 groups. These are but a small sample of communism or communism that sprang from Marx, showing that not only was it anti religious but incompatible with religion.
Category 1: Religion as a Tool to Distract/Control
Category 2: Religion is Man-Made
Category 3: Religion as Cult/Delusion/Illusion
Category 4: Need for Regulation/Abolition
Category 5: Communism is Secular/Secular Humanist
Together, the quotes below show if your communism comes from Marx and Engels and you say that communism accepts religion, that your communism is revised or a heterodox version of Marxist-Leninism.
Category 1: Religion as Tool to Distract/Control
1. "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
2. "Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation." - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
3. "Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man." - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
4. "The clergy have always been in alliance with the landlords and the capitalists, and have always defended exploitation and the rule of the bourgeoisie." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (1922)
5. "Religion and communism are incompatible, both theoretically and practically. Communism is incompatible with religious faith." - Mao Zedong, various speeches (1950s)
6. "The Catholic Church is an enemy of the Cuban Revolution." - Fidel Castro, speech (1960)
7. "The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and all they have for the latter is the pious wish the former will be charitable." - Karl Marx, "Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter" (1847)
8. "The social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of Antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages and equally know, when necessary, how to defend the oppression of the proletariat." - Karl Marx, "Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter" (1847)
9. "Religion is a means of exploiting the working people." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
10. "The priests have always sided with the landowners and capitalists, and have always helped to keep the workers in slavery." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
11. "Religion teaches people to bear meekly the yoke of slavery and exploitation." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
12. "The clergy as a whole... serves as a spiritual police for the bourgeoisie." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
13. "The priests and the churches have always been on the side of the exploiters, on the side of landlords and capitalists." - V.I. Lenin, speech (1919)
14. "Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual gin in which the slaves of capital drown their human shape and their claims to any decent life." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
My thoughts
The ideological architecture revealed in these statements demonstrates a consistent pattern across Marxist thought: religious institutions function as mechanisms of class control, wielding spiritual authority to maintain material oppression. From Marx's foundational recognition of religion as the "opium of the people" through Lenin's characterization of clergy as "spiritual police for the bourgeoisie," these thinkers identified organized religion not as a neutral belief system but as an active participant in exploitation. The promises of heavenly reward, the glorification of meekness and suffering, the sanctification of existing hierarchies, all served to channel the desperation of the oppressed away from revolutionary transformation and toward passive endurance. What makes this critique particularly damning is not simply that religion offers false comfort, but that this comfort actively perpetuates the conditions that make comfort necessary. The church and the capitalist found natural alliance because both required the worker to accept their station, to view their suffering as either divinely ordained or a test of character rather than the predictable outcome of systematic theft of labor value. When religious leaders blessed the factories, legitimized the landlords, and preached charity rather than justice, they transformed what could be righteous anger into submissive prayer.
Category 2: Religion is Man-Made
15. "Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
16. "Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand." - Karl Marx (attributed, though source uncertain)
17. "Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking." - Karl Marx, *The German Ideology* (1845)
18. "Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence." - Karl Marx, *The German Ideology* (1845)
19. "Mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc." - Friedrich Engels, "Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx" (1883)
20. "All religion, however, is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces." - Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring* (1878)
21. "Religion is a kind of spiritual vodka in which the slaves of capital drown their humanity and their desires for some sort of decent human existence." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
22. "The criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
23. "In religion people make their empirical world into an entity that is only conceived, imagined." - Karl Marx, *The German Ideology* (1845)
24. "All religion is nothing more than the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which control their daily lives." - Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring* (1878)
25. "Religion arose in very primitive times from erroneous, primitive conceptions of men about their own nature and external nature surrounding them." - Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring* (1878)
26. "The religious world is but the reflex of the real world." - Karl Marx, *Capital Vol. 1* (1867)
27. "The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations." - Karl Marx, *Capital Vol. 1* (1867)
28. "Ideas of god or the gods arose from the benightedness and ignorance of men." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
29. "Religion springs from ignorance and fear." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
My thoughts
These statements construct a materialist genealogy of religious consciousness, tracing divinity back to its earthly origins in human need and ignorance. The progression reveals religion not as revelation from above but as projection from below, born from humanity's confrontation with forces it could neither comprehend nor control. Early humans, facing the incomprehensible violence of nature and the mysterious workings of their own minds, invented supernatural explanations because they lacked scientific frameworks to understand natural phenomena. As Marx observed, religion has no independent development, no autonomous history apart from the material conditions and productive relations that generate it. The gods emerge as "fantastic reflections" of real social forces, supernatural personifications of very terrestrial powers that dominate human existence. What we worship reveals what we fear and what we cannot yet master. This analysis fundamentally inverts religious self-understanding: believers imagine they serve timeless truths handed down from eternity, but materialism reveals these "eternal truths" as historical products that will disappear when the conditions producing them are transformed. Religion becomes comprehensible only when we stop looking to the heavens and examine instead the earth, when we understand that before humans can pursue theology they must first eat, drink, and find shelter.
