For the first time in history, church membership in the US has fallen below 50%. Between 2001 and 2024, the percentage of people who have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in organized religion fell from 60% to just 32%. Since 1965, the number of Catholic nuns has fallen from 179,000 to fewer than 42,000—a 76% drop. Millennials are far more likely than any older generation to identify as “unaffiliated” with any religious group. In 2021, a poll showed that one in five adults describe their religion as “nothing in particular.”
This trend is not a complete mystery—the Catholic Church has been associated with an abundance of scandals, and organized religions tend to have more conservative stances on issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights. The general population has changed its outlook on these issues far faster than the sloth-paced “reforms” by these ancient institutions.
However, there has also been a concurrent rise in mysticism and “New-Age” beliefs. According to a Pew poll, 29% of Americans believe in astrology. The “crystal therapy” industry has also swelled. In 2017 there was a “crystal boom,” and by 2018 it was the hip, new “wellness” trend. Between 2014 and 2019, demand for “raw stone” crystals and gemstones doubled.
There are big profits to be made in this industry. According to the Guardian:
Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world, but beneath its soil is a well-stocked treasure chest. Rose quartz and amethyst, tourmaline and citrine, labradorite and carnelian: Madagascar has them all … And in a country where infrastructure, capital and labor regulation are all in short supply, it is human bodies rather than machinery that pull crystals from the earth. While a few large mining companies operate in Madagascar, more than 80% of crystals are mined “artisanally”—meaning by small groups and families, without regulation, who are paid rock-bottom prices.
In 2023, the “mystical and psychic services” market was valued at $2.8 billion, up from $2.2 billion in 2018. The app Sanctuary, launched in 2019, not only provides your daily horoscope, it connects you with a professional astrologist—for the right price. A review of the app described the appeal it holds with people:
For the godless, or the spiritually unaffiliated, it offers assurance of larger forces; astrology can make you a part of something big, while sweetly taking destiny out of your hands—bigger forces are at work, and those forces are benevolent, which can be of comfort to someone living a secular life.
Nearly 40% of American women read their horoscope at least once a month. You can buy a set of “crystals for fighting the patriarchy” online. It’s a coping mechanism, a means of escapism, which gives a sense of purpose and belonging. Whether organized or not, religion and mysticism are “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions,” as Marx described it.
Religion, including all types of spiritualism and mysticism, is a form of idealist philosophy. Idealism asserts that ideas—our thoughts—are primary and the world we see and interact with is shaped by them. In other words, the world exists because of an idea. In religion, the originator of this idea is God. In other forms of idealism, God is replaced by some other subject. In solipsism, I am the originator of the idea, and only I exist. The hot new trend of “manifesting” is the most vulgar form of this; the idea that if you imagine something hard enough, you can bring it into existence. This is fundamentally no different than praying to a god with a specific request.
Marxism, on the other hand, bases itself on a materialist philosophy—dialectical materialism. Materialism asserts that matter is primary and our ideas are a reflection or a product of the real world. We do not need to rely on anything beyond material reality to explain how the world works—we can determine the causes of every effect, without God, spirits, superstition, the supernatural, the soul, the “afterlife,” auras, mysticism, crystals, astrology, etc. We can understand nature on its own terms, and explain society as a product of real, human, non-mystical processes. It is not a religion, a dogma, or a set of beliefs that require faith—it is a scientific method.
The “crystal therapy” industry has swelled. In 2017 there was a “crystal boom,” and by 2018 it was the hip, new “wellness” trend. / Image: Elderberry Arts, Flickr
Where does philosophy come from?
Humanity is the only species that has philosophies. Why is this? How did philosophy, religion, abstract thought come to be?
Humanity as a species is the culmination of a process of evolution that started with single-celled life on Earth, continuously increasing in complexity over billions of years. Somewhere between three and six million years ago, our primate ancestors came down from the trees and adopted an upright posture, freeing our hands to interact more granularly with our environment. Our diets changed, and out of necessity, we developed technologies that increased our chances of survival, which in turn impacted the development of our brains.
Over hundreds of thousands of years, we began to think, to try to understand how to continually improve our tools, and we developed increasingly elaborate speech to communicate with others and to plan, learn, and improve. As we moved into ever more diverse biomes, our survival as a species depended increasingly on a deeper understanding of the world.
While we developed this strong drive to understand the world, it did not coincide automatically with understanding everything. We gained the ability to ask questions before we had the ability to find the true, scientific answers. Since nature abhors a vacuum, these gaps in our knowledge were filled with religion, with idealism. Spirits were assigned to everything in nature. Rain dances or rainmaking rituals can be seen in cultures on nearly every continent, especially in drier climates where survival was dependent on rainfall. These were direct attempts to influence our conditions, and coincided with a proto-scientific observation of weather patterns.
