Marxist Perspectives on Religion as Ideology and Social Expression

Religion is widely understood as a deeply personal matter – a system of belief and spiritual practice. But what if religion is also something more structural? What if it shapes, and is shaped by, the very social and economic arrangements of the society in which it exists? This is exactly the question the Marxist anthropological tradition asks. Rather than treating religion as a timeless encounter with the supernatural, Marxist thinkers – and in particular, the anthropologist Stephen Feuchtwang – examine religion as ideology: a set of shared symbols, meanings, and practices embedded in material conditions and social formations. Understanding this perspective changes not just how we study religion, but how we understand the relationship between belief, power, and social order.

Marx’s foundational view: religion as ideology 🔗

To understand Feuchtwang’s anthropological contribution, it helps to start with Marx’s core position. For Marx, religion did not exist in a vacuum. It was produced by society – specifically, by societies organised around class inequality and economic exploitation. Marx described religion as an “inverted consciousness of the world,” meaning that it reflects the contradictions of an unjust social order but in distorted, mystified form. His famous phrase – religion is the “opium of the people” – captured a dual reality: religion offers genuine comfort to the suffering, but at the same time it turns the attention of the oppressed away from the exploitation that shapes their everyday lives, discouraging them from challenging the social structures causing their suffering.

This is what Marxists mean by false consciousness: a condition where the working class is misled about the true nature of their exploitation. By promoting ideas such as divine will, fate, or heavenly reward for earthly suffering, religion can naturalise inequality and make it appear divinely ordained rather than historically constructed. Louis Althusser developed this further, arguing that religion is part of the ideological state apparatus – transmitting the dominant ideology and maintaining false class consciousness alongside institutions like education and the media.

Crucially, however, the Marxist critique does not reduce religion to a mere conspiracy of the ruling class. This “opiate” function emerges as a structural feature of societies characterised by exploitation, alienation, and profound social inequalities – it is built into the system itself, not simply imposed from above.

Feuchtwang’s contribution: religion as shared reality and social practice 🔗

Stephen Feuchtwang, a British anthropologist associated with the London School of Economics, significantly deepened the Marxist understanding of religion by moving beyond the idea of religion as pure distortion or manipulation. For Feuchtwang, religion is best understood as a shared reality – a system of ideology and meaning through which people understand and act within their social circumstances.

Feuchtwang defines religion as ideology and its set of shared symbols and meanings, arguing that religion as a form of ideology is always attached to the category of the subject: men and women think and act in relation to their circumstances as they define them, and it is through ideology that they are culturally constructed as individuals. In other words, religion does not just reflect material conditions from the outside – it actively shapes how individuals understand themselves, their roles, and their place in the social order.

Feuchtwang argues that researchers studying religion in any society need to look at religious ideas not only as thought, but as behaviour. Ideas and thought are inscribed in practice, and help to shape – as they are shaped by – what has been produced before, unfolding in relation to the existing relations of production. This is why Feuchtwang called for a Marxist theory of social practice when studying religion: not a top-down analysis of ruling-class manipulation, but a grounded examination of how religious practices reproduce social formations in everyday life.

Base, superstructure, and the place of religion 🔗

Feuchtwang’s approach sits within the broader Marxist framework of base and superstructure. In this model, the modes of production form the base or infrastructure of a society, which determines the superstructure – including laws, governments, philosophies, and religions. Ideologies in the superstructure, including religious ones, tend to legitimise the existing base and the class relations it produces.

What Feuchtwang adds is nuance: rather than seeing the superstructure as a passive reflection of the base, he shows how religious ideologies have a degree of autonomy and can actively feed back into social formation. Feuchtwang called for a Marxist analysis that can differentiate between different social formations – since practices are repeatable, and so too are societies in all their detailed variations. This means the relationship between religion and material conditions is dynamic, not fixed. Religious ideologies are not simply produced by economic arrangements; they also help maintain, reinforce, and in some cases challenge those arrangements.

This is also what makes the Feuchtwang approach distinct from purely theological or functionalist readings of religion. Rather than asking “what do people believe?” or “what purpose does religion serve for social cohesion?”, Feuchtwang asks: What social formations does this religious practice reproduce? Whose interests does it serve? How do shared religious meanings position people within structures of power?

Imperial China: religion, hierarchy, and political loyalty 🔗

To see this theory in action, imperial China is one of the most instructive examples. For over two thousand years, Chinese imperial society was organised around a rigid, hierarchical social structure – and religion was woven into its very fabric.

Confucianism, which has existed for more than 2,500 years, concerns itself centrally with inner virtue, morality, and respect for community and its values. But its role in imperial China went well beyond personal ethics. Under the Han Emperor Wu (r. 140-87 BCE), Confucianism became accepted as state ideology and orthodoxy, and from that time the imperial state promoted Confucian values to maintain law, order, and the status quo. The emperor and other authorities sponsored morality texts that reinforced values like respect for parents, loyalty to government, and remaining in one’s assigned social station – farmers should remain farmers, artisans should remain artisans.