Category 3: Religion as Cult/Delusion/Illusion
My thoughts
The Marxist understanding of religion operates on a deeper level than simple dismissal of supernatural claims as factually incorrect. These thinkers diagnosed religion as false consciousness, a systematic inversion of reality where human creations come to dominate their creators, where the products of the mind take on independent existence and authority over those who imagined them into being. This represents not merely error but alienation, the projection outward of human capacities and qualities that then return to oppress and diminish the very humanity that produced them. Religion becomes the "illusory sun" around which people revolve when they have not yet learned to revolve around themselves, when they have not yet grasped their own agency and power. The function of this illusion is dual: it expresses genuine suffering while simultaneously protesting against that suffering in a manner that leaves the suffering intact. The worker sighs to God precisely because they cannot yet strike against the boss. What makes religion so insidious from this perspective is not that it simply lies but that it contains elements of truth twisted into forms that prevent rather than enable liberation. The following quotations reveal how this false consciousness operates and why its abolition requires not merely intellectual persuasion but transformation of the material conditions that make illusions necessary.
30. "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
31. "Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
32. "This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
33. "Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
34. "The religious world is but the reflex of the real world... Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion." - Karl Marx, *Capital Vol. 1* (1867)
35. "Religion is the fantastic realization of the human essence." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
36. "Religious ideas are superstitions." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
37. "All the gods and all the supernatural forces have been invented by men." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
38. "God is... a social idea, a social force; nature does not know God." - Nikolai Bukharin, "Down with Religion and the Church!" (1922)
39. "The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in the face of the blind forces of capitalism." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
40. "Every religious idea, every idea of God, even flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness." - V.I. Lenin, letter to Maxim Gorky (1913)
41. "There is no devil, there is no god; both have been invented by men." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
Category 4: Need for Regulation/Abolition
42. "The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
43. "We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism." - V.I. Lenin, letter to Maxim Gorky (1913)
44. "Religion must be declared a private matter." - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
45. "Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (1922)
46. "A Marxist must be a materialist, i.e., an enemy of religion." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (1922)
47. "Communism begins where atheism begins." - Karl Marx, *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844*
48. "Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
49. "We want to eliminate God from the hearts of men." - Joseph Stalin (attributed in various sources, exact citation unclear)
50. "Destroy all religion, destroy all gods." - Mao Zedong (paraphrased from Cultural Revolution era speeches)
51. "We are atheists and materialists. We deny all idealism." - Enver Hoxha, various speeches on Albania's atheist state (1967)
52. "The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility." - Karl Marx, *Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung* (1847)
53. "Religion will disappear to the extent that socialism develops. Its disappearance must be brought about through social development, in which education will play a role." - Friedrich Engels, letter to Bebel (1873)
54. "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
55. "Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality." - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, *The Communist Manifesto* (1848)
56. "But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience." - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, *The Communist Manifesto* (1848)
57. "The communist abolition of religion is the positive abolition of human self-alienation." - Karl Marx, *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844*
58. "Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority." - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
59. "We must fight religion. This is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (1922)
60. "The party of the proletariat demands that the state should declare religion to be a private affair, but by no means regards the fight against the opium of the people as a 'private affair.'" - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
61. "We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideological weapons." - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
62. "We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism." - V.I. Lenin, letter to Maxim Gorky (1913)
63. "The party cannot be neutral towards religion. It conducts anti-religious propaganda against all and every religious superstition." - Joseph Stalin, *Foundations of Leninism* (1924)
64. "Religion will die away when the exploiting classes are destroyed and when socialism is victorious." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
65. "Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
66. "The party cannot be neutral on the question of religion. It conducts anti-religious propaganda because it stands for science." - Joseph Stalin, interview with Emil Ludwig (1931)
67. "Communism and religion are incompatible both in theory and practice." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
68. "Religion must be combated in the name of materialism and science." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
69. "We want to eliminate God from the hearts of men because in this way they will understand better that everything depends on them." - Enver Hoxha, speech on Albania's atheist state (1967)
70. "Religion and communism are incompatible, both theoretically and practically." - Mao Zedong, *Quotations from Chairman Mao* (Red Book)
71. "Communism begins from the outset with atheism." - Karl Marx, *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844*
72. "The struggle against religion must not be limited nor reduced to abstract ideological preaching. This struggle must be linked up with the concrete practical class movement." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
73. "Only the class-conscious worker of today, brought up by large-scale factory industry, discards religious prejudices." - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
74. "The party must demand the complete separation of Church and State in order to combat the religious fog with purely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth." - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
75. "Religion is like a nail—the harder you hit it, the deeper it goes into the wood. We must fight religion with reason." - V.I. Lenin (paraphrased from various speeches)
76. "Down with religion! Long live science!" - Soviet League of Militant Atheists, slogan from *Bezbozhnik* journal (1920s-1930s)
77. "There is no room in our socialist society for religion." - Enver Hoxha, on closing Albania's churches and mosques (1967)
