Secular Europe, religious America

Public Interest, Spring, 2004 by Brian C. Anderson

In pursuing their radical ends, as scholars such as J.L. Talmon and Francois Furet have shown, France's revolutionaries became proto-totalitarians. As early as November 1789, the first year of upheaval, they nationalized church property and soon boarded up convents and monasteries. They mandated that all clerics would henceforth be state officials, subject to election by the laity--including nonbelievers. The violence escalated as the Revolution advanced: Churches were torched, altars desecrated, religious libraries wrecked, and priests and nuns forced to marry and have sex. The Jacobin Reign of Terror of 1793 and 1794 saw even greater abuses. The revolutionaries sent scores of priests (and many others) to the guillotine. In a sacrilegious gesture, they moved the remains of Voltaire from his estate at Ferney to the Church of Sainte-Genevieve, which they renamed the Pantheon. Notre Dame Cathedral was transformed into the Temple of Reason.

In response, the Catholic church set itself resolutely against "progress, liberalism, and modern civilization," in the words of Pope Pius IX's infamous 1864 "Syllabus of Errors." The church became the symbol of resistance to democracy--a resistance that, as Tocqueville predicted, was doomed to fail against the "providential" movement of history toward democracy. It was not until Vatican II, in the mid 1960s, that the church finally came to terms with democracy and began instead to claim historical responsibility for its emergence. (In fact, some within the church became so enthusiastic about modern democracy that they lost sight of the enduring truths of the church itself.)

Meanwhile, the French Revolution, despite its enormous abuses of power and its failure to establish a viable political order, won an honored reputation not just among the French but among generations of Europeans. It became the symbol of light--the vanguard of political freedom against all the agents of the old order, including religion. The anticlerical spirit of the Revolution, reinforced by school curricula and public traditions, has continued to typify European democracies. As is obvious, Europe's secularism is far less ferocious than in Robespierre's time. The philosopher Pierre Manent says European democracy no longer plans "to destroy the infamous thing," and it "consents to the presence in its bosom" of religious believers. But that is only because it was victorious in its struggle against them. For many Europeans, to be a modern democrat means necessarily that one is also secular.

America's point of departure

In America, relations between religion and democracy developed very differently, in ways that have encouraged the flourishing of faith visible around the nation today. On first blush, this might appear surprising. The dominant view among scholars, at least until quite recently, has been that the American Revolution, like the French, was an expression of the secular Enlightenment--finding its inspiration in the commonsensical natural rights philosophy of John Locke. According to this view, the U.S. Constitution privatized religion, downgrading its public status permanently. In political scientist Walter Berns's words,