Chapter 48 Part Two Results Chapter 12 Ideology: Religion 1

Give me a people whose zeal and avarice are pacified by faith, hope, and benevolence; a people who see life on earth as a pilgrimage, and life on the other side as their true homeland; A nation; a nation that loves and adores Jesus Christ, the forerunner of all the oppressed, and his cross, the instrument of universal salvation.I said, give me a nation cast in the pattern of the Lord, and socialism would not only be easily defeated, but impossible to be remembered...   ——"Catholic Civilization" But when Napoleon began to push forward, they (the Molokan pagan peasants) believed that he was the lion in the valley of King Jehoshaphat, as their old hymn says, He was destined to overthrow the false Tsar and restore the true White Tsar to the throne.Accordingly, the Molokens of Tambov province selected a delegation from among them, and went to meet him in white.

- Hacksterhausen, "Studies on Russia" 1 What people think about the world is one thing, but the terms in which they think it is another.For most of history and for most of the world (with the perhaps major exception of China), the terms in which all but a few educated and emancipated people think about the world are those of traditional religions, so that in some country, the word "Christian" is simply synonymous with "peasant" or "man."At some point before 1848, this was no longer the case in some parts of Europe, although outside the areas affected by the Dual Revolution, this did not change.Religion, which was once like the boundless sky, covering all and encompassing everything, from which nothing on the ground escapes, is now like a cloud in the human firmament, a vast, limited, ever-changing landscape.Of all the ideological changes, this was the most profound, although its practical consequences were less certain and less certain than were imagined at the time.Regardless, it's still the most unprecedented change.

Unprecedented, of course, is the secularization of the masses.Gentlemanly indifference to religion while scrupulously performing religious duties and ceremonies (setting an example for the lower classes) was not uncommon among unfettered nobles, although the nobles Women, like other women, are still far more religious.Gentle and educated people may appear to be believers in a Supreme Being, though this Supreme Being has no function other than existence, and certainly does not interfere with human activities, or demand any worship other than sincere acknowledgment form.In reality, however, their views of traditional religion are rather arrogant and often outright hostile.Even if they were prepared to declare themselves outspoken atheists, their views would make no difference.It is said that Napoleon asked the great mathematician Laplace where God was placed in his celestial mechanics, and that Laplace replied, "Sir, I do not at all need such an assumption." Publicly There were still relatively few atheists in India, but there were even fewer professed Christians among the enlightened scholars, writers, and gentlemen who set the intellectual fashion of the late eighteenth century.If there was one faith that flourished among the elite of the late eighteenth century, it was rationalism, Enlightenment, and anti-Church Masonicism.

Among men of the refined and cultivated classes, the process of secession from Christianity dates back to the end of the seventeenth or the beginning of the eighteenth century.The public impact it has had has been quite astonishing and quite beneficial.The fact that the witchcraft trials that had afflicted Western and Central Europe for centuries were now entrusted to the afterlife was enough to justify the departure from Christianity.But, in the early eighteenth century, the phenomenon of secession from Christianity hardly affected the lower or even middle classes.An ideology that does not speak in the tone of Madonnas, Saints, and the Bible still has nothing to do with peasants, let alone those ancient gods and spirits who still wear Christian masks today.Among those artisans who would previously have been attracted by heresy, there was a surge of secular thought.Cobblers were the most stubborn group of working-class intellectuals, and there were mystics like Jacob Boehme who seemed to have begun to doubt any gods.In any case, in Vienna they were the only artisanal group sympathetic to the Jacobins, who were said to be godless.Still, these are just occasional small ripples.The vast majority of unskilled workers and poor people of all stripes in the cities (with the possible exception of Nordic cities like Paris and London) were still deeply religious and superstitious.