78. "All religion is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces." - Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring* (1878)
79. "Religion is inherently the emptying of man and nature of all content, the transferring of this content to the phantom of a remote god, who then in his turn graciously permits man and nature to receive a small portion from his abundance." - Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring* (1878)
80. "When once the idea of the immortality of the soul had insinuated itself among the people, the priests gained enormous power." - Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring* (1878)
81. "The philosophy of nature must be driven out of its last refuge, which is the conception of God." - Friedrich Engels, *Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy* (1886)
82. "In all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura." - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, *The German Ideology* (1845)
83. "The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man – hence with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
84. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." - Karl Marx, *Theses on Feuerbach* #11 (1845)
85. "We shall not achieve our aim unless we free the masses from religious prejudices." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (1922)
86. "Every religious idea, every idea of God, even every flirtation with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness... of the most dangerous kind, 'contagion' of the most abominable kind. Millions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions... are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of a God." - V.I. Lenin, letter to Maxim Gorky (November 13-14, 1913)
87. "The dictatorship of the proletariat... must wage a ruthless struggle against religion." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (1922)
88. "Religion must die out... The party wages ideological warfare against all remnants of religion." - Joseph Stalin, "Questions and Answers" speech to the Sverdlov University (1924)
89. "It is the task of the Party to put an end to these relics of the past, to mobilize the broad masses for a struggle against religious superstitions, and to organize the widest possible scientific-educational propaganda." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
90. "The party must pursue a tireless atheistic propaganda and must use all the weapons of science to free the workers from religious delusions." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
91. "We have done away with religion by decree. We closed the churches and destroyed them." - Joseph Stalin (attributed in various sources discussing Soviet religious persecution, 1930s)
92. "The party cannot remain neutral in the struggle between science and religion, between materialism and idealism. It must conduct an uncompromising struggle against religious ideology." - Joseph Stalin, *Foundations of Leninism* (1924)
93. "The complete victory of the socialist revolution is impossible without extirpating religious prejudices from the masses." - V.I. Lenin, *Collected Works* Vol. 15
94. "Scientific socialism is incompatible with religious belief. We must fight religion systematically." - Mao Zedong, speech on atheist education (1950s)
95. "Albania will be the first atheist state in the world. We have closed all churches and mosques. Religion is abolished." - Enver Hoxha, declaration making Albania officially atheist (1967)
96. "The struggle against religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching... It must be linked up with the concrete activities of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
97. "We must work systematically to eliminate religious prejudices, remembering at the same time not to make a martyr out of religion by crude methods." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (1922)
98. "The goal is not only to separate church and state, but to completely eliminate religion from public and private life through education and propaganda." - Soviet League of Militant Atheists, founding principles (1925)
99. "Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle." - Karl Marx, "Wages of Labour" (1844)
100. "In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out." - Karl Marx, "Preface to the Critique of Political Economy" (1859)
101. "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." - Karl Marx, *Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy* (1859)
102. "Religion is opposed to science... Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organisation, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
My thoughts
What emerges from these prescriptions is the conviction that religion cannot simply be ignored or tolerated as private belief but must be actively confronted as part of revolutionary transformation. The variety of approaches represented here, from Lenin's early formulation of religion as a "private matter" for the state but not for the party, to the more coercive programs of Stalin, Mao, and Hoxha's complete prohibitions, reflects ongoing tension within communist practice about methods but not about ultimate aims. All agreed that scientific socialism necessarily entails materialism and therefore atheism, that the party must conduct ideological warfare against religious superstition even while recognizing that crude repression might create martyrs rather than converts. The demand for separation of church and state served not to protect religion but to strip it of institutional power while freeing the movement to combat it through education and propaganda. These thinkers understood that religion would not simply vanish the moment socialist revolution succeeded, that the mental habits and emotional dependencies cultivated over millennia would persist even after the material conditions generating them had been overcome. Thus the need for sustained, systematic effort to eliminate religious prejudices through scientific education, to replace the consolations of faith with the satisfactions of collective human achievement. The goal was not persecution for its own sake but the creation of conditions where humans no longer needed gods because they had finally become fully human.
Category 5: Communism is Secular/Secular Humanist
My thoughts
Against the negation of religion stands the affirmation of human capacity, the reclamation of humanity as the highest value and active subject of history rather than passive object of divine will. This vision positions man not as fallen creature requiring salvation but as creator requiring only the proper material and social conditions to flourish. Where religion locates meaning and authority in transcendent realms, the communist project insists that man is the world of man, that state and society are human productions subject to human transformation. The criticism of religion serves not to leave people without consolation but to demand they abandon consolations that require continued suffering, to cast off imaginary flowers so they might grasp real ones. What replaces religious consciousness is not mere absence but positive content: the understanding that everything depends on human effort, that freedom consists in conscious collective control over social existence rather than submission to forces falsely imagined as beyond human power. This represents a fundamental reorientation where humans cease revolving around illusory suns and begin instead revolving around themselves, recognizing their own creative and transformative capacities. The following quotations articulate this humanist core of the communist project, the vision of what becomes possible when humanity discards its illusions and acts on the recognition that our liberation must be our own achievement.
