The Fast Track to a Secular Society: A Petty and Oppressive State Religion

There have been political protests in Iran over the past few days and they are not only about various grievances, of which there are many in the country, but they are also directed against the system of the “Islamic Republic.” An iconic image is of a woman who took off her obligatory chador and waved it on a stick. I love it.

I have no feel for what is going on in Iran, so my claim is not that I predicted anything on a short time scale here. But on a longer time scale, I think something like this was to be expected. In many countries, the fast track to a secular society has been to try and ram religion down people’s throats. It is like Communism lost the mojo it initially had. Even if people go along with the propaganda, they stop believing in it after some time. It becomes hollow when it is only a cover for petty tyrants. And at some point, it is over.

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What many Americans cannot fathom is why European countries are so secular by comparison. There are probably many other reasons, but a major one was the same mechanism: Religion propping up the state and the state propping up religion. The Liberal politician Eugen Richter who edited the original “Freisinnige Zeitung” warned about this in a Reichstag [national parliament] speech in 1900:

Actually I think: You should not mix politics and religion. If that happens, not only politics is spoilt, but also religion.

The remark came in the context of news that German troops had committed what would now be called war crimes during the Boxer Rebellion in China, executing prisoners of war. That caused an uproar in Germany, especially because Kaiser Wilhelm II had instigated this behavior with his infamous “Hunnenrede” (Hun speech, which earned the Germans the epithet: Huns). The Emperor had delivered the speech off the cuff when German troops embarked in Bremerhaven for China. The central part of it was:

Should you encounter the enemy, he will be defeated! No quarter will be given! Prisoners will not be taken! Whoever falls into your hands is forfeited. Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Attila made a name for themselves, one that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend, may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German.

Kaiser Wilhelm’s advisers were shocked by his words and tried to sanitize the speech for the press. However, local journalists had the original text, and it leaked out later. During the Reichstag debate, few parliamentarians were willing to stand up for the Kaiser. Those who still did made the point that it was to spread Christianity, and that’s where Eugen Richter pushed back.

The only good point here was that the Kaiser was not yet on Twitter.

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Germany was then already pretty secular. So this was not the beginning. If you read Eugen Richter, it is hard to tell whether he was religious, probably only in a very wide sense. His party colleague Rudolf Virchow, a famous pathologist, joked that he had opened thousands of corpses, but had never found a soul.

For more than half a century most people who were in the opposition in Germany were either far away from organized religion, agnostic or outright atheists. The main step in this direction came with the rule of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, the brother of Wilhelm II’s grandfather. He ascended the throne in 1840 after his father Friedrich Wilhelm III had died. The population had high hopes that the reactionary system would now be reformed.

Initially, it looked like that. The press and public opinion had been heavily repressed before, and that loosened up a bit. However, the King had no inclination to go further. Instead he brushed the demand for a constitution off that had been promised by his father during the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon and afterwards. Friedrich Wilhelm IV insisted on his divine right of kings:

Splendor and deceit I leave without envy to the so-called constitutional princes who have become a fiction, an abstract notion, for their people by a piece of paper [ie. a constitution].

Friedrich Wilhelm’s vision was shaped by his Romantic worldview and pietist take on Protestantism. His goal was to resurrect a medieval feudal order, one component of which was supposed to be a “Christian state.” This was meant as a bulwark against a revolution. But the attempt to implement his policies backfired because especially many educated people now turned against the reactionary system and religion in one sweep. The best-known examples here are perhaps Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels although at the time they played only a minor role.

Contrary to the King’s plan, he made the situation untenable, and it was only a matter of time before things would come to a head. When the Spring of Nations swept through Europe, Prussia was a pushover. Within a few days in March 1848, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV was cornered and only managed to stay afloat by far-reaching concessions, among them religious liberty. The Revolution was on the defensive already in late 1848, though, and was then surpressed in 1849.

Friedrich Wilhelm IV drew the conclusion from the events that he should now double down on his program and step up the indoctrination of the population with even more religion. This was combined with a petty suppression of any opposition and tight regulations for all aspects of social and economic life. The phase is known as the “Reaktionszeit” (time of the Reaction) in German. It lasted until 1858, when Wilhelm I, the grandfather of Wilhelm II, took over from his brother who had been incapacitated by a stroke (many people at the time thought he had gone mad).

The outcome after almost two decades of ramming religion through with the power of the state was that people who were in the opposition, probably the majority of the general population and a vast majority of the educated classes, were at least skeptical about religion if not outright hostile. That never went away and politicians on the Left, which were then the Liberals and later also the Socialists, would be little religious or irreligious from then on. The least they demanded was a clear separation of state and religion.

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You have a similar story in many other European countries. In Italy, it was the anti-Liberalism of the Catholic Church, especially under Pope Pius IX, and the experience of the Papal States that were the most backwards state in Europe apart from Russia. In Spain, the association of the Franco regime with the Catholic Church turned a major part of the population away from religion.

The forerunner here was France, where the thrust of the Revolution of 1789 was directed against the ruling two estates: the aristocracy and the Church. That had a long prehistory since the 18th century when the thinkers of the Enlightenment had attacked religion as obscurantism, a way to keep the population in the dark and away from the light of reason, but also as a prop for an unjust system.

I would think that the different development in the US has a lot to do with the separation of state and religion from the start. That kept religions from going into a short-sighted alliance with power, and so rescued them from spoiling religion by mixing it with politics. Many social conservatives nowadays don’t seem to have understood this point. I will not be surprised by how this will probably work out over time.

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A religion claims to stand for eternal values that go far beyond the vicissitudes of political life. It even has a supernatural being or many on its side. So it seems like a contradiction in terms, if it has to enlist the force of the state to ram its views down the throats of the population. This is an admission of fragility and a very pedestrian concern for temporal success. As Eugen Richter rightly says in the quote: This also spoils religion. It makes it look weak and unable to stand on its own.

In addition, mixing politics with religion means that what is supposed to be supernatural becomes very human when it is associated with day-to-day pettiness. I guess that is also what is playing out in Iran: You know that religion is just a cover for corruption and oppression. And the “saintly people” are in reality simple crooks and nosy tyrants that want to lead society by a short leash. When religion has gone this far, it is on the way out.

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And finally another word from Eugen Richter:

• Es lebe die Freiheit!
• !آزادى زنده باد
• Long live liberty!