Marx e Engels como sociólogos da religião

What interests us here is less the materialist critique of religion than the contribution of Marx and Engels to the sociology of religions. In the famous passage on “the opium of the people” — a formula that has nothing specifically Marxist about it, since we find it in Heine, Moses Hess and many other contemporary authors — from 1844, Marx refers to religion as being, simultaneously, an expression of the misery of the world and a protest against it. This “dialectical” conception was little developed by Marx, who seemed to lose interest in religion from 1846 onwards. It is, above all, in Engels that we find the concrete historical analyses of religious phenomena and particularly of the contestatory role of religion, whether in early Christianity, in medieval heresies or in the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century (Thomas Miinzer). The English Revolution of the 17th century was, according to Engels, the last in which religion was still the ideological banner of the dominated classes. The link between religion and social classes is undoubtedly Engels' most interesting contribution to the sociology of religions, even if his analysis often tends to reduce the religious symbolic universe to a simple “mask” of material interests.