l emancipation, which thus
neither abolishes nor seeks to abolish the real religiosity of the
individual.

The splitting-up of the individual into Jew and citizen, into
Protestant and citizen, into a religious person and citizen, this
decomposition does not belie citizenship; it is not a circumvention of
political emancipation; it is political emancipation itself, it is the
political manner of becoming emancipated from religion. Moreover, in
times when the political State as a political State is forcibly born
of bourgeois society, when human self-liberation strives to realize
itself under the form of political self-liberation, the State is
driven the whole length of abolishing, of destroying religion, but it
also proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the law of
maximum, to confiscation, to progressive taxation, just as it proceeds
to the abolition of life, to the guillotine. In the moment of its
heightened consciousness, the political life seeks to suppress its
fundamental conditions, bourgeois society and its elements, and to
constitute itself as the real and uncontradictory generic life of the
individual. It is, however, only enabled to do this by a flagrant
violation of its own conditions of life, by declaring the revolution
to be permanent, and the political drama therefore ends as inevitably
with the restoration of religion, of private property, and all the
elements of bourgeois society, as war ends with peace.

Why not even the so-called Christian State, which acknowledges
Christianity as its basis, as the State religion, and therefore adopts
a proscriptive attitude towards other religions is the completed
Christian State. The latter is rather the atheistic State, the
democratic State, the State which consigns religion among the other
elements of bourgeois society. The State which is still theological
and which still officially prescribes belief in Christianity, has not
yet succeeded in giving secular and human expression to those human
foundations whose exaggerated expression is Christianity. The
so-called Christian State is simply no State at all, because it is not
Christianity as a religion, but only the human background of the
Christian religion which can realize itself in actual human creations.

The so-called Christian State is the Christian denial of the State,
although it is not by any means the political realization of
Christianity. The State, which still professes Christianity in the
form