Religion and Politics Today from a Marxian Perspective

Abstract

The resilience of religion at the dawn of the fifth century after the 'scientific revolution' is an enigma to anyone holding a positivist view of the world, but not for an authentic Marxian understanding. This essay aims not only to provide a clue to the resilience of religion in general, but also to account for the various religious ideologies to which history gives rise at different epochs, and their specificities. For not only did religion survive into our times as part of the 'dominant ideology', it is also still producing combative ideologies contesting the prevailing social and/or political conditions. Two of these have received a lot of attention in recent years: Christian theology of liberation and Islamic fundamentalism. A comparative assessment of these two phenomena from the standpoint of Marxist theory, enriched by further inputs from the sociology of religions, is a particularly challenging and politically enlightening endeavour, as I hope to establish.