The Transformation of the World (189 page)

This radical assault on organized religion was a French peculiarity, whose long-term consequence was the ending of the Catholic monopoly. Earlier, the North American revolutionaries had freed themselves from the supremacy of the Anglican state church, but had not initiated anything like the French “dechristianization” policy or the violent iconoclasm associated with Robespierre's sponsorship in 1793 of the Cult of the Supreme Being. Church representatives were not subject to physical repression in the United States; antichurch sentiment or state-supported atheism was not a legacy of the Atlantic revolution as a
whole. Anyway, during his period as first consul, Bonaparte already showed himself willing to neutralize a potentially dangerous enemy by striking a deal with the Holy See (Concordat of 1801) and recognizing it as a power in European diplomacy. After 1815, under the Restoration monarchy, the church regained much of its former influence, and Napoleon III, whose most loyal supporters were in the Catholic countryside, treated it with respect. Only under the Third Republic did a thoroughly secular separation between church and state become a basic feature of French politics, although it was a far cry from any state-imposed atheism. The radical character of the French handling of organized religion in the 1790s looked ahead rather to the twentieth century, where it reappeared in more violent forms in the Soviet Union, in revolutionary Mexico (refigured there in the vehemently anticlerical 1870s), and in the later Communist dictatorships. No other part of the nineteenth-century world saw a comparable offensive against organized religion. No state declared itself to be atheist.

Tolerance

The Atlantic revolution left behind a less spectacular but continuing legacy in the shape of religious tolerance.
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The basic idea had originated in Europe during the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; since Pierre Bayle and John Locke, it had been one of the pillars of Enlightenment thought, soon coming to define not only relations among religions in Europe but also the equal rights of others outside the West.
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In 1791 the principle that the state should not dictate the private beliefs of its citizens or favor one religion over others was simultaneously established in France (Constitution of September 3) and the United States (First Amendment to the Constitution). The United States therefore guaranteed religious freedom from its earliest days, even if being a Protestant long remained advantageous for a career in politics.
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In Britain it took several more decades before Catholics (1829) and Jews (1846/58) won full civil equality, while on the Continent freedom of religion and freedom of the press were main planks in liberal programs. For Jews in Germany, the first key dates were 1862 in Baden and 1869 in the North German League. In 1905 the Tsarist Empire became the last major country in Europe to accept religious toleration, issuing an edict that promised “freedom of conscience.” Those who profited most from this were not the Jews but Muslims and sectarian offshoots of the Russian Orthodox Church. In fact, Catherine II had granted legal security to Islam back in 1773—the first step in a retreat from state persecution.

The fact that religious tolerance was first codified in the countries of “applied Enlightenment” (the United States and France), and that this set in motion a process that culminated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, does not mean that it was an unknown practice in other parts of the world. In the early modern period, Europe's bitter religious wars and antagonisms were rather an exception to the rule of peaceful religious pluralism. In
the multinational empires ruled by Muslim dynasties, aggressive Islamicization would not have been practicable; it would also have contradicted old political customs. The Prophet Muhammad himself reached various agreements with “People of the Book” in the Arabian Peninsula, and the Ottomans granted “protection” to non-Muslim
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(chiefly Christians, Jews, and Parsis, whose economic activities were beneficial to the state) in return for tribute-like payments; Christian peasants in the Balkans were an exception, however. In the Indian Mogul Empire, a Muslim conquering dynasty ruled over a non-Muslim majority with many different religious orientations. Here raison d'état demanded a policy of toleration, such as that which was pursued with impressive effect especially in the sixteenth century. When the dynasty under Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707), the only jihadist Mogul ruler, changed course and tried to impose sharia throughout the empire, it contributed to the tensions that resulted in the collapse of Mogul rule in the early eighteenth century. In principle, however, Islam ruled out the equality of other religions with the one Truth revealed to Muhammad, the “Seal of the Prophets.” We should not idealize the religious pluralism that existed in the Islamicate empires; non-Muslims were tolerated and largely protected from persecution, but only as second-class subjects. Nevertheless, there is a striking contrast with the ruthless exclusion of religious aliens in early modern Western Europe. Around 1800, religious minorities still had an easier time in the Muslim Orient than in the Christian Occident.

In China the Manchu conquerors, whose religious background lay in North Asian shamanism, operated a finely calculated system of balances among the various schools of thought and religious currents. They showed special care in cultivating Lama Buddhism, in view of its important political role for Mongols and Tibetans. But there were major structural tensions between the Qing State and its Muslim subjects, whose position in the hierarchy of minorities deteriorated in comparison with the Ming period (1368–1644). As far as “traditional” African societies are concerned, their characteristic hospitality was recognizable also in an openness to outside religious influences, which greatly facilitated missionary work for Islam and Christianity in the nineteenth century.
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Since the idea of religious toleration is linked to the modern constitutional state, it cannot be applied sensu stricto to all these cases. But religious coercion was not the normal practice in non-Western societies before they were exposed to the influence of European liberalism. In the early modern period, which in terms of religious policies began with the compulsory baptism or expulsion of Jews (1492) and Muslims (1502) by the Crown of Castile, Europe's record in accepting religious diversity shows a deficit in comparison with the rest of the world. And once liberalism got into power, established churches might be in for a hard time—and not just in Europe. “Power,” says John Lynch in view of the period 1870 to 1930, “could change Latin American liberals into monsters of illiberalism.”
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2 Secularization

Dechristianization in Europe?

