Communist Marxism functioned as a secular religion with Jewish roots

Evidence

In the secular state, which officially has no religion at all, and in which there is no involvement of the state in religion and no involvement of religion in the state, Judaism theoretically has the same status of any other religion. There are not many secular states of that type in the world. Most of the countries of Western Europe have a state church, though at the present time this is not very meaningful. The communist states in Eastern Europe were in principle secular, but in reality their secularism had little effect. They were atheists, but not godless. They had no theology, but they did have a creed. They had no religion, but they certainly had a church, complete with scriptures and dogmas, prelates and hierarchs, orthodoxy, heresies and, above all, an inquisition. This church too, coincidentally, was founded by one of Jewish origin and background. One might even argue that he too was to some extent inspired by Jewish prophetic vision and Jewish messianism. Fortunately, unlike his predecessors, he did not come into collision with his Jewish co-religionists, and the Jews are therefore not cast, in Marxist sacred history, in an adversarial role as they are in Christian and to a lesser extent in Muslim history. It is perhaps fortunate that the modern secular religion has not claimed Spinoza as its founder. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 330

Categorization

• XREF: This account of Marxism as a substitute religion recalls the Frankfurt School readings of Marxism’s eschatology and Hereward’s critique. — connects to: Marxism and Nazism functioned as secular forms of millennialism. — Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic…, 127
• SHARE: The Marx-as-Jewish-prophet-and-church-founder framing, plus the Spinoza dig, is the sort of contrarian aperçu a specific interlocutor debating religion-secularism would enjoy.