103. "The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
104. "Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
105. "The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
106. "Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
107. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." - Karl Marx, *Theses on Feuerbach* #11 (1845)
108. "To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
109. "Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution." - Karl Marx, *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844*
110. "The real, practical dissolution of... religious phrases [is] accomplished only by an alteration of practical life." - Karl Marx, *The German Ideology* (1845)
111. "Man is the world of man – state, society." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
112. "Nothing human is alien to me." - Karl Marx (quoting Terence, adopted as humanist principle)
113. "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, *The Communist Manifesto* (1848)
114. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." - Karl Marx, *Critique of the Gotha Programme* (1875)
115. "The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
116. "We want to eliminate God from the hearts of men because in this way they will understand better that everything depends on them." - Enver Hoxha, speech on Albania's atheist state (1967)
117. "Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life... only then will human emancipation have been accomplished." - Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (1843)
118. "The socialist system will abolish the division of mankind into classes... it will close the era of the history of human society which consists of struggles between classes, and inaugurate a new era in the history of human society, the era of the flourishing of the human race." - Mao Zedong, "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People" (1957)
119. "The victory of socialism means the end of the exploitation of man by man and the beginning of truly human life." - V.I. Lenin (from various speeches on socialist humanism)
120. "Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations." - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, *The Communist Manifesto* (1848)
Conclusion
The evidence presented across these five categories establishes beyond reasonable dispute that Marxism and religion exist in fundamental, irreconcilable opposition. This is not a matter of interpretation or emphasis but of basic philosophical coherence. The founders of scientific socialism and their most influential successors spoke with remarkable consistency across decades and continents: religion represents false consciousness that must be overcome, an ideological weapon of class oppression that must be dismantled, and a worldview fundamentally incompatible with materialism that must be replaced.
Those who claim that communism can accommodate religious belief, or that Marxist theory allows space for spiritual faith, are either ignorant of the actual content of communist thought or engaged in deliberate revisionism. The quotes compiled here represent a tiny fraction of the available evidence, yet even this sample demonstrates the unanimity of communist thinkers on this question. From Marx's foundational critique in the 1840s through Lenin's theoretical refinements and practical applications, from Stalin's institutional programs to Mao's Cultural Revolution to Hoxha's complete prohibition, the message remained constant: communism begins where atheism begins, and the struggle for human liberation requires the elimination of religious belief.
This is not incidental to Marxism but essential to its entire structure. Dialectical materialism cannot coexist with belief in supernatural forces. Historical materialism cannot incorporate divine intervention into its analysis of social development. The recognition that social existence determines consciousness collapses if consciousness can be shaped by revelation from transcendent realms. The commitment to scientific understanding of the world cannot accommodate faith in unprovable metaphysical claims. The project of human self-emancipation cannot proceed while people imagine salvation comes from gods rather than through collective action.
When contemporary movements calling themselves communist embrace or accommodate religion, they reveal their departure from the theoretical foundations laid by Marx and Engels. They may retain certain economic critiques or political goals associated with communism, but they have abandoned the philosophical core that makes those critiques and goals intelligible within a Marxist framework. This is not to say such movements are necessarily wrong in their goals or ineffective in their methods, but it is to say they represent something other than orthodox Marxism as articulated by its founders and most influential theorists.
The relationship between communism and religion is not analogous to the relationship between, say, communism and particular cultural practices or communism and certain tactical questions where legitimate diversity of approach exists within Marxist thought. On those questions, different applications and interpretations can claim fidelity to core principles. But on the question of religion, the core principles themselves demand atheism. To accept the fundamental premises of historical and dialectical materialism is to reject the fundamental premises of religious belief. There is no middle ground here, no synthesis possible, no way to be simultaneously a consistent Marxist and a believer in supernatural religion.
This does not necessarily mean, and the theorists quoted here often acknowledged, that crude repression represents the most effective method for overcoming religious belief. Lenin himself warned against creating martyrs through heavy-handed persecution. The recognition that religion would wither away as material conditions improved led some Marxists to emphasize patient education over forcible closure of churches. But these were debates about tactics and timing, not about ultimate aims. All agreed that religion must and would disappear, that this disappearance was inseparable from the achievement of genuine communism, and that the party could not remain neutral in this struggle.
The contemporary attempt to reconcile Marxism with religion therefore represents either a failure to understand Marxism or a conscious decision to revise it. For those who take ideas seriously, for those who believe theoretical consistency matters, this revision cannot be accomplished without acknowledging that it represents a break with orthodox Marxist-Leninist thought. The texts speak for themselves. The founders and most influential practitioners of scientific socialism rejected religion in the strongest possible terms, identified it as a barrier to human liberation, and demanded its elimination as a necessary component of revolutionary transformation. Any communism that claims otherwise has severed itself from its own intellectual heritage.
Here I have communist statements sorted into 5 groups. These are but a small sample of communism or communism that sprang from Marx, showing that not only was it anti religious but incompatible with religion.
Category 1: Religion as a Tool to Distract/Control
Category 2: Religion is Man-Made
Category 3: Religion as Cult/Delusion/Illusion
Category 4: Need for Regulation/Abolition
Category 5: Communism is Secular/Secular Humanist
Together, the quotes below show if your communism comes from Marx and Engels and you say that communism accepts religion, that your communism is revised or a heterodox version of Marxist-Leninism.
