A. Fromm is a Neo-Freudian who believes that life is a struggle between three existential dichotomies:

            freedom.......................determinism

            separateness.................unity

            knowledge....................ignorance

To be happy and mature, we all must be free, knowing individuals.
 

B. Fromm believes that religion is an escape from our responsibilities -- reason is always better than religion. (In this, he is like Freud.)  The priest and the psychoanalyst both minister to the soul, he asserts, but only the psychoanalyst always makes the individual the responsible authority.

C. BUT -- we all need meaning in life and a deeper way of orienting to the world than reason alone can provide, so we all have a religious impulse. Religion is inevitable (In this, he is very different from Freud.)

D. SO -- Fromm wants to distinguish between good and bad religion.

Bad religion, which he calls "authoritarian religion," people are made inappropriately subserviant to a higher power and they are forced to sacrifice their integrity.

Good religion, which Fromm calls "humanistic religion," centers on our strength not our powerlessness and assumes that that which fulfills that individual is good.  Its object is self-realization, not obediance to authority.