The Collapse of American Faith: A Materialist Victory
Slow and Steady Wins the Race — Marxism Wins!
By Sabina Guzzanti — A Marxist Correspondent in New York
The latest Gallup poll released Thursday delivers what may be the most significant vindication of materialist analysis in recent memory: for the first time on record, only 49% of U.S. adults say religion is essential to their daily life, down from 66% in 2015. This represents not merely a statistical shift, but the accelerating disintegration of the ideological superstructure that has long mystified class relations in American society.
The 17-point decline ranks among the biggest measured globally since 2007, placing the United States alongside nations like Greece, Italy, and Poland in experiencing one of the world’s most dramatic secularization processes. For those of us who understand religion as what Marx called “the opium of the people”—the illusory happiness that masks real suffering—this collapse signals something profound: the American working class is slowly awakening from its ideological stupor.
The timing is hardly coincidental. As capitalism’s internal contradictions intensify—widening inequality, precarious labor conditions, the financialization of everyday life, ecological catastrophe—the material conditions that breed religious consciousness are transforming. When the promises of prosperity theology ring hollow against the reality of stagnant wages and exploding housing costs, when “thoughts and prayers” cannot pay medical bills or student debt, the masses begin to see through the fog.
What makes this development particularly significant is its acceleration. Only 14 out of more than 160 countries have seen drops of over 15 percentage points in religious importance over the past decade. The United States, that supposed bastion of evangelical fervor and reactionary Christianity, is shedding its false consciousness at a pace that would have astonished even the most optimistic historical materialists of previous generations.
The cultural right senses the danger. They understand, perhaps better than many on the left, that religion has served as capitalism’s most effective social glue—justifying inequality as divine will, channeling working-class rage into culture war theatrics, and inoculating the oppressed against revolutionary consciousness. The panic in conservative circles over these numbers is not about souls; it’s about social control.
The United States is rapidly approaching the median religiosity level of 36% found among the 38 OECD nations, finally converging with other advanced capitalist economies where secularization has long been the norm. This represents the Americanization of American exceptionalism’s demise—the recognition that the United States is subject to the same historical and material forces as every other nation.
Of course, we must resist triumphalism. The decline of religious consciousness does not automatically produce class consciousness. The bourgeoisie has proven remarkably adaptable, replacing traditional religious ideology with new forms of mystification: lifestyle consumerism, wellness culture, techno-utopianism, and nationalist mythology. The marketplace of ideas has simply expanded its product line.
Yet there is something qualitatively different about this moment. The speed and scale of religious decline, concentrated particularly among younger generations, suggests a rupture rather than mere gradual evolution. When the ideological apparatus that has justified American capitalism for centuries begins to crumble this rapidly, it creates an opening—a space for alternative frameworks to take root.
The question for the left is whether we can fill this void with genuine historical materialism before it gets occupied by fascistic substitutes or commodified spiritualities. As Americans increasingly reject the supernatural explanations for their suffering, will they embrace the structural ones? Will they trace their alienation to its source in capitalist relations of production, or will they be diverted into identitarian dead-ends and reactionary populism?
From my vantage point in New York—this great laboratory of late capitalism where luxury condos tower over tent encampments, where algorithmic exploitation masquerades as innovation—I see the contradictions sharpening daily. The same material forces driving religious decline are intensifying class antagonisms. The coincidence is not accidental; it’s dialectical.
The collapse of American religiosity represents the slow-motion disintegration of ideology’s grip on consciousness. It is not victory itself, but it is the clearing of ground upon which victory might be built. For the first time in generations, millions of Americans are living without the consoling myths that Marx identified as the “heart of a heartless world.” They are experiencing reality without the anesthetic.
What comes next depends on whether the left can articulate a vision as compelling as the religious worldview was—but one rooted in material reality rather than mystification. The crisis of faith is simultaneously a crisis of capitalism’s legitimacy. Our task is to name it as such, loudly and clearly, before the moment passes and new opiates are synthesized to dull the pain of exploitation.
The culture war, as we’ve long argued, was never really about culture. It was always about power, property, and the relations of production. As religion’s ability to mystify these relations weakens, the contradictions of capitalism become starker, more visible, less deniable.
This is how history moves—not through dramatic ruptures alone, but through the slow accumulation of material changes that eventually overwhelm the ideological structures built to contain them. The U.S. is rapidly becoming more secular, and with that secularization comes the potential for clearer vision, for consciousness unclouded by supernatural fairy tales.
We are not yet winning the class war. But we are winning the war of ideas, one collapsed illusion at a time. The great awakening is underway—not to God, but from God. And that changes everything.
Further Reading:
- Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – The original text containing Marx’s analysis of religion
- Gallup: Drop in U.S. Religiosity Among Largest in World – The full poll data and analysis
- Financialization and Labor Discipline in Contemporary Capitalism – On precarious labor under financialized capitalism
- UN Report: Financialization and Sustainable Structural Transformation – Analysis of financialization’s impacts on inequality
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