Category 1: Religion as Tool to Distract/Control
1. "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
2. "Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression which everywhere weighs down heavily upon the masses of the people, over burdened by their perpetual work for others, by want and isolation." - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
3. "Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demand for a life more or less worthy of man." - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
4. "The clergy have always been in alliance with the landlords and the capitalists, and have always defended exploitation and the rule of the bourgeoisie." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (1922)
5. "Religion and communism are incompatible, both theoretically and practically. Communism is incompatible with religious faith." - Mao Zedong, various speeches (1950s)
6. "The Catholic Church is an enemy of the Cuban Revolution." - Fidel Castro, speech (1960)
7. "The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and all they have for the latter is the pious wish the former will be charitable." - Karl Marx, "Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter" (1847)
8. "The social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of Antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages and equally know, when necessary, how to defend the oppression of the proletariat." - Karl Marx, "Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter" (1847)
9. "Religion is a means of exploiting the working people." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
10. "The priests have always sided with the landowners and capitalists, and have always helped to keep the workers in slavery." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
11. "Religion teaches people to bear meekly the yoke of slavery and exploitation." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
12. "The clergy as a whole... serves as a spiritual police for the bourgeoisie." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
13. "The priests and the churches have always been on the side of the exploiters, on the side of landlords and capitalists." - V.I. Lenin, speech (1919)
14. "Religion is opium for the people. Religion is a sort of spiritual gin in which the slaves of capital drown their human shape and their claims to any decent life." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
My thoughts
The ideological architecture revealed in these statements demonstrates a consistent pattern across Marxist thought: religious institutions function as mechanisms of class control, wielding spiritual authority to maintain material oppression. From Marx's foundational recognition of religion as the "opium of the people" through Lenin's characterization of clergy as "spiritual police for the bourgeoisie," these thinkers identified organized religion not as a neutral belief system but as an active participant in exploitation. The promises of heavenly reward, the glorification of meekness and suffering, the sanctification of existing hierarchies, all served to channel the desperation of the oppressed away from revolutionary transformation and toward passive endurance. What makes this critique particularly damning is not simply that religion offers false comfort, but that this comfort actively perpetuates the conditions that make comfort necessary. The church and the capitalist found natural alliance because both required the worker to accept their station, to view their suffering as either divinely ordained or a test of character rather than the predictable outcome of systematic theft of labor value. When religious leaders blessed the factories, legitimized the landlords, and preached charity rather than justice, they transformed what could be righteous anger into submissive prayer.
Category 2: Religion is Man-Made
15. "Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
16. "Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand." - Karl Marx (attributed, though source uncertain)
17. "Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking." - Karl Marx, *The German Ideology* (1845)
18. "Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence." - Karl Marx, *The German Ideology* (1845)
19. "Mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc." - Friedrich Engels, "Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx" (1883)
20. "All religion, however, is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces." - Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring* (1878)
21. "Religion is a kind of spiritual vodka in which the slaves of capital drown their humanity and their desires for some sort of decent human existence." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
22. "The criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
23. "In religion people make their empirical world into an entity that is only conceived, imagined." - Karl Marx, *The German Ideology* (1845)
24. "All religion is nothing more than the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which control their daily lives." - Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring* (1878)
25. "Religion arose in very primitive times from erroneous, primitive conceptions of men about their own nature and external nature surrounding them." - Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring* (1878)
26. "The religious world is but the reflex of the real world." - Karl Marx, *Capital Vol. 1* (1867)
27. "The religious reflex of the real world can, in any case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every-day life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations." - Karl Marx, *Capital Vol. 1* (1867)
28. "Ideas of god or the gods arose from the benightedness and ignorance of men." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
29. "Religion springs from ignorance and fear." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
My thoughts
These statements construct a materialist genealogy of religious consciousness, tracing divinity back to its earthly origins in human need and ignorance. The progression reveals religion not as revelation from above but as projection from below, born from humanity's confrontation with forces it could neither comprehend nor control. Early humans, facing the incomprehensible violence of nature and the mysterious workings of their own minds, invented supernatural explanations because they lacked scientific frameworks to understand natural phenomena. As Marx observed, religion has no independent development, no autonomous history apart from the material conditions and productive relations that generate it. The gods emerge as "fantastic reflections" of real social forces, supernatural personifications of very terrestrial powers that dominate human existence. What we worship reveals what we fear and what we cannot yet master. This analysis fundamentally inverts religious self-understanding: believers imagine they serve timeless truths handed down from eternity, but materialism reveals these "eternal truths" as historical products that will disappear when the conditions producing them are transformed. Religion becomes comprehensible only when we stop looking to the heavens and examine instead the earth, when we understand that before humans can pursue theology they must first eat, drink, and find shelter.
