The Bourgeoisie and Religion: Why Capitalism Promotes the Bible

Religion, in the Marxist reading that runs through this page, is a tool of class power: the ruling class promotes and protects it because it teaches the exploited to accept inequality as divine order. In every capitalist country where the Jewish religion and Christianity are widespread, the content of the Bible is drilled into people's heads from childhood, while open anti-religious propaganda is punished by law. This was equally true in Russia before the Great October Socialist Revolution.

Why the bourgeoisie needs faith: religion as a tool of exploitation

The bourgeoisie treats religion as an instrument of social control rather than a private conviction. Belief in the Bible calms the proletariat, teaches obedience to earthly authority, and frames poverty as the will of God — which is exactly why a class that holds scientific knowledge still spends enormous effort defending scripture. The same logic that made the Church useful to feudal lords makes organised religion useful to capital: it manufactures consent among the very people who are exploited.

The imposition of the Bible in capitalist countries

Instilling faith in the Bible is a state project in capitalist societies, not a matter left to individual choice. Governments and dominant classes finance the teaching of scripture, police dissent from it, and export it abroad. Four features of this campaign stand out.

Religious instruction in the schools of Czarist Russia

Czarism made scripture a compulsory school subject so that superstition would take root before reason could. Russian peasants and muzhiks were kept in religious ignorance deliberately, because a devout, fatalistic peasantry was easier to tax, conscript, and rule. The classroom was the first front in maintaining the obedience the ruling class depended on.

The ban on anti-religious propaganda under capitalism

Capitalist law protects religion by criminalising open criticism of it, which reveals that faith is defended as a political asset rather than a spiritual truth. Where the state cannot outlaw dissent outright, unofficial pressure — social, professional, and economic — does the same work. The freedom of religion advertised under capitalism coexists with sharp limits on the freedom to argue against it, exposing the difference between religious liberty as a slogan and genuine human emancipation.

Christian missions in colonial and dependent countries

The bourgeoisie is not content to strengthen faith at home; it equips numerous expeditions to colonial and dependent countries to plant Christianity among so-called "heathens." Christian missions are scattered across every corner of the Earth, counting tens of thousands of preachers and commanding immense wealth: farms and industrial enterprises, religious schools, churches, and monasteries. Missionary work followed the flag, softening conquered populations for economic exploitation while presenting subjugation as salvation.

Vast sums spent on propagating the "word of God"

Capitalist governments spend enormous sums maintaining the preachers of the "word of God" — sums fully sufficient to feed, clothe, and shoe millions of workers in need, and to improve public education and health. That such money flows to pulpits rather than to the hungry is not an oversight but a priority: the ruling class calculates that religious obedience secures its wealth more reliably than public welfare would.

Why the bourgeoisie defends the Bible without believing in it

The bourgeoisie defends the Bible because the book is politically useful, not because the educated exploiter accepts its "revelations." At first glance it seems strange that so much effort and money go into Bible propaganda when the bourgeoisie, armed with scientific knowledge, cannot itself believe the biblical miracles. The answer is that this book is not merely a collection of legends and tales. The fantastic fables are far from its main part, and the bourgeoisie would gladly discard them — but, as the proverb says, "you can't drop a word from a song."

The origin of the Bible in slave-owning society

The Bible took shape roughly two and a half thousand years ago in the Israelite (Jewish) state, in a world organised around slavery. Besides folk tales and legends, the book absorbed legal codes that regulated the slave-owning order then prevailing throughout the ancient world, including the Israelite state. Understanding the Bible as a document of a particular mode of production — a social-conflict approach rather than a devotional one — explains why its rules still serve rulers today.

The Bible's slave-owning statutes in the service of exploiters

These slave-owning statutes of the Bible align neatly with the interests of modern exploiters. It is enough to note that the Bible commands people to serve faithfully and submit to kings and to the authorities they set over the people. The Bible establishes that priests should be free from labour and live in comfort on the offerings of believers. The Bible also asserts that wealth and poverty are ordained by God himself. This makes the Bible a highly convenient book for the reactionary bourgeoisie — which is why its content is set against science.