Outright hostility to religion was not widespread even among the middle classes, although an Enlightenment, progressive and iconoclastic, had brilliantly outlined the contours of a rising middle class.This silhouette conjures images of the aristocracy and the immorality of belonging to aristocratic society. The libertine and infidel (libertin) of the mid-seventeenth century, arguably the first "free thinkers," did live up to the general meaning of their name: Molière's Don Juan, not only depicts They combined atheism with sexual freedom, and portrayed the respected bourgeoisie's fear of it.The paradox is that the most intellectually daring thinkers, such as Bacon and Hobbes, who predicted the ideology of the middle class in the future, were also part of this ancient and rotten society. (especially in the 17th century) for a reason.The rising army of the middle class required a discipline and organization of strong virtues of sincerity to drive them into battle.In theory, agnosticism or atheism are perfectly compatible with this need, whereas Christianity is not; eighteenth-century philosophers assiduously demonstrated that "natural" morality (which they find exemplified in noble savages) and The noble character of individual free thinkers is far better than the Christian faith.But in practice, the proven superiority of the old religions, and the dire risks of abandoning supernatural beliefs, are enormous.Not only for the working poor who are not driven by superstition, but for the middle class itself.

Through the Rousseauian "worship of the Supreme Being" (Robespierre, 1794), through the various false religions based on a rationalist breakaway from Christianity, which still retain the husk of ritual and worship (Saint-Simonians, and Comte's "Religion of Humanity").Generations of French people after the revolution repeatedly attempted to create a bourgeois morality equivalent to Christian morality.Ultimately, the attempt to maintain the liturgical shell of the old religion was abandoned, but not to establish a formal secular morality (based on various moral concepts such as "unity and fraternity"), especially a rivalry to the priesthood. Secular position - school teacher.The poor, disinterested French schoolteachers, who taught the schoolchildren of every village the Roman morality that the Revolutionary Republic advocated, were the official opponents of the village parish priests, who did not win until the establishment of the Third Republic, which also resolved the The political problem of establishing the stability of the bourgeoisie on the basis of a social revolution is only 70 years away.Nevertheless, as early as 1792 in the law of Condorcet (Condorcet), the title "primary teacher" has appeared.The law stipulates: "The person responsible for the primary education shall be called the primary teacher (inshtuteur)." The reason for choosing the word instituteur is to echo what Cicero and Sallust said "Instituterecivitatem" (instituterecivitatem) and "instituterecivitatem mores" (instituterecivitatem mores).

Thus, the bourgeoisie remained ideologically divided between an increasingly overtly free thinker minority and a devout Protestant, Jewish and Catholic majority.But the new historical development is that, of the two schools, the free-thinking school has more infinite vitality and effectiveness.Although religion is still extremely powerful in sheer numbers and, as will be seen, is growing stronger, it is no longer (to use a biological analogy) overt but implicit. sexually.This is still the case today, in a world transformed by the dual revolution.The newly formed United States of America, the majority of its citizens were almost certainly religious, mostly Protestant, but, despite their efforts to change, the Constitution of the Republic remained agnostic in matters of religion position.There can be no doubt that, at the time of this book, the Protestant faithful of the English middle class far outnumbered and developed the agnostic radical minority by far.But Bentham was far more influential than Wilberforce in shaping the actual institutions of his day.

The clearest evidence of the victory of secular ideology over religious ideology is its most important achievement.With the outbreak of the American Revolution and the French Revolution, major political and social changes were secularized.In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Dutch and English revolutionary publications continued to discuss and argue in the traditional language of Christianity, Orthodoxy, Schism, or heresy.For the first time, however, among the revolutionary ideologies of America and France, Christianity was no longer relevant to European history. The language, symbols, and costumes of 1789 were purely alien to Christianity, except for the attempt by certain nostalgic populace to create, among the dead heroes of the sans-culottes, a cult akin to the saints and martyrs of old.In fact, the ideology of the revolution was Romanesque.At the same time, the secularism of the revolution signaled the remarkable political hegemony of the liberal middle class, which imposed its characteristic ideological forms on a broader mass movement.If at all the spiritual leadership of the French Revolution came from the masses who actually launched the revolution, we cannot imagine that there were as few traces of traditionalism in the revolutionary ideology as it actually appeared (in fact, only the popular songs only occasionally borrow Catholic terminology).