The nineteenth century has often been viewed as the age of “secularization.”
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Until the middle of the nineteenth century, this word was understood to refer to the transfer of church lands to lay owners. Then it acquired a new meaning: the decline of religious influence over human thought, the organization of society, and government policies. To simplify somewhat, the issue in the case of Europe has been to plot the graph of dechristianization that began with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and has continued to this day. Here, historians have come to very different conclusions, irrespective of what they understand by “religion.” Hugh McLeod, a British specialist in comparative religion, identifies six distinct areas of secularization: (1) personal faith, (2) participation in religious practices, (3) the role of religion in public institutions, (4) the significance of religion in public opinion and the media, (5) the contribution of religion to individual and collective identity-formation, and (6) the link between religion and popular beliefs and mass culture. For Western Europe between 1848 and 1914, his conclusions are as follows. In the first two respects, secularization was most evident in France, Germany, and England. The share of the population who regularly attended religious services and took part in communion showed a considerable decline. This cannot be quantified, but a jigsaw of discrete observations yields that overall impression. At the same time, there was a clear rise in the share of the total population (not only small intellectual circles) who expressed personal indifference, aversion, or hostility to the Christian faith. This trend was essentially the same in all three countries.

The differences were greater with regard to the significance of religion in public life. State and church were most clearly separated in France, especially from the 1880s on, and it was there, too, that Catholics had great success in building a “counterworld” out of their own organizations. Victorian England witnessed what might be called a creeping secularization, but no explicit ideology corresponded to it. Officially the country claimed to be devout and churchgoing. The much noted piety of William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98), who now and then felt divine inspiration for his political decisions, stood in sharp contrast to the religious indifference of another prime minister, Lord Palmerston (1784–1865), from a previous generation. In Germany, amid continuing opposition between Protestants and Catholics, the churches were well funded and could secure for themselves an unusually large role in education and social welfare.
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Everywhere, religious orientations had by far their deepest roots in popular culture. Even those who did not go to church regularly or consider themselves part of the faithful clung to elements of a religious worldview, recognized and used religious symbols, observed the calendar of feast days, and sought help from religion in times of crisis.

Nationalism and socialism also offered all-embracing worldviews, but they were never able to supplant Christianity. Denominational subcultures proved more elastic than ever before in the three countries—even more so in the Netherlands—and had political parties attached to them (though not in Britain). The great majority of people in Europe (including the Jewish communities) held on to at least some outward religious forms.
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The absorptive capacity of official Christianity was so great that even an Enlightenment agnostic like Charles Darwin was buried in a state funeral at Westminster Abbey. It is true, though, that the Archbishop of Canterbury sent his apologies.
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Symbolism and Law

Did this restrained secularization of Western Europe reflect a general trend? Little is known about the evolution of individual belief in many parts of the world. Where religious law and informal controls made participation in religious community life more or less obligatory, and where religiosity was expressed less in conventional acts of worship than in relations between individual masters and pupils, attendance at services is no longer a significant measure. On the other hand, we have estimates for the size of the monastic population. In 1750 Catholic Europe, from Portugal to Poland, had the highest figures since the Reformation: 200,000 monks and 150,000 nuns, or just under 0.3 percent of the total population of Europe west of Russia.
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The dimensions were very different in Buddhist countries, the second great area of monastic culture. In Burma the number of monks seems to have remained constant throughout the century, or even to have grown: it represented 2.5 percent of the male population in 1901.
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Tens of thousands of men in saffron robes, recruited from every section of the population and by no means divorced from worldly life, formed an important cement of Burmese society. In Tibet around 1800, there are said to have been 760,000 monastery residents—a quite staggering figure, twice as high as in the whole of Europe before the French Revolution.
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In 1900 too, the country at the roof of the world was a monastery-dominated theocracy with the Dalai Lama as its spiritual and political leader—not at all peaceful, though, but in a constant state of unrest as various sects and monasteries fought it out with one another. Monastic rule was not altogether peculiar to the Orient, for at the same time, almost until the end of the colonial period, Spanish monks constituted the strongest political force in the Philippines; the independence revolution of 1896–98 was directed mainly against their unpopular ascendancy. Even in the case of Tibet, however, it is possible to speak of a kind of secularization. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama (called the “Great Thirteenth” in Tibet, r. 1894–1935), far from being an unworldly dreamer, was a priest-king who saw early on the opportunity for Tibet to develop into a nation-state and, with Britain's support (but without its direct colonial input), devised plans to lead his country out of the Chinese sphere of influence into an independent modernity.
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Insofar as secularization means the withdrawal of religious symbols from public space, the gap between Europe and Asia remained small. So long as there were monarchies that invoked at least a minimal degree of religious sanction, state rituals continued to have a religious character. Sultan Abdülhamid II (who also bore the title of caliph) played this role with at least as much calculation as the last two tsars or Emperor Franz Joseph in Vienna. Wherever revolutions swept monarchy aside, the secularization of power also came to a conclusion. From 1912 on there was no longer an emperor in China who might have performed the rites at the Temple of Heaven, and after the end of the sultanate-caliphate, secular symbols of the Kemalist republic appeared in place of the religious account that the bygone dynasty used to give of itself.

The secularization issue was (and still is) posed especially where a clear separation did not exist between secular and religious law. In such conditions—Egypt is a good case in point—secularists were those who sought to wrest space for European-style legislation away from the authority of religious law (e.g., the sharia). Legal reform, pursued by indigenous intellectuals with support from the protectorate power, became the first stage in secularization of the state as a whole. It was seen as part of a comprehensive process that would transform the premodern jumble of laws and jurisdictions into an orderly modern system.
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Secularization of the state, first launched in reality with some Ottoman reforms after 1826, became a central theme in the Islamic world.
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The postimperial countries, beginning with the Turkish Republic under Kemal Atatürk, transformed themselves in the twentieth century overwhelmingly into secular orders—a process whose reversibility would be dramatically demonstrated in 1979 with Khomeini's revolution in Iran.