Might be siding with bruno

Bruno Bauer claims, “There is no longer any religion when there is no longer a privileged religion. Take away from religion its power to excommunicate and it will no longer exist” (29). This forms the nucleus of his broader argument against Jewish emancipation, because for Bauer, political emancipation is only possible by abolishing religion from state, and secularism implies the death of religion entirely. Posited in this way, Jewish emancipation, according to Bauer, would require Jews to relinquish not only their political subjugation, but also their religious identity. This poses the same problem for Christians who enjoy the benefits of living within a Christian state. 

His error here, as Marx points out, is assuming that religion is a fundamental element of state (Bauer even says, as quoted on page 29, that “the state which presupposes religion is not yet a true or actual state”). Marx cites secular North America to show that when a state emancipates itself from religion, “the immense majority do not cease to be religious by virtue of being religious in private”. He also brings up the elimination of property qualifications, which imply that private property has been ‘abolished’ (on the state-level) because the non-owner can now legislate for the owner of property. However, this does not mean private property has disappeared entirely from society - indeed, it continued to flourish! 

I find Marx’s argument partially compelling, but I’m not sure I completely agree with his line of reasoning. First of all, unlike property, religion is pervasive and intangible. It shapes societal behavior in such an extreme manner, in a way that property does not, and is in turn also shaped by societal behavior. At the time of writing, I think that the individual tie to religion was a lot stronger than it probably is, on average, today. This is attributable to many things, but one could be that people were much more strictly conditioned to the religion of their society in the 19th century, and this is tapering out. I think one of the main reasons we see a rise in atheism, or ‘Christian degeneracy’ (and I would make the same argument for other major religions, such as Hinduism in secular India, or Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia) is the de-institutionalization of religion within government. Every religion is stratified, but we see much greater stratification (indeed, nowadays, I think belief varies from person to person even within the same religion, community, and family) in secular countries because codes of conduct are no longer determined by a state religion. So while I am a huge proponent of the secular state, Bauer’s intuition that secularism eventually causes religious dissolution makes sense to me. I think there is a middle ground to be struck (obviously, religion still exists today!), but I don't think Marx fully considers the dependence religion has on institutions that necessitate faith, the strongest of which would be government.

I am curious why Marx or Bauer did not consider the fact that, despite existing under a Christian state and not having the “power to excommunicate”, Judaism did not die out. To me, this would have been an obvious rebuttal to Bauer’s argument, so maybe I missed something in the reading.