The Bible against science: the Scopes case in the United States

In the largest capitalist state, the United States, the teaching of modern science on the origin of man was officially banned in many states, and where there was no official ban the doctrine was persecuted unofficially. The teacher Scopes of the town of Dayton was sentenced to a heavy fine for acquainting his pupils with the science of human origins. Somewhat later an artist was brought to trial for depicting, in caricature, the biblical God strolling through the Garden of Eden. The Bible, the judge declared, is the dearest book to Americans, and undermining its authority is equivalent to undermining the foundations of capitalism — on which grounds he demanded severe punishment for the blasphemous artist. The episode shows in the open what usually stays hidden: that scientific materialism and the discovery of natural law threaten a social order that rests on scripture.

Religion as the "opium of the people": Marx's analysis

Karl Marx summed up this whole mechanism in a single dictum — religion is "the opium of the people." In his critique, Marx did not treat religion mainly as an error to be refuted but as a symptom of real suffering: "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world." The intoxicant dulls the pain of exploitation while leaving its cause untouched, which is precisely why Marxism examines religion as a phenomenon of human behaviour rooted in material conditions rather than in theology.

Marx's critique of religion as a means of social control

Marx's critique of religion is a critique of the society that needs religion. Because belief consoles the exploited without changing their position, it functions as social control: it displaces the demand for justice from this world into the next. This is the core of the social-conflict approach that later sociology inherited from Marx — the question is not whether a doctrine is true but whose class interests it serves. Contemporary writers such as Yanis Iqbal restate the same point, arguing that religion under capitalism is privatised and reshaped into a democratised, individual consolation that leaves economic power intact.

Religion as an instrument for pacifying the proletariat

Every major religion instructs the working class to endure. Islam, Buddhism, and the rest all teach that kings are "the chosen of the gods," that their power is sacred, and that the hoarding of excessive wealth by a handful of exploiters alongside the need, hunger, and disease of millions of workers is a perfectly normal state of affairs, established by the gods themselves. It follows that discontent — let alone revolt against parasites and oppressors — is displeasing to the gods. Working people are to submit and meekly bear any hardship, promised in return a "life after death" full of contentment.

Wealth and poverty "from God": justifying class inequality

By declaring wealth and poverty divinely ordained, religion converts a man-made class hierarchy into an eternal natural law. This is the ideological heart of religion's political job: inequality ceases to be a grievance and becomes a test of faith. Those who break the "divine order" are terrified by clergy of every persuasion with the torments of hell and other fabrications. There is nothing surprising, then, in the bourgeoisie defending religion and sparing no money on the upkeep of clergy — one hand washes the other.

The Church as the political prop of reactionary power

Beyond ideas, the Church operates as an organised political force that anchors reactionary rule. It owns property, commands revenue, and lends the sanction of heaven to whatever regime protects it — a political function that recurs from medieval kingdoms to the resurgence of fascist movements and religious fanaticism in the modern era, where clerical authority again lends respectability to reaction.

The Church and feudalism in medieval Europe

In medieval Europe the Church and feudalism were fused into a single order of domination. As one of the largest landholders, the Church was itself a feudal power, and it supplied the doctrine that fixed serfs to their lords and lords to their king as a chain ordained by God. The Reformation later erupted in part because religious conflict became the language in which rising classes fought older ones — proof that upheavals in faith tracked upheavals in the class struggle rather than pure questions of doctrine.

Control of the means of production and the class struggle

Whoever controls the means of production controls the ideology that defends that control, and religion has served as one of its principal defences. In Marxist theory the class that owns the land, workshops, and capital also dominates the churches, schools, and courts that shape consciousness. Religion enters the class struggle on the side of the owners, teaching the dispossessed that their condition is fated — which is why the fight over material power is always accompanied by a fight over the beliefs used to justify it. In our what religion thinks about the origin of man discussion we examined one such belief; the Bible is by no means the only religious book defending the interests of oppressors.

The Gospel and the promise of the "kingdom of heaven" after death

The Gospel postpones the reward for suffering until after death, which is exactly what makes it useful to the powerful in life. This other sacred book of Christians — the "New Testament" — teaches people to bear the misfortunes and burdens of earthly existence uncomplainingly: want, hunger, oppression. To the "humble in spirit" it promises, for their "virtues," the "kingdom of heaven" — after death. To the exploiters, meanwhile, the Gospel grants all earthly goods, reassuring them only that it will be harder for a rich man to enter paradise than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Judaism and Christianity are not the only religions calling for submission and patience, but the mechanism is always the same: present-day obedience purchased with a promissory note on the afterlife.

