Marx wrote this just prior to the Civil War. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The Republican coalition of religious conservatives and business has its origins in the Civil War, where northern industry joined forces with fundamentalist Christians who opposed slavery. A quarter of all union soldiers were immigrants, mostly poor German immigrants. Iowa sent more volunteers (per capita) to fight for the union than any other state. What motivated all those people to fight and die in a war between British people? They had no personal stake in the war—they didn’t have industry powered by southern resources like cotton, nor were any battles fought anywhere near their homes. For them, fighting for the union was about vindicating a religious opposition to slavery.
It was the confederates that portrayed themselves as being on the side of “science” against religious “zealots.” https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornersto.... To make sense of that, put yourself in 1861. That was more than a century before we had the technology to determine that humans are genetically all the same. If you were someone who looked at the world—what people had built in Africa and what they had built in Europe—and said “these people are all the same,” that was a statement of faith.
The modern Republican Party has a large contingent of rebadged Dixiecrats.
As for Iowa, there had never been slavery in what we think of as the Midwest--north of the Ohio River and of Missouri. However, the Dred Scott decision put it into question whether the states could maintain that status. I imagine that to have been a motivator for Midwesterners who did not wish to compete with slave labor.
Did we have the technology in the mid 1800s to understand that humans were all the same? Imagine you came from London to Virginia in 1700 and saw American Indians living as hunter gatherers. What empirical basis would you have to say they were the same as Europeans?
In addition to what the other commenter said, the Indians in 1700 Virginia weren't hunter-gatherers. They had farms, money, laws, and government. To the extent that the colonizing English didn't think of them as "the same," well, they felt the same way about the Irish, who are also European.
I mean, to the extent you can have “laws” and “government” without written language, maybe you could say that. The English, meanwhile, had steam engines, buildings nearly 500 feet tall, guns, cities with half a million people, street lighting, and indoor plumbing.
You can have those things without written language; they weren't hunter-gatherers. I don't know what building you're talking about, but as far as I know the Brits didn't have any building nearly that tall in 1700. The Brits didn't have a steam engine in 1700. The Brits recognized, in 1700, that the Indians were people just as much as themselves. This argument of yours projects onto the past an opinion that nobody actually held.
Race realists would do well to remember that, if you were a Mediterranean or Asian a couple of thousand years ago, the empirical evidence would have persuaded you that Northern Europeans were a lesser race: https://elfinspell.com/PrimarySource54BCCicero.html. History could have turned out very differently if the Romans hadn’t invaded bringing technology and civilization to Europe.
Really ironic thing to say about religion given how deeply Christian Marxism is (or how Marxist Christianity, specifically, is). We're all equal ~~under God~~, sharing is caring, a camel can go through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man can ~~get into Heaven~~ stay out of a gulag... :D
