Karl Marx's Obsession With the Devil

It’s well known that Communism killed 100 million people — but few are aware of the obsession Communism’s founder Karl Marx had with the Devil.

Karl Marx (1818–1883) is the economist and social theorist whose enduring footprint on the world is the political system known as Communism.

By the time the infamous ‘Century of Communism’ had ended, the ideas unleashed by Marx had led to the deaths of at least 100 million people worldwide—making Communism by far the greatest catastrophe in human history.

Marx’s ideas came with many diabolical flaws, perhaps none so deadly as his naive and unfounded optimism about the perfectibility of man.

If 20th-century Communist experiments taught the world anything, it is that humans, by their very nature, will always seek to oppress one another — most notably at nexus of a revolution, when traditional hierarchies are torn down.

While the devilish fruit of Marxism is visible to anyone with eyes to see it, what many people do not know about Karl Marx is that he had an explicit interest — even preoccupation — with devilry, which had a profound influence on all of his thinking.

Over the years, a number of writers have sought to shed light on Karl Marx’s obsession with the Devil.

The bizarre discovery was first made by Marx’s original biographer Franz Mehring, who was so taken aback by what he found that he advised Marx’s youngest daughter Eleanor to keep the revelation from going public.

Two books that ultimately did make these revelations public were Marx: A Biography (1968) and Marx and Satan (1971), both penned by British intellectual Robert Payne. In 1976, Romanian pastor Richard Wurmbrand added to this catalogue with his popular tome Marx & Satan.

The most recent publication on the topic is The Devil and Karl Marx (2020), written by Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College and executive director of the Institute for Faith and Freedom.

Karl Marx’s parents were Jewish, however his father Heinrich converted to a liberal brand of Lutheranism, mostly for social convenience and career mobility, in an era in Germany rife with antisemitism.

A significant and “toxic, pernicious” influence on Karl Marx during his formative years, Kengor notes, was his doctoral advisor Bruno Bauer. Bauer was a theology professor and, rather ironically, an atheist — which was not an entirely impossible combination given the waywardness of 19th-century German Protestantism.

The pair began plans for a journal called Atheistic Archives, which never came to fruition. Kengor shares that on one particular Palm Sunday, Bauer and Marx rode into a German village on donkeys, mocking Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem. They also scandalised their class by getting drunk and disrupting a church service.

Far from being mere footnotes in the biography of Karl Marx, Kengor and Mohler agree these devilish antics are emblematic of the West’s loss of meaning and spiritual fortitude over subsequent centuries.

Germany in the 1800s “is where biblical criticism was born,”….“This is where [Friedrich] Schleiermacher, the father of liberal theology… [reduces] the essence of Christianity to experience and feeling and utter subjectivity”.

Kengor refers to one of the closing lines in The Communist Manifesto, in which Marx and Engels state that “their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions/”

Thus, they observe, true Marxism is not merely about economics, but all of society. “They realised that you had to take out God,” Kengor explains. “You had to remove God.”

Kengor ends the discussion highlighting a quote often attributed to former U.S. President Ronald Reagan: “A Communist is somebody who reads Marx. An anti-Communist is someone who understands Marx.”

He then reflects, “I hear young people say, ‘Communism’s a pretty good idea if you just read it.’ They haven’t read it. They haven’t read it because if they did, they’d reject it.”

https://intellectualtakeout.org/2024/07/karl-marxs-obsession-the-devil/