Category 3: Religion as Cult/Delusion/Illusion
My thoughts
The Marxist understanding of religion operates on a deeper level than simple dismissal of supernatural claims as factually incorrect. These thinkers diagnosed religion as false consciousness, a systematic inversion of reality where human creations come to dominate their creators, where the products of the mind take on independent existence and authority over those who imagined them into being. This represents not merely error but alienation, the projection outward of human capacities and qualities that then return to oppress and diminish the very humanity that produced them. Religion becomes the "illusory sun" around which people revolve when they have not yet learned to revolve around themselves, when they have not yet grasped their own agency and power. The function of this illusion is dual: it expresses genuine suffering while simultaneously protesting against that suffering in a manner that leaves the suffering intact. The worker sighs to God precisely because they cannot yet strike against the boss. What makes religion so insidious from this perspective is not that it simply lies but that it contains elements of truth twisted into forms that prevent rather than enable liberation. The following quotations reveal how this false consciousness operates and why its abolition requires not merely intellectual persuasion but transformation of the material conditions that make illusions necessary.
30. "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
31. "Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
32. "This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
33. "Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
34. "The religious world is but the reflex of the real world... Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion." - Karl Marx, *Capital Vol. 1* (1867)
35. "Religion is the fantastic realization of the human essence." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
36. "Religious ideas are superstitions." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
37. "All the gods and all the supernatural forces have been invented by men." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
38. "God is... a social idea, a social force; nature does not know God." - Nikolai Bukharin, "Down with Religion and the Church!" (1922)
39. "The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in the face of the blind forces of capitalism." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
40. "Every religious idea, every idea of God, even flirting with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness." - V.I. Lenin, letter to Maxim Gorky (1913)
41. "There is no devil, there is no god; both have been invented by men." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
Category 4: Need for Regulation/Abolition
42. "The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
43. "We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism." - V.I. Lenin, letter to Maxim Gorky (1913)
44. "Religion must be declared a private matter." - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
45. "Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (1922)
46. "A Marxist must be a materialist, i.e., an enemy of religion." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (1922)
47. "Communism begins where atheism begins." - Karl Marx, *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844*
48. "Atheism is a natural and inseparable part of Marxism, of the theory and practice of scientific socialism." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
49. "We want to eliminate God from the hearts of men." - Joseph Stalin (attributed in various sources, exact citation unclear)
50. "Destroy all religion, destroy all gods." - Mao Zedong (paraphrased from Cultural Revolution era speeches)
51. "We are atheists and materialists. We deny all idealism." - Enver Hoxha, various speeches on Albania's atheist state (1967)
52. "The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility." - Karl Marx, *Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung* (1847)
53. "Religion will disappear to the extent that socialism develops. Its disappearance must be brought about through social development, in which education will play a role." - Friedrich Engels, letter to Bebel (1873)
54. "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
55. "Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality." - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, *The Communist Manifesto* (1848)
56. "But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience." - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, *The Communist Manifesto* (1848)
57. "The communist abolition of religion is the positive abolition of human self-alienation." - Karl Marx, *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844*
58. "Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority." - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
59. "We must fight religion. This is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (1922)
60. "The party of the proletariat demands that the state should declare religion to be a private affair, but by no means regards the fight against the opium of the people as a 'private affair.'" - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
61. "We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideological weapons." - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
62. "We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism." - V.I. Lenin, letter to Maxim Gorky (1913)
63. "The party cannot be neutral towards religion. It conducts anti-religious propaganda against all and every religious superstition." - Joseph Stalin, *Foundations of Leninism* (1924)
64. "Religion will die away when the exploiting classes are destroyed and when socialism is victorious." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
65. "Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
66. "The party cannot be neutral on the question of religion. It conducts anti-religious propaganda because it stands for science." - Joseph Stalin, interview with Emil Ludwig (1931)
67. "Communism and religion are incompatible both in theory and practice." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
68. "Religion must be combated in the name of materialism and science." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
69. "We want to eliminate God from the hearts of men because in this way they will understand better that everything depends on them." - Enver Hoxha, speech on Albania's atheist state (1967)
70. "Religion and communism are incompatible, both theoretically and practically." - Mao Zedong, *Quotations from Chairman Mao* (Red Book)
71. "Communism begins from the outset with atheism." - Karl Marx, *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844*
72. "The struggle against religion must not be limited nor reduced to abstract ideological preaching. This struggle must be linked up with the concrete practical class movement." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
73. "Only the class-conscious worker of today, brought up by large-scale factory industry, discards religious prejudices." - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
74. "The party must demand the complete separation of Church and State in order to combat the religious fog with purely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth." - V.I. Lenin, "Socialism and Religion" (1905)
75. "Religion is like a nail—the harder you hit it, the deeper it goes into the wood. We must fight religion with reason." - V.I. Lenin (paraphrased from various speeches)
76. "Down with religion! Long live science!" - Soviet League of Militant Atheists, slogan from *Bezbozhnik* journal (1920s-1930s)
77. "There is no room in our socialist society for religion." - Enver Hoxha, on closing Albania's churches and mosques (1967)
