Marx "saw religion, not just negatively as 'the opium of the people,' but positively as the 'sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions.' This helps us understand the mass appeal of the religious charlatans of the television screen, as well as the work of Liberation Theology in joining the soulfulness of religion to the energy of revolutionary movements in miserably poor countries".[4] Some recent scholarship has suggested that "opium of the people" is itself a dialectical metaphor, a "protest" and an "expression" of suffering.
