Religion and Marxism
An Introduction
Paul-Francois Tremlett [+–]
Open University
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Paul-François Tremlett is a senior lecturer in religious studies at the Open University. His research interests include classical and contemporary anthropological and sociological theories of religion and the broad constitution of religion as a site of study in societies experiencing rapid social change. He is the author of Towards a New Theory of Religion and Social Change: Sovereignties and Disruptions (Bloomsbury 2021) and co-edited Ritual and Democracy: Protests, Publics and Performances (Equinox, 2020). He also co-edits the Bloomsbury Series ‘Religion, Space and Place’.
This concise and accessible introduction brings the writings of Marx and Engels and later thinkers in the Marxist tradition including Althusser, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School as well as Liberation Theologians such as Gutierrez and Maduro, into focus in relation to questions of religion, social change and social justice. Marx was a nineteenth century thinker trying to develop a theory that could explain the dramatic social and technological changes that he lived through. Later thinkers modified and developed key elements of Marx’ theoretical model, with religion – particularly Christianity – providing a vital point of critical self-reflection for thinkers in the Marxist tradition. This book tracks these modifications and developments to Marx’ ideas, and their continuing relevance to contemporary debates about religion, social change and social justice.
Table of Contents
Preface
Preface vii-xi
Chapter 1
Introducing Marx [+–] 1-9
This chapter provides a brief biographical sketch of Marx’s life before outlining the broad sweep of Marx’s influence on the humanities, social sciences and theology and the influence of Feuerbach and Hegel on the development of Marx’s thought.
Chapter 2
Marx: Religion, Ideology, Power, and Change [+–] 10-19
This chapter considers some of the different ways Marx talked about religions in his writings before looking more closely at how they are implicated in Marx’s base-superstructure model of society, particularly in relation to the concept of ideology.
Chapter 3
This chapter provides a brief biographical sketch of Engels’s life before moving on to consider the extent of the collaborative relationship between Engels and Marx and Engels’s influence on historical and anthropological accounts of religions.
Chapter 4
This chapter introduces Althusser’s concept of ideology and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and reflects on how Althusser and Gramsci modify key aspects of Marx’s thought. It also introduces some more recent developments in Marxist thought such as Stuart Hall’s “marxism without guarantees”.
Chapter 5
This chapter introduces the Frankfurt School and Horkheimer and Habermas, particularly the concept of critical theory and Habermas’s twin notions of the lifeworld communicative action as resources for re-energising modernity.
Chapter 6
Marxism and Liberation Theology [+–] 52-61
This chapter outlines the emergence of liberation theology before introducing some of its key voices. The chapter attends to some of the principal features of liberation theology particularly its emphasis on lived experience over the study of Scripture, and for the space it has made for women, black, queer and indigenous peoples to articulate new, more inclusive theologies and, more recently, for the articulation of new eco-theologies.
Chapter 7
Conclusions [+–] 62-64
This chapter brings together the different threads of the book, situating marxism as an on- going interdisciplinary enquiry into processes of social change that privileges social justice.