The emperor himself was given the title “Son of Heaven”, positioning political authority as cosmically ordained. The idea of “filial piety” – devotion to family – was key to Confucian thought, taking the form of ancestor worship, submission to parental authority, and use of family metaphors such as “son of heaven” to describe the emperor and his government. This blending of family duty, cosmic order, and political loyalty was not accidental – it was ideologically potent.

Throughout the imperial era, patriarchal family lines served as the basis for a rigid hierarchy, and Confucian concepts served as the foundation for these hierarchies. The social order was framed not as a human arrangement that could be questioned and changed, but as a moral and cosmic necessity. Challenging the emperor was tantamount to violating the natural order of heaven itself. The family served as a metaphor for the state, and family relations were the foundation of the hierarchical social roles essential in the Confucian vision of a morally correct society.

From a Feuchtwangian Marxist perspective, this is ideology at work. Confucian religious-philosophical teachings were not merely abstract beliefs – they were inscribed in daily practice, ritual, education, and governance. They shaped how people understood their own subjectivity: who they were, what they owed to others, and what their place in the world should be. The lineage associations through which ordinary people participated in elite religious and social structures kept them ideologically invested in a system that materially disadvantaged them. Even though the living conditions for the masses during imperial times did not change substantially as a result of their participation in the lineage associations of the elite, they were sustained ideologically by their hope for upward mobility.

Religion as more than supernatural belief 🔗

One of Feuchtwang’s most significant theoretical moves is to challenge the assumption – common in Western academic frameworks – that religion is fundamentally about belief in the supernatural. This assumption itself reflects a particular cultural and historical context. In imperial China, there was no clean separation between “religion” and “politics,” between cosmological order and social order. They were the same thing, expressed through the same rituals, the same texts, the same relationships of loyalty and deference.

Confucianism is better understood as an ethical guide to life in the here and now – its institutions were not a separate church, but those of society, family, school, and state; its “priests” were parents, teachers, and officials. This makes Confucianism an ideal illustration of Feuchtwang’s argument: that religion, understood as ideology, does not require a separate supernatural realm. It operates through shared practice, shared symbols, and shared meanings – all of which are tied to the specific material and social formation in which they arise.

This is why Feuchtwang insists that the researcher of religion in other societies needs to begin their studies from the viewpoint of the underlying conditions and assumptions that allow subjective expressions of religion – an approach that challenges many of the categorical assumptions born of Western science. Supernatural categories are not universally given; their existence and meaning must be determined through analysis of the historical and structural context and in relation to a particular social formation.

Can religion also resist? 🔗

It would be a misreading of the Marxist anthropological position to conclude that religion is always and only a tool of the ruling class. Marx himself acknowledged a dual function: religion is both a form of oppression and an expression of genuine protest against suffering. Marx described religion not only as an opium but also as a protest – not only a drug which the believer uses to stomach the hopelessness of his social status, but also a sign of resistance against that status.

In imperial China, too, this complexity was present. Throughout the ages, many Confucians continued to fight against unrighteous rulers and suffered for their convictions. During the Ming-Qing era, prominent Confucians promoted individuality and independent thinking as a counterweight to subservience to authority. Religious and philosophical ideology, in other words, was also a resource that could be mobilised against hierarchy – even when that same ideology was used to sustain it.

This tension – between religion as legitimation of power and religion as site of resistance – is central to what makes the Marxist anthropological approach so productive. It does not flatten religion into a simple function, but instead reads it as a dynamic ideological terrain where social contradictions play out.

Why this perspective still matters 🔗

The Marxist anthropological viewpoint on religion, as developed by Feuchtwang and others, offers a rigorous framework for understanding religion that goes well beyond questions of personal belief or spiritual experience. It asks us to look at who benefits from particular religious ideologies, how religious practice shapes and is shaped by economic and political conditions, and how shared meanings can simultaneously bind communities together and reproduce social hierarchies.

In contemporary contexts – from the revival of Confucian values by the Chinese Communist Party as a political tool, to the use of religious rhetoric in nationalist movements worldwide – this framework remains acutely relevant. Religious ideology continues to do social work: it constructs subjects, reinforces hierarchies, builds loyalty, and sometimes fuels resistance.

The social scientific literature consistently shows that religion is shaped by social structures – including economic and political ones – and also that, as an integral element of many cultures, it can shape those same structures in turn. The insight of Feuchtwang’s Marxist approach is that we cannot understand one without the other.

What do you think? If religious ideologies are shaped by the material conditions of a society, does that mean their meaning and function will inevitably change as those conditions change – or do religious ideas have a staying power that outlasts the social formations that produced them? And looking at examples beyond China, can you identify other historical or contemporary cases where religious ideology has been used to sustain social hierarchies, even while appearing to speak a universal moral language?

References

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