Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (30 page)

A Cult of Reason was created in place of Christianity (refer to the next section for more information).

Divorce was legalized, and all birth and death records became the property and purview of the state.

Streets and towns with religious names were given secular names. Saint-Denis became Franciade, for example, and Saint-Amand-Montrond became Libreval.

Like the crackdown against the Mexican Catholic Church in the 1920s (refer to
Chapter 8
), the dechristianizing of France had more to do with power and privilege than with beliefs. And like many such rebellions, both included actions that most historians now agree were excessive and punitive — not to mention a contradiction of the principles of liberty, tolerance, and freedom they claimed to espouse. Napoleon reversed the process in 1801, and the Church regained most of its lost status and privileges.

Creating a Cult of Reason

The Cult of Reason was an attempt to organize a civic religion without gods to replace Christianity during the French Revolution. Centered on humanity rather than divinity, the goal of the cult was the perfection of mankind through the pursuit of truth and freedom.

Like most radical social experiments, it was interesting and more than a little weird. Christian rituals were replaced with secular ones, which sometimes worked really well and sometimes . . . just didn’t. Reason was semi-personified as a being to be celebrated. Cathedrals were reconsecrated to Reason, and elaborate ceremonies were created to refocus attention away from religious ideas and toward the advancement and perfection of the human race.

One of the leaders of the cult was Joseph Fouché, a military commander who (among other things) ordered that all cemeteries would have only one inscription on the gates: “Death is an eternal sleep.” A new national holiday called the Festival of Reason was briefly instituted.

Some atheists today may think of this kind of secular takeover of the culture as a dream come true. But I think most atheists see this cultural bulldozer for what it is — a violation of the rights and freedoms we cherish most. You can’t complain about the church telling people there’s only one way to think, then turn around and tell people there’s only one way to think. If you’re going to build a revolution around values like freedom and tolerance, you probably ought to exhibit them.

Back to the future: The Cult of the Supreme Being

The Cult of Reason lasted only about 18 months before the new dictator Robespierre denounced it, sent its leaders to the guillotine, and replaced it with a new official religion of the French Republic: the Cult of the Supreme Being. The Festival of the Supreme Being replaced the Festival of Reason in every city across France. Robespierre presided over the massive event in Paris. An enormous artificial mountain was built for the occasion. It must have been quite a show.

Just as the reason cult had replaced Catholicism, this new cult replaced a focus on reason with a belief in a living Creator God and the immortality of the human soul. Reason was now considered only a means to the ultimate end — public virtue. Like Voltaire and Kant before him, Robespierre said that belief in God was necessary for moral behavior and virtue — a “constant reminder of justice” that was essential to a civil society.

After Robespierre established his new religion to promote and maintain virtue, he turned his attention back to his Reign of Terror, in which 40,000 people were executed.

Checking In on the US Founding Fathers

Many Christian commentators today claim that the United States is a Christian nation. The Founding Fathers would probably be shocked by this notion because they were plenty clear that it wasn’t anything of the sort. They’d seen what happened to Europe when religions insisted on their way — 150 years of continuous war. Mother England herself had gone through a century of rolling heads as the Crown passed from Catholic to Protestant to Catholic to Protestant to Catholic to Protestant in little more than a century. You can see why there’d be very little interest in establishing a state religion in any way, shape, or form.

When it came to religious identity, the founders themselves were quite a mixed bag. Among the signers of the US Constitution, for example, were

28 Anglicans

8 Presbyterians

7 Congregationalists

6 geese a-laying

2 Dutch Reformed