Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity was published in the same year (1841) as the second volume of Strauss's Christian Faith and the first two volumes of Bauer's Critique of the Synoptic Gospels, and like these two contemporaneous studies its aim was to reveal Christian theology and religious consciousness as the psychological and historical culmination of human self-alienation. It was not surprising, therefore, that Feuerbach, Strauss, and Bauer were often grouped together by contemporary observers as a Left Hegelian atheistic trio. Feuerbach, however, resisted the identification of his standpoint with those of Strauss and Bauer. His own critique of Christian religion and culture, he insisted, went beyond their works in at least two significant respects.

The object of Bauer's and Strauss's criticism, Feuerbach claimed, was biblical and dogmatic theology, the “theoretical” objectifications of Christian religious experience; their analysis did not penetrate beyond historical forms to the religious experience expressed in those forms. “The main object of my inquiry”, he wrote, “is Christianity, is religion, as it is constituted in its immediacy by the objectification of the essence of man”. This differentiation, however, was misleading. Bauer and Strauss were also concerned with the religious experience embodied in Christian “representations” and also analyzed religious consciousness in terms of the objectification and self-alienation of “the essence of man”. The distinctiveness of Feuerbach's viewpoint lay in his conception of human essence, of man's “species being”.