Why not "Marxism and the Art of Tea Ceremony (or Fly-Fishing, Calligraphy, Tai Chi, whatever)," then? No doubt "pedagogically useful" and perhaps more "strategically resonant" than Christianity in Japan. They say it builds the character and is good for mental health....
That said, here's a criticism of Zizek's proposal (as well as postmodern name-calling of Marxism as "chilliasm," etc.) avant la lettre.
Ernst Bloch, _The Principles of Hope_, Vol. 3:
***** Secularization and the power of setting things on their feet
The human must be brought out into fresh and strong air. So that it can walk and at last break out of the merely inner mode, which has been preached long and vainly enough. But it is sometimes said, though in more than suspect places, that this kind of thing is not breaking out but _sinking down_. What is set on its feet has then so to speak only come down from the nag to the ass, and then to the plebian pedestrian. Or it was even irreverently brought down from a sacred space and 'made worldly'. When it appears historically, this is also called _secularizing_, though then in a less pejorative sense....But secularization certainly has become pejorative when a reactionary fashion then applies it to Marx, because he has set many things on their feet. Even this kind of thing, despite the walking feet, is supposed to be nothing but second hand, as the Americans say, who ought to know. Man, for example, or even his blessed life: did this not exist before Marx, in significantly more enhanced, more sublime form, and did not Marx defuse this? Did not the blessed life merely become happy, indeed one with only material goods in mind? Does not Marx, ask these bank-clerks of the idea, sell formerly high values at heavily reduced prices, affordable by far too many, and what is acquired looks that cheap? Such a dumper of goods, when he is selling them off, then no longer needs to be specially taken into account there and then, by the relieved commodity expert....Instead, the true lover of man and his salvation returns to the true sources of supply and finds them where the political song never seems to have sounded...at all. Thus Marx is elegantly got rid of, and yet with a sense of morning red, of new beginning. But then this morning red must have glowed as far back in the past as possible, and the new beginning lies behind holy smoke and not in the so-called barren late age of today. Marx himself is then supposed to appear almost decadent, at the least he becomes civilizatory in the bad sense. Just as with reactionary intent a distinction was once made between authors and writers [i.e., high literature and middle-brow writing], with the latter being regarded as comparatively trivial, so the secularizing Marx is then also regarded as part of the asphalt. All this because man and several great things related to man were here set on their feet.
This disparagement of one's own age is certainly widespread among the bourgeoisie in other respects too. To this extent it is not...confined to Marx....Now there is a 'late age' and nothing more, sterile 'wakefulness' [e.g., the hermeneutics of suspicion] instead of the once-young 'culture-bearing soul'....However, all retractions of the characteristic, though now historical, bourgeois value would not be fulfilling their social mandate unless they dismantled both the liberal past and also, above all, the calling of our time towards the _future_. How consoling if even Marxism, precisely Marxism, purely chronologically, according to its status in the universal autumn of culture, cannot be anything of substance, let alone containing future. And how discouraging this is intended to be for a youth susceptible or inclining to socialism. Here Marx is not only 'deepest nineteenth century', as the Nazis used to say, but even if he were and expressed the twentieth century he would have only the past in him, not the future. And yet the business of antiquarian Marx-killing is still not exhausted; for the disparagement of one's own age would not be complete without the idolatry of the moonlit magical nights of yore....Marx, in well-known lines from the postscript to the second edition of 'Das Kapital', first identified the setting-on-its-feet of the past, with regard to the Hegelian dialectic, which was standing on its head: 'It has to be turned upside down in order to discover the rational core in the mystical shell.' When this, together with the also familiar Marxist genealogy in German classical philosophy, was understood not as 'bringing over' but as it were as bringing back to safety, i.e. into an allegedly solely classical origin, there then arose the formerly common 'improvements' on Marx by a Marburg Kant or also (significantly weaker) by a neo-Hegelian Hegel. But at least there was no irrationalizing here yet but rather idealizing, i.e. Marxism was -- without regard for its most characteristic, proletarian-revolutionary source -- whittled down to at least still rational, though definitely non-materialistic theories. But in the late bourgeoisie...irrationalization now increasingly emerged; therefore the belittling of Marx by the playing off of truly mythical originals against alleged imitation could now go ahead. Consequently a radical attempt at extermination of Marx through a kind of accusation of plagiarism ousted the former Kantianization or Hegelianization of Marx. Thus a quite unspeakable kind of source fetishism blossoms here -- going back from Marx to Joachim of Fiore or Augustine or ultimately to the mythical expectations of salvation of primeval times. The great heretic and future-dreamer Joachim of Fiore is just about allowed to pass, although he too was only a kind of Isaiah of the thirteenth century, but Marx, because he is the critical case, is stopped and unmasked as a soi disant church-robber. All this especially in the decrescendo of secularization, one tainted with the foul odour of revolution. Humanity according to this view is nothing but the Son of Man trivialized, proletarian solidarity merely the kitsch edition of early Christian love-communism, the realm of freedom merely the kingdom of the children of God -- at the level of godless pseudo-enlightenment....Here 'historical materialism' as a whole is 'salvation-history in the language of national economy' and 'communist religion a pseudo-morphosis of Judaeo-Christian messianism' (Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen, 1953, p. 47ff.). Indeed it is not surprising...to find the scandalous statement here that: 'Compared to Marx, Hegel's philosophy is realistic' (l.c., p. 54). This is the kind of thing that comes out when the power to set things on their feet, to save the rational core, appears exclusively as secularization. A secularization that does not cheer the supporters and provers of spiritual princedoms in any case....
...[Meanwhile, t]he real regurgitators only have before them, in dull and duller form, what was once better or at least newer food. *****
Yoshie