Bourgeois revolution and anti-clerical movements

Before the bourgeoisie learned to defend religion, it had to fight the Church to break feudalism — a contradiction that runs through the history of capitalism. Rising against an old order propped up by clerical power, the bourgeoisie waged anti-clerical struggles to transform the state; only after it became the ruling class did it rediscover religion's value for pacifying the proletariat beneath it.

The French Revolution and the confiscation of Church property

The French Revolution attacked the Church directly, nationalising its vast landholdings and subordinating clergy to the new state. Seizing Church property struck at feudal wealth and funded the revolutionary bourgeois order, showing that the young capitalist class was willing to dismantle religious institutions when they blocked its path to power. This was a political revolution that reorganised the state, not yet a human emancipation — a distinction Marx drew sharply in On the Jewish Question, where he showed how a state can proclaim secular freedom while civil society remains ruled by private egoism and inequality.

Nineteenth-century bourgeois materialism and the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment gave the bourgeoisie a materialist weapon against clerical dogma. Thinkers built on the scientific revolution — the discovery of natural laws by figures such as Isaac Newton — to argue that the universe obeyed reason, not miracle, while writers like Rousseau reimagined political authority as a human contract rather than a divine gift. Nineteenth-century bourgeois materialism carried this forward, yet it stopped at the point where deeper critique would have threatened capital itself, leaving the fuller materialist analysis of society to Marxism.

The Bolshevik struggle against religion in Russia

The Bolsheviks treated the abolition of religious superstition as part of the liberation of the proletariat, not as an afterthought. Where the bourgeoisie fought the Church only until it held power, Bolshevism in Russia and the Soviet Union pursued a systematic campaign to replace faith with a materialist worldview, on the grounds that a working class freed from the "opium" could grasp its real interests.

Vladimir Lenin's philosophical materialism

Vladimir Lenin grounded the anti-religious effort in philosophical materialism, insisting that the world is knowable through science and that religion is a reflection of oppression. For Lenin, materialism was not merely atheism but a method: understand the material roots of belief, remove the social conditions that produce it, and superstition loses its hold. This linked the theoretical work of Marxism to the practical politics of the new state.

The propaganda methods of the League of the Godless

The League of the Godless carried atheist agitation to the masses through methods aimed at a largely peasant, illiterate population. Its tools included:

• mass-circulation newspapers, journals, and cheap pamphlets promoting scientific materialism;
• public lectures, debates, and travelling exhibitions contrasting religion with natural science;
• anti-religious clubs, museums housed in former churches, and campaigns tied to peasant education and land reform;
• festivals and posters designed to replace religious ritual with secular, revolutionary celebration.

The campaign explicitly targeted the religious superstition of Russian peasants and muzhiks, tying the fight against the priest to the broader drive for land reform and collective management of the countryside.

Abolishing religion as a path to the liberation of the proletariat

In Bolshevik thinking, dismantling religion was inseparable from the communist transformation of political and economic structures. Overcoming dogmatism through the collective management of production, the argument ran, would remove the misery that made religion attractive in the first place — so that belief would wither not by decree alone but because the suffering it consoled had ended. Abolition of religion was thus framed as both cause and consequence of the proletariat's emancipation.

Comparing the bourgeois and Bolshevik struggles against religion

The two struggles look alike but pursue opposite ends: the bourgeoisie fought the Church to seize state power and then defended religion to keep it, while the Bolsheviks fought religion to complete the liberation of the working class. The table below sets out the contrast.

The decisive difference lies in what Marx called the division between political society and civil society. The bourgeois revolution emancipated the state from the Church while leaving civil society governed by private property and egoism, so religion could return as a private consolation. The Bolshevik project, at least in its stated aim, sought to abolish that split — treating the critique of religion not as an end in itself but as one moment in the class struggle, closer to knowledge harnessed to a political goal than to scholarship pursued for its own sake.

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