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Erich FROMM's humanistic religion is viewed as a concentrated expression of the spiritual searching which gripped a sizable portion of the bourgeois intelligentsia and Western youth during the 1960s. FROMM characterized his thought as humanistic or existentialistic psychoanalysis. Of special interest are his theories on the pathology of civilized societies and possible >convalescent measures<. In an attempt to explain the universality of religious feeling as reaction to fear, suffering, loneliness, and need for love, FROMM claims that everyone experiences the need to have a fundamental orientation and object of adoration, although he does not make any assertion as to the specific context of this religious need. FROMM does not necessarily consider religion as having to do with a personal God; he claims that man worships not only animals, idols, and gods, but also nations, class, political parties, money, success, strength, and also intelligence, love, and brotherhood. Thus, atheists also have religious sentiment, and the line of demarca-tion should not be drawn between atheism and religion, but between various types of religion. Authoritative religion, viewing man as a debased, enslaved being, is contrasted with humanistic religion, focusing on man himself as the highest of moral values. FROMM maintained that such humanistic religion was not an ivory tower creation, having instead concrete historical roots in the teachings of Isaiah, Jesus, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, Socrates, Spinoza, and the better representatives of the Enlightenment. A Marxist analysis reveals that there is little new in FROMM's appeal to subjective experience as documentation for religious truth, nor in his transposition of religion away from the concept of a personal God toward an emotionally based system of morals. Such a transition from philosophical idealism toward fideism within the bourgeois system was accurately predicted by V. I. Lenin.