78. "All religion is nothing but the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces." - Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring* (1878)
79. "Religion is inherently the emptying of man and nature of all content, the transferring of this content to the phantom of a remote god, who then in his turn graciously permits man and nature to receive a small portion from his abundance." - Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring* (1878)
80. "When once the idea of the immortality of the soul had insinuated itself among the people, the priests gained enormous power." - Friedrich Engels, *Anti-Dühring* (1878)
81. "The philosophy of nature must be driven out of its last refuge, which is the conception of God." - Friedrich Engels, *Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy* (1886)
82. "In all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura." - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, *The German Ideology* (1845)
83. "The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man – hence with the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
84. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." - Karl Marx, *Theses on Feuerbach* #11 (1845)
85. "We shall not achieve our aim unless we free the masses from religious prejudices." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (1922)
86. "Every religious idea, every idea of God, even every flirtation with the idea of God, is unutterable vileness... of the most dangerous kind, 'contagion' of the most abominable kind. Millions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions... are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of a God." - V.I. Lenin, letter to Maxim Gorky (November 13-14, 1913)
87. "The dictatorship of the proletariat... must wage a ruthless struggle against religion." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (1922)
88. "Religion must die out... The party wages ideological warfare against all remnants of religion." - Joseph Stalin, "Questions and Answers" speech to the Sverdlov University (1924)
89. "It is the task of the Party to put an end to these relics of the past, to mobilize the broad masses for a struggle against religious superstitions, and to organize the widest possible scientific-educational propaganda." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
90. "The party must pursue a tireless atheistic propaganda and must use all the weapons of science to free the workers from religious delusions." - Nikolai Bukharin & Evgenii Preobrazhensky, *The ABC of Communism* (1919)
91. "We have done away with religion by decree. We closed the churches and destroyed them." - Joseph Stalin (attributed in various sources discussing Soviet religious persecution, 1930s)
92. "The party cannot remain neutral in the struggle between science and religion, between materialism and idealism. It must conduct an uncompromising struggle against religious ideology." - Joseph Stalin, *Foundations of Leninism* (1924)
93. "The complete victory of the socialist revolution is impossible without extirpating religious prejudices from the masses." - V.I. Lenin, *Collected Works* Vol. 15
94. "Scientific socialism is incompatible with religious belief. We must fight religion systematically." - Mao Zedong, speech on atheist education (1950s)
95. "Albania will be the first atheist state in the world. We have closed all churches and mosques. Religion is abolished." - Enver Hoxha, declaration making Albania officially atheist (1967)
96. "The struggle against religion cannot be confined to abstract ideological preaching... It must be linked up with the concrete activities of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
97. "We must work systematically to eliminate religious prejudices, remembering at the same time not to make a martyr out of religion by crude methods." - V.I. Lenin, "On the Significance of Militant Materialism" (1922)
98. "The goal is not only to separate church and state, but to completely eliminate religion from public and private life through education and propaganda." - Soviet League of Militant Atheists, founding principles (1925)
99. "Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle." - Karl Marx, "Wages of Labour" (1844)
100. "In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out." - Karl Marx, "Preface to the Critique of Political Economy" (1859)
101. "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." - Karl Marx, *Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy* (1859)
102. "Religion is opposed to science... Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organisation, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class." - V.I. Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion" (1909)
My thoughts
What emerges from these prescriptions is the conviction that religion cannot simply be ignored or tolerated as private belief but must be actively confronted as part of revolutionary transformation. The variety of approaches represented here, from Lenin's early formulation of religion as a "private matter" for the state but not for the party, to the more coercive programs of Stalin, Mao, and Hoxha's complete prohibitions, reflects ongoing tension within communist practice about methods but not about ultimate aims. All agreed that scientific socialism necessarily entails materialism and therefore atheism, that the party must conduct ideological warfare against religious superstition even while recognizing that crude repression might create martyrs rather than converts. The demand for separation of church and state served not to protect religion but to strip it of institutional power while freeing the movement to combat it through education and propaganda. These thinkers understood that religion would not simply vanish the moment socialist revolution succeeded, that the mental habits and emotional dependencies cultivated over millennia would persist even after the material conditions generating them had been overcome. Thus the need for sustained, systematic effort to eliminate religious prejudices through scientific education, to replace the consolations of faith with the satisfactions of collective human achievement. The goal was not persecution for its own sake but the creation of conditions where humans no longer needed gods because they had finally become fully human.
Category 5: Communism is Secular/Secular Humanist
My thoughts
Against the negation of religion stands the affirmation of human capacity, the reclamation of humanity as the highest value and active subject of history rather than passive object of divine will. This vision positions man not as fallen creature requiring salvation but as creator requiring only the proper material and social conditions to flourish. Where religion locates meaning and authority in transcendent realms, the communist project insists that man is the world of man, that state and society are human productions subject to human transformation. The criticism of religion serves not to leave people without consolation but to demand they abandon consolations that require continued suffering, to cast off imaginary flowers so they might grasp real ones. What replaces religious consciousness is not mere absence but positive content: the understanding that everything depends on human effort, that freedom consists in conscious collective control over social existence rather than submission to forces falsely imagined as beyond human power. This represents a fundamental reorientation where humans cease revolving around illusory suns and begin instead revolving around themselves, recognizing their own creative and transformative capacities. The following quotations articulate this humanist core of the communist project, the vision of what becomes possible when humanity discards its illusions and acts on the recognition that our liberation must be our own achievement.
