Earthly Powers and Political Religions

Frankly, I'm beginning to regret having styled myself as a "neo-Manachaean" in my recent series of posts culminating in Confessions of a Neo-Manichaean, Part V.

The reason, in part, is that I have begun reading Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War by Michael Burleigh. The British historian traces the development of "political religion" — aka "secular" or "civil" religion, meaning "the political use of religious belief" (p. 93) — in Europe from the Enlightenment through World War I.

Beginning with the French Revolution — if not with the Puritans of England a century or so before — Christianity morphed into often lethal forms in service to earthly political ends. In France, the original 1789 revolution, relatively soft and moderate in comparison to what soon ensued, quickly radicalized into an instrument of death-by-guillotine at the hands of the Jacobins, famous for their Reign of Terror.

Burleigh anatomizes the Jacobins' "underlying pathologies" in a section titled "Goodness and Virtue," in his "Puritans Thinking They Are Spartans" chapter (pp. 88-95). The Jacobins were anything but rabble, writes Burleigh. They were well-to-do professionals, many of them lawyers. As many as six percent were priests. They met openly in thousands of local clubs during their infamous reign over France, which ended in 1794. The watchwords at their gatherings were supposedly reason and civility; yet, as Burleigh details, "a tearful sentimentalism" like as not would prevail "whenever the People were invoked."


Their besottedness with "the People" as a disembodied, bloodless concept in turn reflected the Jacobins' "fateful infatuation with an abstract ought-world to which mere human beings in all their complexity necessarily failed to conform." Thus was justified the reign's "moral imperialism" and "terroristic violence," wherein "any form of dissent or opposition, real or imagined, bore the taint of moral leprosy, something to be amputated or excised from an otherwise healthy body."

The object of the revolution, in Jacobin eyes, was a "new political religion" which would foster "a regenerated people" — wherein a "new man" would supplant the old, corrupted sort. Regeneration was (and remains) a motif associated with traditional Christianity, and one of Burleigh's main points is that political religion is often a sort of Christianity-sans-God.

In revolutionary France, Burleigh indicates, many of the intellectuals were heirs of philosophes such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montaigne whose religious positions were typically Deist, if not outright atheist. Others continued to put faith in God, though not always in Church. But what kind of God?


The God of the French Revolution was, per Burleigh, a deity whose Providence could allow one Geffroy, a "local locksmith and father of three" who survived in hospital after taking a random bullet in a melee after a failed assassination attempt on Robespierre and other Jacobin notables, to be cast instead as "a Christ-like figure at what was tantamount to a revolutionary Day of Judgement in which the righteous virtuous would be separated from the incorrigibly corrupt ... ."

This "Manichaean view of the world," writes Burleigh, was one of "Openness versus Hypocrisy, Virtue versus Vice, Good versus Evil, Light versus Darkness" — and it was "heavily indebted to monotheistic religion."


I would prefer to call it, in a phrase I borrow from literary critics, a "demonic parody" of Christianity. As I have discussed in earlier posts (see, for instance, Rededication: To Solidarity, Above All), Albert Nolan, a provincial for the South African Province of the Dominicans, wrote in his book Jesus before Christianity about how Christ conspicuously sat down to dinner with lepers and other outcasts. Per the interpretation of Jewish law that prevailed in his time, their sickness was taken as a sign that God found them (to borrow a phrase) "incorrigibly corrupt." They were to be shunned lest, in Yahweh's eyes, they infect all Israel.

But Jesus taught and showed by living example that there is no such thing as a moral leper.


The political religions Burleigh talks about hence would seem to be ugly burlesques of true Christianity. Where Christianity celebrates life, they wield death.

So, if a "Manichaean" outlook is in fact the wellspring of such demonic parodies and ugly burlesques, as modern usage à la Burleigh indicates, I hereby recant. I am no neo-Manichaean after all. In truth, by calling myself that I meant to associate myself with a diametrically opposite view, one in which pure good and pure evil are so mixed in every creature that "mere human beings in all their complexity" lack the capacity for self-regeneration via worldly institutions. That's why it has taken the death on a cross of a God-man who is himself without sin to accomplish our regeneration.