Gramsci rejects paternalist religion-as-primitive-education dressed as historicism.

Evidence

The Gentile Reform provided for compulsory religious education in Italian schools, and Gentile’s justifications of this are criticised by Gramsci in Int., pp. 116-18: ”… Gentile’s thinking … is nothing more than an extension of the idea that ‘religion is good for the people’ (people = child = primitive phase of thought to which religion corresponds, etc.), i.e. a (tendentious) abandonment of the aim of educating the people … Gentile’s historicism is of a very degenerate kind: it is the historicism of those jurists f or whom the knout is not a knout when it is an ‘historical’ knout. Moreover, its ideas are extremely vague and confused. The fact that a ‘dogmatic’ exposition of scientific ideas and a certain ‘mythology’ are necessary in the primary school does not mean that the dogma and the mythology have to be precisely those of religion.” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1857

Categorization

• DEFINE: Naming the ‘religion is good for the people’ view equates masses with children at a primitive phase of thought — a key ideological mechanism for later Islamophobia debates.
• XREF: The degenerate-historicism idea (‘a historical knout is not a knout’) connects to how later critiques of Orientalism treat claims about other cultures’ internal logics as excuses.