The triumph of the bourgeoisie thus imbued the character of French thought with the agnostic or secular moral ideology of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and thus passed on.With a few insignificant exceptions, notably intellectuals like the Saint-Simonians, or retro-Christian communists like the tailor Weitling (1808–1871), the emerging working-class and socialist movements of the nineteenth century , whose ideology was secularist from the start.Paine's ideas embodied the radical democratic aspirations of small artisans and poor artisans, and his masterpiece "Rights of Man" (1791) catapulted him to fame, while his popular language "The Age of Reason" (The Age of Reason) Age Reason, 1794), which also made him famous, was the first to show that the Bible is not the language of God. Mechanism in the 1820s inherited not only Owen's analysis of capitalism but also his unbelief.Long after the collapse of Owenism, their "Schools of Science" were still spreading rationalist propaganda in the cities.Since ancient times, there has been no shortage of socialists who believe in religion, and a large number of people believe in both religion and socialism.But the dominant ideology of modern labor and socialist movements is, as it claims to be, based on eighteenth-century rationalism.

Even more surprising, as we have seen, is the overwhelming majority of the masses that remain religious.When the natural revolutionary idiom is a language of rebellion (social heresy, millennialism, etc.), the Bible becomes a highly inflammatory document.But the secularism that prevailed in the emerging labor and socialist movements was based on an equally fresh and more fundamental fact: the religious indifference of the emerging proletariat.By modern standards, the working class and urban masses who grew up during the Industrial Revolution were undoubtedly strongly influenced by religion.But their alienation, ignorance, and indifference to organized religion were unprecedented by the standards of the first half of the nineteenth century.Any observer of any political leaning will agree with this. The census of religion in England in 1851 also bears this out, though at the time it was a source of great horror.Much of the estrangement of the masses from religion is attributable to the complete inability of the traditional state church to grasp various new groups (big cities and new industrial settlements) and the proletariat, both of which are quite alien in their practice and experience of.By 1851, only 34% of Sheffield residents had churches, in Liverpool and Manchester, only 31.2% of residents had churches, and in Birmingham, only 29%.The difficulty for a rural parish priest is that he does not know how to save an industrial town, or play the role of soul guide in an urban slum.

The Church of the State thus ignored these new communities and classes, leaving them almost entirely (especially in Catholic and Lutheran countries) to the secular faith of the nascent labor movement, which at the close of the nineteenth century finally conquered the them.In any case, Protestantism has generally been more successful in countries where denominations have become an established phenomenon, such as England.Yet there is ample evidence that even small sects thrived in those social settings closest to the traditional small town or village, such as among farm laborers, miners, and fishermen.But among the industrial working class, the religious sects have always occupied a minority position.The working class is undoubtedly less touched by organized religion than any other group of the poor in history. Thus, from the period 1789-1848, the overall trend was a strong secularization.When science ventured into the realm of evolution (see Chapter 15), it found itself in increasingly open conflict with the Bible.Knowledge of history has been applied to the study of the Bible to an unprecedented degree (especially since the Tuebingen professors began in the 1830s), and this book, inspired by God (if not written) ), it was parsed into a collection of historical documents of different periods, and had all the flaws of human documents.Lachmann's New Testament (Novun Testamentum, 1842-1852), denies that the Gospels are an eyewitness record and doubts that Jesus Christ ever attempted to found a new religion.David Strauss's controversial "Life of Jesus" (1835) removed all supernatural elements from related biographies.By 1848, educated Europe was almost ripe for Darwin's onslaught.Many regimes began to directly attack the property and judicial prerogatives of the state church and its monks, or other persons in charge of ecclesiastical rites, and increasingly powerful governments or other secular institutions gradually replaced functions mainly performed by religious institutions (especially [in Roman Catholic countries ] are education and social welfare), all of which make this trend even more surging.Between 1789 and 1848, from Naples to Nicaragua, monasteries were dissolved and properties sold.The white race, who was subjugating other peoples outside of Europe, would naturally launch a direct attack on the religion of his subjects or victims.For example, British officials stationed in India in the 1830s ordered the ban on the traditional custom of burning widows (suttee).Some of these attacks are motivated by anti-superstition and belief in enlightenment, while others are simply ignorant of how their measures will affect the victims.