Religion marked a step forward in human consciousness insofar as it was a reflection of human agency. It was, and is, an expression of our desire to shape our environment, to take the place of the mysterious forces beyond our control. In the same way that hominids underwent a process of evolution, human society has also experienced a historical evolution. In the last few thousand years, there has been development in the complexity of our society, technology, thought, and culture.
And just as we can understand the biological process of evolution, we can determine the scientific laws that govern the development of human society. It may be more difficult, but by no means are these laws an unsolvable mystery. In both cases, this is not a gradual and steady process, but includes periods of stagnation, retreat—and revolutionary leaps forward.
Philosophy emerged when humanity began to seek answers for how the world works outside of the will of spirits or gods. It only begins at a certain level of economic development, a point at which the surplus in society could consistently support a class of people that had idle time to think. Eventually, we became skilled enough at survival that a small portion of the population was freed completely from having to perform manual labor, and it was to the benefit of everyone collectively for some people to be freed for mental labor, to better understand nature.
This division between mental and physical labor is the objective basis for idealism. Due to the limited development of the means of production, only a small caste could be freed for this activity. These people jealously controlled the access to their specialized knowledge, because it was the source of their freedom from the drudgery of manual labor. Naturally, they saw ideas as the foundation of everything.
Science begins when human beings not only have their hands freed for the use of tools, but when they have the freedom to drop those tools and look up at the skies. By gazing at the stars, mankind can track and predict the seasons, the motion of the tides. Astronomy was the first science.
We have come a long way in our understanding of nature: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, mathematics, and so on give us mastery over our environment unmatched at any other point in history. In the ideas of Marx and Engels, we see the highest development of philosophy—dialectical materialism, a scientific method—with which to understand society, economics, and history, in order to change the world.
As Trotsky explains in “Dialectical Materialism and Science,” the purpose of science is:
To know in order that we may foresee and act . . . The social evaluation of science, its historical evaluation is determined by its capacity to increase man’s power and arm him with the power to foresee and master nature. Science is knowledge that endows us with power.
Science has definitively shown that astrology has no basis in reality, and that crystals do not affect one’s health or their “aura.” So why is it that these ideas have a grip on such a sizable layer of the population?
Science has definitively shown that astrology has no basis in reality. / Image: Lucas Pezeta, Pexels
Skepticism and empiricism
The founder of an astrology dating app, Align, witnessed a turning point in the audience for astrology:
I just have such a vivid memory of the New York Times scale on election night in 2016. It was at 99% Hillary Clinton and then it went all the way to the other side of the scale and I just realized that what we relied on to be valid was not actually accurate. It allowed people to become more receptive to the fact that everything isn’t black and white and there is a lot of nuance and a lot of gray areas and that’s where a lot of stuff happens. After 2016, the faucet just turned on. Suddenly, everybody everywhere was just fascinated by astrology.
Tarot cards are also part of this trend with young people mixing and matching spiritualist rituals and beliefs. Between 2016 and 2021, tarot deck sales doubled, after seeing a similar bump after the 2008 crisis. According to the Washington Post, “people were looking for ways to process fear and anxiety.”
As one astrologer explained, the experience of two major recessions, an economic system in decline, and climate change, has pushed young people into “exploring nontraditional religious beliefs”:
I think that it’s a yearning to return to something. There’s a rejection of things that don’t work. Socialism isn’t new, and astrology definitely isn’t new, and earthly spirituality or living in accordance with the earth’s rituals isn’t new, it’s ancient. I think we’re yearning for something that technology cannot give us, that capitalism cannot give us.
Organized religion isn’t the only institution suffering from a crisis in confidence. Less than 20% of people express confidence in the mainstream media, the courts, congress, and big business. When asked what America will look like in 2050, 66% polled said they think the US will be economically weaker, 77% said the country will be more politically divided, and 81% said the gap between the rich and poor will widen.
After the defeated 1905 Russian Revolution, the tsarist reaction, repression, and an economic crisis triggered a similar trend towards pessimism and spiritualism that affected even the Bolsheviks. To combat these trends, Lenin wrote his classic philosophical polemic, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
Skepticism is a natural product of crumbling empires. We are living through the decline of capitalism, and the result is that millions of people are looking for a way out of the system. However, skepticism asserts a purely negative idea—it does not give you any tools to chart out of the impasse
This simple skepticism leads many down the path of conspiracy theories. Flat Earth theory saw a revival in 2020. 24% of adults in the US believe they have seen a “flying saucer.” 34% of Americans polled in 2022 believe these UFOs are proof of alien life, compared to 20% in 1996.
