Atheism and an Ideology of Revolution: Feuerbach and Marx
Perhaps one of the most revolutionary developments of the first half of the nineteenth century was not the formation of new political units or the shaping of social attitudes towards religion in Europe, but the emergence of a critique of religion that undermined its credibility. The European churches gained their social influence partly because they were seen as the bearers of a divinely given and divinely authorized message. But what if this message were simply an invention, shaped either by human needs or by its social context? In early nineteenth-century Germany, a school of thought emerged which argued that religion was not a response to divine revelation, but was in essence a matter of psychology or sociology.
The political and social background to this development needs explanation. The war between revolutionary France and the absolutist German princes and monarchs of 1792 raised new hopes of radical social reform within Germany. Liberal politicians such as Karl Theodor Welcker pressed home popular demands for press freedom and other democratic rights. In 1817, some five hundred students celebrated the three- hundredth anniversary of the Reformation by marching to the Wartburg to demand constitutional changes and a united fatherland. Demands for political reform, often driven by a strongly nationalist agenda, became widespread.
