Two of history’s most important philosophers are John Locke and Karl Marx. Both made valuable and lasting contributions to modern political discourse and the way in which people think government ought to operate. Locke is widely considered to be the father of liberal democracy; while Marx is the progenitor of socialism in its various forms. The differences in their philosophies are not exclusively limited to the role of government; religion as a public and private matter is an important topic on which they each have opposing views. Locke, a devout Christian, believed religion to be a private matter and that it does not fall under the realm of government; while Marx, an atheist, felt that religion was a hindrance to people’s political freedom. In this essay I will explore the arguments for and against religion as put forth by John Locke and Karl Marx and determine what the proper role between religion and government and politics should be.
John Locke believed that the realms of church and state are separate spheres; that religion does not belong in the sphere of government and vice versa. Concerning the separate spheres, Locke wrote: “This only I say, that whencesoever their authority be sprung, since it is ecclesiastical, it ought to be confined within the bounds of the Church, nor can it in any manner be extended to civil affairs; because the Church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth (Locke, p.403).” Because of the fact that church and state are indeed two separate spheres, Locke insists that toleration is what is necessary. The state only has power over matters of civil matters, such as money, land, and the preservation and advancement of civil interests; the care and salvation of souls is the responsibility of the church.
Locke argued that the church does have power to make rules to govern its members, but with respect to religion only. The church has the capacity to enforce rules that pertain to matters of religion through excommunication, but cannot punish its members when the matter at hand is one of civil interest. Locke believed that private persons should not prejudice others in civil affairs on the basis of religious differences.
Being that the care of souls is a duty for the clergy, religion should not be a political issue. Locke wrote, “In the second place, the care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God (Locke, p.395).” Going further, Locke writes, “Now that the whole jurisdiction of the magistrate reaches only to these civil concernments, and that all civil power, right, and dominion is bounded and confined to the only care of promoting these things (Locke, p.394).” Locke is certain that the government should use its influence only to promote civil, not religious, virtues.
Inasmuch as church and politics are separate entities, the ruling magistrate also has no authority to force churches to practice certain rites and rituals, as Locke writes: “Speculative opinions, therefore, and articles of faith, as they are called, which are required only to be believed cannot be imposed on any Church by the law of the land (Locke, p.420).” Locke’s view is the government should not use its power and influence to promote religious views that it happens to agree with, and neither should the magistrate prevent a church from practicing rites and rituals that are lawful. “Further,” writes Locke, “the magistrate ought not to forbid the preaching or professing of any speculative opinions in any Church, because they have manner of relation to the civil rights of the subjects. If a Roman Catholic believe that to be really the body of Christ which another man calls bread, he does no injury thereby to his neighbor (Locke, p.420).” However, Locke did believe that if the practices of a religion violate natural laws, those practices do not have to be tolerated.
While Locke supported the legal toleration of religion, he advocated that opinions that undermine the moral fabric of society need not be politically tolerated. “I say, first, no opinions contrary to human society, or to those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society, are to be tolerated by the magistrate. But of these, indeed, examples in any Church are rare. For no sect can usually arrive to such a degree of madness, as that it should think fit to teach, for doctrines of religion, such things as manifestly undermine the foundations of society, and are therefore condemned by the judgment of all mankind: because their own interest, peace, reputation, everything would thereby endangered (Locke, p.425).” Here Locke argues that a church would not dare teach doctrines that undermine civil society, and that if a church does so, those teachings are not to be tolerated.
Where Locke argued for the legal toleration of religion, Karl Marx argued for the total abolishment of religion. To be completely free, Marx believed, man needed to be wholly emancipated from religion; he called this universal human emancipation. In his response to philosopher Bruno Bauer’s “The Jewish Question,” Marx writes, “Bauer thus demands, on the one hand, that the Jew give up Judaism and man give up religion in order to be emancipated as a citizen. On the other hand, he holds that from the political abolition of religion there logically follows the abolition of religion altogether….Here we find Bauer’s mistake in subjecting only the ‘Christian state,’ not the ‘state as such,’ to criticism, in failing to examine the relation between political emancipation and human emancipation, and hence presenting conditions that are only explicable from his uncritical confusion of political emancipation with universal human emancipation (Marx, p.5).” Bauer, argued Marx, had subjected the state as a state to criticism, rather than the state as a Christian state.
