Religion is whatever must be believed to avoid Marxism’s implications

Evidence

We may therefore define religion as that set of imaginary propositions which must be believed to be true if the theoretical consequences of Marxism are to be avoided. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 767

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Adorno/Horkheimer (Dialectic of Enlightenment) reading on ideology and to the Jameson-Frye debate; also mirrors Marx’s ‘opium of the people’ reconfigured as a functionalist-epistemic necessity.
• DEFINE: A provocative functionalist redefinition of religion in strictly Marxist terms — belief as a mechanism for avoiding theoretical consequences.