The Religious Way Out of an Unbearable Present:Friedrich Engels on religion and social change

Raised in a family rooted in Calvinist Protestantism, Friedrich Engels was completely familiar with the Bible. While Marx after the early works focused on researching political economy, Engels maintained an interest in religion – especially Christianity – and published writings on it. His texts on religion combined several purposes. It was part of unfolding a historical materialist understanding of the ways that ideas are shaped by social and material conditions. A connected political purpose was to clarify how the socialist labor movement should relate to questions of atheism and faith in the labor movement. But Engels also sought to contribute to academic research on the origins of Christianity. In the paper I discuss Engels’ writings on religion and their significance.