This thesis examines the relationship between socialism and religion through a comparative analysis of Andrei Znamenski’s Socialism as a Secular Creed and Stefan Arvidsson’s Röd tro. The aim is to compare how the two authors describe socialism’s relationship to religion, how they use or criticize the concept of political religion, and how their different ways of defining religion affect their conclusions.

The thesis places the two books in relation to a broader discussion of political religion. In that discussion, scholars such as Eric Voegelin, Emilio Gentile, Michael Burleigh and Tzvetan Todorov have analyzed modern political ideologies as phenomena that can take over functions associated with religion. Znamenski uses this tradition of interpretation to describe socialism as a secular creed and political religion. Arvidsson is more critical of the concept and instead presents socialism’s relationship to religion as historically varied: socialism can be anti-religious, religiously inspired, compatible with religion or even given religious form by some socialists, without socialism as such becoming a religion.

In the final analysis, Michael L. Satlow’s concept of tradition is used to discuss whether socialism can be understood as a tradition-forming phenomenon in modernity. This makes it possible to analyze socialism’s narratives, practices, symbols, institutions and forms of authority without deciding too quickly that socialism either is or is not religion. The thesis concludes that Znamenski and Arvidsson reach different conclusions partly because they use the concept of religion differently, but also because they ask different questions: Znamenski asks how socialism can function like religion, while Arvidsson asks how socialism has historically related to religion and where the boundary of the concept of religion should be drawn.