Politics and professions

Politics and professions

Intellectual ideas are always received in a concrete context that also exerts its own influence. Political commitments proved one of the most important factors influencing people to abandon religion in the nineteenth century. Religion was frequently viewed as aligned with ruling elites and conservative politics, and therefore, conversely, irreligion became a political weapon, a way of furthering radical politics. Radicals, of course, often had good evidence from which to deduce that the Church was one of their main opponents. In 1864, for example, Pope Pius IX had issued the Syllabus of Errors, making it quite explicit that the papacy would not bend to accommodate liberal political trends. An Italian nationalist such as GIUSEPPE MAZZINI knew that anti-clercialism was essential to his struggle. Political antagonisms polarized France and Germany into conservative factions who championed the cause of the Church and radical factions who made a point of repudiating religion. In the last third of the nineteenth century, French republicans and German Social Democrats both created political cultures that exerted pressure on adherents to dispense with their religion. Many socialists came to view religious commitments as unwelcome because they produced divided loyalties.

It has already been noted that some scientists attacked religion as a way of establishing the legitimacy of their own emerging profession and its claims to speak authoritatively. Other professional identities, however, also were sometimes particularly apt to produce unbelievers—less as an occupational hazard then as a badge of membership. For example, in France both the teaching and the medical profession had high numbers of unbelievers due to efforts to carve out their professional domain in the face of opposition from the Roman Catholic Church. Being a freethinker also became a possible profession in its own right in the nineteenth century, with most countries having figures who made a vocation of speaking, writing and editing in a sceptical vein. CHARLES BRADLAUGH in England, Robert G.Ingersoll in the USA, Viktor Lennstrand in Sweden and Fernando Lozano in Spain are prominent examples of such figures. Many secularist or freethinking societies were founded in the nineteenth century. In retrospect, these often look remarkably similar to small religious denominations or sects, although in France a mass freethinking movement did flourish.

In conclusion, it is important to keep nineteenthcentury trends toward unbelief in perspective. A crisis of faith, after all, could be resolved by a reaffirmation of religious belief as well as abandonment of it, and a lost faith might later be regained. In mid- Victorian England, for example, a significant number of popular radicals who championed unbelief later came back to faith and actively and publicly defended it, including Thomas Cooper, the disseminator of Strauss’s ideas. The intellectual climate in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was also marked by a wave of erstwhile sceptics rediscovering the Church including, most symbolically, the writer

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Ernest Psichari, a grandson of Ernest Renan. In many ways, the nineteenth century must

be recognized as a remarkably religious age, especially in the British Isles and North America. Even the crises of faith themselves may be viewed as a perverse tribute to the religious intensity of the period. Nevertheless, it is beyond doubt that in the nineteenth- century West unbelief was being publicly and forcefully championed to a hitherto unprecedented extent.