Friedrich Engels

Frederick Engels (28 November 1820 – 5 August 1895) was a German philosopher, historian, social scientist, sociologist, journalist and businessman.

Karl Marx's collaborator in developing the theory of communism. Engels' atheistic beliefs strained his relations with his parents. He once stated: "Three hundred years after its appearance Christianity was the recognized state religion in the Roman World Empire, and in barely sixty years socialism has won itself a position which makes its victory absolutely certain". On the Letters of Marx and Engles, 1845, Engels shared sympathy for atheism.

On the Letters of Marx and Engles, a letter to Conrad Schmidt said: "As to the realms of ideology which soar still higher in the air, religion, philosophy, etc., these have a prehistoric stock, found already in existence and taken over in the historic period, of what we should to-day call bunk. These various false conceptions of nature, of man's own being, of spirits, magic forces, etc., have for the most part only a negative economic basis; but the low economic development of the prehistoric period is supplemented and also partially conditioned and even caused by the false conceptions of nature. And even though economic necessity was the main driving force of the progressive knowledge of nature and becomes ever more so, it would surely be pedantic to try and find economic causes for all this primitive nonsense. The history of science is the history of the gradual clearing away of this nonsense or of its replacement by fresh but already less absurd nonsense."

Before his death in 1895, although he had been thinking about it for decades, Engels argued that the origins of Christianity were revolutionary. The proposal challenged both his fellow socialists, who were suspicious of religion and its reactionary tendencies, and the churches, which were keen to emphasise the figure of a gentle Jesus and the other-worldly piety of the early Christians.

Engels based his argument on three points: 1) early Christianity drew its followers from amongst the poor and exploited, the peasants, slaves and unemployed urban poor; 2) early Christianity shared many of the features of the communist revolutionary movement in which he was involved – such as sects, struggles, lack of finance, and false prophets; 3) eventually it took over the Roman Empire.