Not feeling that they are on solid ground in this world of chaos and confusion, many fall back on their senses, their own experience. Surely this is something they can trust! Placing the senses front and center as the primary source of truth sounds very scientific—what could be more scientific and true than practical experiments and experience? This outlook is known as empiricism.
But this doesn’t resolve the matter either. If all you can know for certain is that which you can sense, can you be certain that what you sense actually exists apart from you? Does the universe exist independently of you and your senses? If a tree falls in the forest but no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Clearly, what is real cannot depend solely on an individual’s experience. Our knowledge of the universe is collective and is not limited to our immediate sense impressions.
Skepticism is a natural product of crumbling empires. / Image: Zde, Wikimedia Commons
Eclecticism and the search for connection and meaning
The general instability of the system and pessimism about the future are leading people to search for meaning wherever they can find it. Simultaneously, alienation has contributed to the general disintegration of social life. The so-called “third place“—a place to exist in leisure, socially, outside of work and home—has been disappearing from our daily lives. This no doubt is also a factor in the rise in “religiously unaffiliated” places of worship that serve as places where people can “build community” and feel connected to others, whether or not there is a higher power.
Part of the appeal of mystical practices is the fact that you can cobble together your own personal amalgam. As an example, 26% of Christians reportedly also believe in astrology. The Los Angeles Times explained the rise in disaffiliation from the major religions as a trend towards eclecticism:
Spiritual practices appeal to the commitment-wary: You can get a little into crystals or astrology or tarot, or a lot into it. You can buy a few rose quartzes or light a few candles and if it’s meaningful for you, keep it; if not, it’s not like you went through a full religious conversion.
As Marx explained, the dominant ideology of any society is the ideology of the ruling class. There is no consistent worldview present within these “New Age” religions because the capitalist system can no longer justify its continuation. What’s left is an idealistically pragmatic, eclectic “whatever works” approach to life. And yet, the quest to find something that works, the determination to exert some control over our lives, cannot be so easily extinguished.
It is not a coincidence that consultations with tarot readers and astrologers often resemble therapy sessions. But instead of finding real means with which people can change their circumstances, they are offered rocks mined with child labor, star charts, and pretty decks of cards.
As Marx explained, the dominant ideology of any society is the ideology of the ruling class. / Image: Revolutionary Communists of America
Marxist materialism
As we’ve seen, all ideas have a scientific explanation, a material basis. In order to change the world, you must first understand it as it really is, with all its contradictions and complexity. The only form of human thinking that allows us to do this is dialectical materialism.
As revolutionary communists seeking to transform human society in our lifetime, we must dedicate ourselves to the study of this philosophy. Trotsky motivated all young workers in the early Soviet Union to learn about materialism in his article, “Attention to Theory”:
A materialist outlook not only opens a wide window onto the whole universe, but also strengthens the will. It alone makes the modern man human. It is true that he is still dependent on difficult material conditions, but he already knows how to overcome them, and consciously takes part in the construction of a new society, one based simultaneously on the highest technology and the highest solidarity.
Unfortunately, we cannot eradicate this mysticism—or “bunk” as Engels called it—simply with facts and logic. As Lenin explains in “The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion“:
The deepest root of religion today is the socially downtrodden condition of the working masses and their apparently complete helplessness in face of the blind forces of capitalism, which every day and every hour inflicts upon ordinary working people the most horrible suffering and the most savage torment, a thousand times more severe than those inflicted by extraordinary events, such as wars, earthquakes, etc.
“Fear made the gods.” Fear of the blind force of capital—blind because it cannot be foreseen by the masses of the people—a force which at every step in the life of the proletarian and small proprietor threatens to inflict, and does inflict “sudden,” “unexpected,” “accidental” ruin, destruction, pauperism, prostitution, death from starvation—such is the root of modern religion which the materialist must bear in mind first and foremost, if he does not want to remain an infant-school materialist.
No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labor, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organized, planned and conscious way.
The way to combat all forms of mysticism is not by banning crystals and horoscopes, but by putting forward a true explanation for why the world is the way it is, thus showing the superiority of Marxism in practice. Philosophy is nothing more than our striving to understand the universe. Science is a measure of how much of it we understand. The development of philosophy and science proves that we can study the universe on its own terms, without needing gods, spirits, ghosts, constellations, or crystals.
By applying dialectical materialism to nature and society we can gain control over our conditions of life and lift our species out of its misery. The workers can change the world, not as individuals, but as a revolutionary class. Through a scientific study of history we can understand revolutions—how they happen, why they succeed or fail, and thus prepare for the successful overthrow of capitalism.