103. "The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
104. "Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
105. "The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
106. "Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
107. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." - Karl Marx, *Theses on Feuerbach* #11 (1845)
108. "To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
109. "Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution." - Karl Marx, *Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844*
110. "The real, practical dissolution of... religious phrases [is] accomplished only by an alteration of practical life." - Karl Marx, *The German Ideology* (1845)
111. "Man is the world of man – state, society." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
112. "Nothing human is alien to me." - Karl Marx (quoting Terence, adopted as humanist principle)
113. "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, *The Communist Manifesto* (1848)
114. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." - Karl Marx, *Critique of the Gotha Programme* (1875)
115. "The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions." - Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* (1843)
116. "We want to eliminate God from the hearts of men because in this way they will understand better that everything depends on them." - Enver Hoxha, speech on Albania's atheist state (1967)
117. "Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life... only then will human emancipation have been accomplished." - Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question" (1843)
118. "The socialist system will abolish the division of mankind into classes... it will close the era of the history of human society which consists of struggles between classes, and inaugurate a new era in the history of human society, the era of the flourishing of the human race." - Mao Zedong, "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People" (1957)
119. "The victory of socialism means the end of the exploitation of man by man and the beginning of truly human life." - V.I. Lenin (from various speeches on socialist humanism)
120. "Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations." - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, *The Communist Manifesto* (1848)
Conclusion
The evidence presented across these five categories establishes beyond reasonable dispute that Marxism and religion exist in fundamental, irreconcilable opposition. This is not a matter of interpretation or emphasis but of basic philosophical coherence. The founders of scientific socialism and their most influential successors spoke with remarkable consistency across decades and continents: religion represents false consciousness that must be overcome, an ideological weapon of class oppression that must be dismantled, and a worldview fundamentally incompatible with materialism that must be replaced.
Those who claim that communism can accommodate religious belief, or that Marxist theory allows space for spiritual faith, are either ignorant of the actual content of communist thought or engaged in deliberate revisionism. The quotes compiled here represent a tiny fraction of the available evidence, yet even this sample demonstrates the unanimity of communist thinkers on this question. From Marx's foundational critique in the 1840s through Lenin's theoretical refinements and practical applications, from Stalin's institutional programs to Mao's Cultural Revolution to Hoxha's complete prohibition, the message remained constant: communism begins where atheism begins, and the struggle for human liberation requires the elimination of religious belief.
This is not incidental to Marxism but essential to its entire structure. Dialectical materialism cannot coexist with belief in supernatural forces. Historical materialism cannot incorporate divine intervention into its analysis of social development. The recognition that social existence determines consciousness collapses if consciousness can be shaped by revelation from transcendent realms. The commitment to scientific understanding of the world cannot accommodate faith in unprovable metaphysical claims. The project of human self-emancipation cannot proceed while people imagine salvation comes from gods rather than through collective action.
When contemporary movements calling themselves communist embrace or accommodate religion, they reveal their departure from the theoretical foundations laid by Marx and Engels. They may retain certain economic critiques or political goals associated with communism, but they have abandoned the philosophical core that makes those critiques and goals intelligible within a Marxist framework. This is not to say such movements are necessarily wrong in their goals or ineffective in their methods, but it is to say they represent something other than orthodox Marxism as articulated by its founders and most influential theorists.
The relationship between communism and religion is not analogous to the relationship between, say, communism and particular cultural practices or communism and certain tactical questions where legitimate diversity of approach exists within Marxist thought. On those questions, different applications and interpretations can claim fidelity to core principles. But on the question of religion, the core principles themselves demand atheism. To accept the fundamental premises of historical and dialectical materialism is to reject the fundamental premises of religious belief. There is no middle ground here, no synthesis possible, no way to be simultaneously a consistent Marxist and a believer in supernatural religion.
This does not necessarily mean, and the theorists quoted here often acknowledged, that crude repression represents the most effective method for overcoming religious belief. Lenin himself warned against creating martyrs through heavy-handed persecution. The recognition that religion would wither away as material conditions improved led some Marxists to emphasize patient education over forcible closure of churches. But these were debates about tactics and timing, not about ultimate aims. All agreed that religion must and would disappear, that this disappearance was inseparable from the achievement of genuine communism, and that the party could not remain neutral in this struggle.
The contemporary attempt to reconcile Marxism with religion therefore represents either a failure to understand Marxism or a conscious decision to revise it. For those who take ideas seriously, for those who believe theoretical consistency matters, this revision cannot be accomplished without acknowledging that it represents a break with orthodox Marxist-Leninist thought. The texts speak for themselves. The founders and most influential practitioners of scientific socialism rejected religion in the strongest possible terms, identified it as a barrier to human liberation, and demanded its elimination as a necessary component of revolutionary transformation. Any communism that claims otherwise has severed itself from its own intellectual heritage.
Note: I didn't miss the possibility of principled heterodoxy based on materialist analysis of specific conditions, I ignored that as I don't believe it. And ignored the cognitive biases in favor of religion, as religion being the opium of the masses, it induces false thoughts, emotions, and consciousness; a clear cognitive dissonance. I do not think all heterodoxy is wrong, I do think the religious heterodoxy is wrong. If this seems like I'm going soft with my position, being as aggressive as I can, it is because I'm trying to respect allies and potential allies, instead of making more enemies.
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