The most intellectually satisfying book I've read on Marx's concept of religion is

Nicholas Lash's A Matter of Hope: A theologians reflections on the thought of Karl

Marx, Darton, Longman and Todd,1981. Lash is an intellectual Catholic in dialogue
with Marx's thought.

I think Lash is correct when he writes that Feuerbach's account of the"Essence" of

Christianity is very weak, as well as elitist. Feuerbach asked this elitist
question in giving "the Essence" of primitive christianity failing grades : "Did
Christianity conquer a single philosopher, Historian or poet of the Classical
period? The philosophers who went over to Christianity were feebl;e contemptible
philosophers...The decline of culture was identical with the victory of
Christianity" (Essence of Christianity, p 269)

And Marx, being dependent on Feuerbach regarding religion, assumed religion had no
content of its own and was just a refraction of human suffering in class
society.So when the capitalist state had withered away in socialist society -
religion too would dry up and blow away. Marx was not elitist or high-handed about
religion, but he failed to objectively evaluate the revolutionary power of the
mission of Jesus.

Feuerbach's condemnation of primitive Christianity is based on a very speculative

schema: he thought that the images of God or Christ,- the content of religious
faith - were just the fanciful pre-conceptual projections of human self-
understanding. So religion for F. is human alienation from itself. Marx took this
theory as his own. But the theory isn't 'Marxian' because it isn't rooted in
investigation or good sociology...
Marx's dialectical method surpassed Hegel's and helped him see religion and real
human suffering in a highly original manner. But still Marx's reliance on
Feuerbach and Marx's very nominal early religious adherence left a certain
reductionism (religion as only a fantastic reflection of human alienation). This
has led to secular socialist popularizers pitting "ruling class religious
idealism" vs. so called "scientific socialism".

Bloch's Principles of Hope, while stylistically obscure, is a big advance in a

Marxian retreival of the revolutionary character of the Jewish prophets, Jesus of
Nazareth, and primitive Christian believing.

My last idea on Marx and religion is that there is a way in which Marx's idea of
the withering away of religion along with the state in communism is like Aquinas.
Aquinas also understood that the mediations of grace in the Sacraments would cease
in The Kingdom of God...the mystery of God will then be the All in all...So we as
Catholics have to retrieve the Mystical Theology of the Via Negativa against the
anthropomorphic and idolatrous tendency in much christianity. Apophatic theology
and the paradoxical language of critical theology would demonstrate that religion
is more than the fetishizing of purely penultimate symbolic forms.