Religion - Opium Of The People?
Evaluate The View That ‘Religion is the Opium of the People’.
The famous assertion that religion is the ‘opium of the people’ was posited by Karl Marx, as a metaphor to describe the effect religion has on the proletariat. He is arguing that just as the upper classes would (at the time he was writing) smoke opium to escape from reality; the working classes would use religion to leave behind their woes. However, the distinction must be made in the sense that whilst those smoking poppies were perfectly aware of what they were doing, the proletariat were being manipulated, unbeknown to them, by the bourgeoise through the medium of religion. Marx argues that this is one of the tools used to produce ‘false consciousness’ in the workers: i.e. giving the proletariat an erroneous picture of their position in society in order to dissuade them from revolting against their repressors.
Marx argues that religion performs the role of producing false consciousness in several ways. First, through the teaching of an afterlife in which eternal bliss will be realised, and any terrestrial troubles will evaporate. This, he claims, has the effect of encouraging the proletariat to coast through their lives with less concern for the fact that they can barely afford to live, because of the ‘knowledge’ that this life is merely a temporary stage, and that eventually they will be able to leave it all behind them. Second, Marx points out that by religious teachings portraying poverty and suffering as virtuous; e.g. ‘the meek shall inherit the Earth’ and ‘it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven’, the proletariat are indoctrinated into disregarding earthly wealth. This, he argues, makes them far less likely to revolt against the bourgeoise in order to reverse the acute social inequality. They instead see their master’s wealth as a hinderance to him and believe that eschatologically they will be far...
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