To be sure, not all forms of secularism tend toward violence. Distinctions are necessary. But at least two kinds have, and it is worth pondering why. To do so, one must return to the ideological ferment of the nineteenth century. In the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (1789–1815), debates about the appropriate relationship between religion and government in a modern polity became pointed and acrimonious across Europe and in the Americas. Confronted by a partially restored Ancien Régime after 1815 eager to return to the throne and altar model in medieval fashion, proponents of modernity theorized three principal ways to resolve the religio-political dilemma of their age—what we might think of as passive secularism, combative secularism, and eliminationist secularism. In the twentieth century, borne by the influence of Western ideas and institutions, these solutions went global.
While citizens of the United States might not recognize a term like passive secularism, they know from experience the political-religious arrangements it describes, for, broadly speaking, this is the solution offered by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment (1791): the national government should neither establish a religion nor meddle with citizens’ free exercise of their faith. Briefly, before the French Revolution’s radical turn, something comparable held sway in France, and the Belgian Constitution of 1831 exemplifies it in spades. In the nineteenth century, liberal thinkers such as Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Lord Acton endorsed versions of passive secularism and its more familiar cognates: freedom of conscience or freedom of religion. The roots of passive secularism would return one to figures such as John Locke, especially his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), written as a pragmatic solution to the religio-political turpitude that convulsed Britain in the seventeenth century. But it arguably possesses much deeper roots in early Christian thought, as the church historian Robert Wilken perceptively argues in his book, Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom (2019). In the twentieth century, the UN’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1948) and Vatican II’s Dignitatis humanae or Declaration on Religious Freedom (1965) are instances of passive secularism. While realities do not always live up to ideals, this form of secularism, when adopted in actual states, has been decidedly less a concern for violence than the other two. Too often, though, Westerners assume this is the only form of modern secularism when in fact this is patently not the case, particularly when one adopts a broader historical and global outlook.
Combative secularism, more problematically, descends from the radical stages of the French Revolution after 1792. At this time, the anticlerical sentiment of the French Enlightenment typified in the philosophe Voltaire’s pet phrase écrasez l’infâme—crush the loathsome thing, i.e., the Catholic Church—gained an outlet for political expression. This resulted in extensive measures of de-Christianization: the shuttering and destruction of churches and monasteries, erasure of the Christian calendar, rampant iconoclasm, guillotining of many clergy, and a genocidal response to Catholic opposition to revolutionary excesses in the Vendée region of Western France. Often if not always tempering its early capacity for violence, this form of secularism—tagged later as laïcité (secularism, laicism)—grew apace throughout the nineteenth century, coming to expression in the European-wide revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and it found a congenial political home in the anticlerical polices of the French Third Republic (1871-1940).
In the late nineteenth century, this version of secularism derived major intellectual support from the positivist August Comte’s theory of stadial civilizational development, which posited theological and then philosophical stages of human history inexorably giving way to a purely “positivist” one—an age of science and strictly immanent conceptions of well-being. The Third-Republic politician Léon Gambetta exemplified combative secularism, sloganeering le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi! (clericalism, that’s the enemy!) throughout much of his career. For Gambetta and other committed anticlericals (within and beyond France), the church assumed the role of a “mythic enemy,” the antithesis of Revolution, reason, and progress, according to the scholar Joseph Moody: “the function of the myth . . . simplified beliefs [and] gave a single satisfactory object to passions that otherwise would be tempered by contradictory data.” Such assertive laïcité informed the French Law of the Separation of Church and State (1905), which fractured French society and effectively crushed the Catholic Church’s role in public life. The outcome in France invited imitation from other republican-anticlerical polities. In the twentieth century, revolutionary Mexico, republican Spain, and post-Ottoman Turkey embraced and adapted versions of combative secularism, ratcheting up its anticlerical hostility and capacity for violence.
Finally, eliminationist secularism was a solution shaped by Europe’s Far Left—by Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Pierre Proudhon, and Mikhail Bakunin, among others. “The first duty of a free and intelligent mind,” Proudhon wrote, “is to chase the idea of God out of his mind incessantly.” Despite the well-known phrase of religion serving as “the opiate of the masses,” Marx wrote little on religion per se, concentrating on political and economic matters. But its place in his thought is crucial and influential. In brief, Marx felt that religious belief was a species of false consciousness, a compensatory delusion resting on unjust social conditions and a major source of human alienation. Once the proletarian revolution overcame these conditions, religion would simply be eliminated, becoming a curious relic of humanity’s pre-socialist past. Implied in this view, however, are potentially major problems for a Marxist regime. What if religion fails to follow its Marxist script and wither away? This reality confronted many socialist regimes in the twentieth century: the persistence of religion became therefore a major embarrassment, a worrisome sign of the failure of theory, not to mention a rival source of moral judgment and a breeding ground for political dissent. To save appearances, socialist regimes resorted to extensive measures in the Soviet era to repress, persecute, and/or control religious elements in society. What Lenin and Stalin began in the 1920s and 1930s, figures such as China’s Mao Zedong and Albania’s Enver Hoxha, among others, continued during the Cold War.
Despite their differences, both combative secularism and eliminationist secularism descend from the Enlightenment’s progressive wing—what the intellectual historian Jonathan Israel has influentially called the Radical Enlightenment. They stem from the belief that secular reason should everywhere supplant tradition and “superstition” and that an individual or group’s religious convictions ought to take a back seat to collective immanent social progress. Surveying the Communist onslaught against religious communities in the twentieth century inclines one to understand not only Voltaire’s écrasez l’infâme but also the philosophe Diderot’s well-known quip that “men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest” not as instances of rhetorical excess, but as prescriptive desiderata. As the philosopher and dissident from Communist Poland Leszek Kolakowski once wrote: “The rationalism, contempt for tradition, and hatred of the mythological layer of culture to which the Enlightenment gave birth developed, under Communism, into the brutal persecution of religion, but also into the principle that human beings are expendable: that individual lives count only as instruments of the ‘greater whole’ or the ‘higher cause,’ i.e., the state, for no rational grounds exist for attributing to them any special, non-instrumental status.” The historical record lends credence to Kolakowski’s judgment.
Finally, both combative secularism and eliminationist secularism have abetted violence not only by what secularist regimes have afflicted on their own populations, but by the forms of zealous backlash that they have often inspired by their intrusive overreach. While rank-and-file believers have often sympathized with the political objectives promoted by modernizing secularist regimes (equality, literacy, redistribution of wealth), they have often found themselves driven into the arms of the regimes’ adversaries by their disagreement over the harsh treatment of the religious sector of society or by the fact that a state-imposed secularism did not accompany genuine democratization and freedom, as was often promised. Zealous (political) secularism, in other words, has ironically sometimes begotten a zealous (religious or religiopolitical) counter-reaction, and thus the former deserves at least an honorable mention in the causal chain leading to the latter.
