Secularism and Reconciliation, Part One

‘. . . He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy, blameless, and beyond reproach.’ (Colossians 1:21)

A good working definition of secularism is this-secularism is a political and social philosophy devoid of any faith or worship. In other words, the secularist (from the Latin word secularum, of a generation, belonging to an age) denies the existence of God, or at the very least, sees no place for God in the public arena of ideas. The secularist views God as either non-existent or irrelevant.

On April 30, 1789, newly elected and first President of the United States of America, George Washington, following the Colonialists’ victory at Yorktown several years earlier, gave his inaugural address at the new Federal Building in New York City. In the first paragraph Washington invoked God’s blessing on our nation, ‘making fervent supplication to the Almighty.’ At the same time, however, winds of a new kind of revolution, one which the world would face many more times in the next two hundred years, was gaining steam in France. When Louis XVI became King of France in 1774 he inherited a flawed government. At the time, there existed, three blatantly, highly combustible ingredients, waiting for the right moment to burst into a conflagration. First, there was corruption in government, more specifically the nobility. France was a monarchy with two hundred thousand nobles who whiled away their time in Versailles with parties, drunkenness, lethargy, and aimlessness. Louis XIV had plunged his nation into ruinous debt by thirty years of war in Europe. Inadequate tax revenue trickled into government coffers because the nobility paid no taxes on their vast land holdings and profits. Second, there was oppression of the poor. A heavy burden of taxes fell on the poor. Since they had no advocate before the throne of France, the king continued to tax the poor into poverty and oblivion. And third, there was the impotence of the Roman Catholic Church. The church held one fifth of all the land in France and she also paid no taxes on her wealth. While there were certainly some godly priests, by and large the Roman Catholic church was a robber’s den of iniquity. Things may have remained as they were for many years if it had not been for the fire which ignited the horror of the French Revolution. That fire was the Age of Reason, the French Enlightenment. Beginning with Descartes who famously stated, ‘Cogito, ergo sum,’ ‘I think, therefore I am,’ intellectuals in France and the rest of Europe began to jettison the authority of Holy Scripture. Until that time, people generally accepted the authority of the Bible as the truth on which they and their people should live. But secularism, the Age of Reason, began to question Scripture. Man became the measure of all things. He could think for himself. He did not need a church, priest, or preacher to tell him how to live. Denis Diderot and his Encyclopedia, a magazine to which the atheistic intellectuals of the day regularly contributed, began in 1750 to make significant inroads into the psyche of France. Major contributors to the Encyclopedia included Jean Jacques Rousseau (born in Geneva to Calvinist parents), Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade (a very sexually perverse man who believed that since there is no god, then there is no law, and if there is no law, then man can do totally as he pleases, including all manner of sado masochism). The church had no answer for this new atheism.

So the three highly combustible ingredients-corruption in government, oppression of the poor, and impotence in the church-were ignited by the Age of Reason. But why? What made France so ripe for a godless, violent revolution? In 1536, twenty-seven year old John Calvin, who had just completed his first edition of The Institutes of the Christian Religion¹, was in Geneva and William Farel challenged him to stay and preach the gospel. Calvin finally agreed, but after two years, he was no longer welcome and fled to Strasbourg and pastored a church there of French speaking refugees. Upon his return to Geneva in 1540, Calvin picked up his preaching and writing load. He remained there until his death in May, 1564. While Calvin was in Geneva, his heart, nonetheless, was in his native France. He had a great burden to see the Reformation take hold in his country. He regularly trained and sent young French pastors across the Alps into France, knowing that many of them would be killed for their faithful preaching of the gospel. In 1555, God began a mighty work in France. At the time there were only three Protestant churches there. Within seven years there was over 2100 Protestant churches with at least ten percent of the populace being Protestant believers.² They were called Huguenots.

Opposition from the Roman Catholic church and nobility rose against the Huguenots who were rightly seeking their own civil rights. Until then they were marginalized as heretics. The Huguenots, mainly in the south of France, were the heart and soul of the nation. They were composed largely of shop keepers, business owners, artisans, physicians, university professors, and lawyers. As their power grew they increasingly upset the status quo in France. In August, 1572, at the marriage of King Charles IX’s daughter to Protestant Henry III of Navarre, an attempted assassination of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, a Huguenot leader, took place. Most historians in the know believe Charles’s mother, Catherine de Medici, called for the murder of de Coligny as well as thousands of other Huguenots. The killing began at the time of the celebration of St. Bartholomew’s Day in Paris; and over several weeks somewhere between 5000 and 20,000 Huguenots were murdered throughout France.

Tensions continued to rise, unabated, until 1598 when the King of France agreed to the Edict of Nantes, a move toward religious toleration, giving the Huguenots peace and credibility in France. However, in 1685 the revocation of the Edict of Nantes occurred, removing the status of religious toleration and acceptance for the Huguenots. Many of these God-fearing, Protestants fled France for their lives, settling in far off places like Charleston, South Carolina, St. Mary’s, Georgia, and Cape Town, South Africa. France has never recovered from this atrocity. The middle class was largely expunged from the nation of France.

Into this religious vacuum came the Age of Reason and the French Enlightenment. So by the time of George Washington’s inauguration in New York City, the dominoes began to fall in quick succession in Paris and Versailles. I will have far more to say about this next week, but for now remember this – ideas always have consequences. Religion matters, for good or for ill.