Marx uses the United States as an example of secularism and how it does not go far enough. “In the United States there is neither a state religion, nor a religion declared to be that of the majority, nor a pre-eminence of one faith over another. The state is foreign to all faiths….Yet ‘no one in the United States believes that a man without religion can be an honest man (Marx, p.6).’”
For Marx, man has a bifurcated existence in that as a private person he can be religious but, as a citizen he is expected to be completely non-religious. This is clearly impossible, for it is not possible to separate a man into two pieces; the secular and civil minded from the religious and spiritual minded. Marx writes: “Political emancipation from religion is not complete and consistent emancipation from religion because political emancipation is not the complete and consistent form of human emancipation…The limits of political emancipation are seen at once in the fact that the state can free itself from a limitation without man actually being free from it, in the fact that a state can be a free state without men becoming free men….The state can thus emancipate itself from religion even though the overwhelming majority is still religious. And the overwhelming majority does not cease being religious in private (Marx, p.7).”
According to Marx, Bauer did not go far enough in his examination, but it was a good first step. “Political emancipation,” writes Marx “is indeed a great step forward. It is not, to be sure, the final form of universal human emancipation, but it is the final form within the prevailing order of things. It is obvious that we are here talking about actual, practical emancipation. Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the sphere of public law into private law.”
All men are egoists, and it is impossible to separate their private interests from those of the community. “Thus none of the so-called rights of men goes beyond the egoistic man, the man withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private choice, and separated from the community as a member of civil society. Far from viewing man here in his species-being, his species-life itself -society- rather appears to be an external framework for the individual, limiting his original independence. The only bond between men is natural necessity, need and private interest, the maintenance of their property and egoistic persons (Marx, p.17).” If a man is religious in his private life it is therefore impossible to separate his being religious from his duties as a citizen; his religious beliefs will no doubt influence his political decisions.
Marx’s approach to religion was nothing but acerbic, and, clearly, he wanted nothing more than seeing it eliminated from public and private life. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature,” he wrote, “the heart of the heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people (Marx, p.28).” Religion is a tool used by the bourgeoisie to keep the proletariat satiated; promising them equality in the world to come while denying it to them in the present. Ultimately, the complete abolition of religion is necessary in order for people to achieve total freedom in this life. “The abolition of religion as people’s illusory happiness is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to abandon illusions about their condition is a demand to abandon a condition which requires illusions (Marx, p.28).”
So, what is the proper role of religion in government and politics? Should it be tolerated as suggested by Locke? Or should it be completely eradicated as suggested by Marx? At this point in history, the abolishment of religion is quite the far fetched idea as religious teachings continue to spread around the world, and Christian and Islamic religious revivals are occurring in the West and the East. So, the toleration of religion is what is necessary. To abolish religion from private life or to take the option of believing in God away from private citizens infringes on their personal liberties, which is contrary to the tenets of democratic liberalism, as put forth by John Locke.
Marx in his contempt for religion comes to the conclusion that the only way to keep religion from influencing policy is the complete abolishment of religion, thus restricting a person’s liberty to choose. Marx had argued that there is no such thing as a private individual, but rather we are social creatures and have no private rights. The prevailing modern political culture argues otherwise. Alan Wolfe writes in his book “The Future of Liberalism,” “When it comes to anything involving conscience, liberals ought to be on the side of protecting the right to privacy rather than on the side of claiming that no such thing as privacy exists (Wolfe, p.180).”
When he suggests that religion is “the opium of the people (Marx, p.28),” Marx suggests that religion impairs reason; and in this vein of thinking, unreasonable voices should not be allowed a voice. This infringes on the principle of equality that is promoted by liberal democracy. “[To] insist that believers must, as a condition for entry into public debate, put aside their convictions. But this denies to people their right to bring to the public square something of great importance to them and for that reason contradicts liberalism’s insistence upon equality: a society that permits secular individuals to bring their convictions into the public square but denies the same right to the faithful treats people unequally (Wolfe, p.181).”
Rather than condemning and alienating people of faith and seeking to eliminate them from the public sphere, liberal and democratic ideals are more benefited to be open and tolerant toward them. It is a mistake to assume that religion opposes values such as reason and altruism. Ultimately, Locke’s endorsement of the toleration of religion and respecting the separate spheres of religion and politics better serves the purposes of a liberal democratic society.
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