Marx on Christianity

(Quote of the Week)

Every holiday season, the bourgeoisie trots out hoary pleas for Christian charity to put a humanitarian gloss on poverty, homelessness and its drive to squeeze ever more profit out of working people. In an acerbic rejoinder to an official in the Prussian Ministry of Religious Worship, Education and Medicine, Karl Marx exposed the “principles of Christianity” as nothing but lies and hypocrisy that justify class domination.

The social principles of Christianity have now had eighteen hundred years to be developed, and need no further development by Prussian Consistorial [official] Counsellors.

The social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages and are capable, in case of need, of defending the oppression of the proletariat, even if with somewhat doleful grimaces.

The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and for the latter all they have to offer is the pious wish that the former may be charitable.

The social principles of Christianity place the Consistorial Counsellor’s compensation for all infamies in heaven, and thereby justify the continuation of these infamies on earth.

The social principles of Christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed.

The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.

The social principles of Christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary.

So much for the social principles of Christianity.

—Karl Marx, “The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter” (1847)