Materialism vs Spirituality: Chicken or the Egg?

Warning – This may be a bit high level for y’all

Some very interesting observations came to me recently, when I experienced first-hand that church and culture directly clashing within what I was learning.

We’ve been studying Marx as a political philosopher,  and I must say it’s some challenging reading, to boil down his theoretical framework to more practical terms. Marx, as we all knowed, advocated a grand vision of economic bliss far different than what capitalism has done today. Time has proven which philosophy was the correct one. Today, Marx exists only as a footnote, and a critic to the capitalist tradition.

One of his beliefs I took particular issue with was his stance on materialism, as follows:

It is a truism that our material needs must be satisfied before any other form of life (e.g. political, intellectual) can exist. - German Ideology

Now, I’m familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and consequent philosophies that have basically stated to take care of your physical needs as a primary concern before addressing other higher level concerns. However, something still irks me about these philosophies in how exclusive they are in saying that material needs come first. Add in examples of priests who have sacrificed themselves in Nazi death camps, or countless martyrs throughout history, and this claim becomes less clear. Finally, in one of his sermons, the famous Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias declared that through Jesus resisting the temptation of Satan to attend to all his materialistic needs (“Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” – Matthew 4:4). From all this, it’s obvious that there are serious flaws with this belief of a merely material-focused reality.

I talked to my professor about this dilemma, and his reply was this – Marx’s materalism was merely from a scientific and historical perspective, not a normative perspective. Societies only progress once they have met their physical needs. However this was merely his own opinion. But to argue that people can only progress linearly through physical needs before thinking of spiritual ones seriously discredits human ingenuity. Where are the experts, the secondary sources to confirm my professor’s ideas? Why does Marx not elaborate on this further, and explain that that there was a spiritual dimension to life? Was there even vision for spirituality and faith in Marx’s ideas? And why is there such a disconnect from the ideal production-based future that Marx envisioned and the terrible realities of the twentieth century?

While Marx may have some plausible truth in his claims of materialistic needs, like the rest of his philosophy, it is questionable how practical his theory here is. Marx may have had good intentions, but all this only proves is that the philosophies of man cannot fill a deeper sense of purpose and longing that God provides.