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I would question whether there's really a relevant distinction. The peasants in the Vendée who revolted against the republican government certainly seemed to have a very deep personal affection for their king and their Christ.
They were mostly not Christians, but they were also mostly not atheists. Robespierre was opposed to atheism. The 'cult of reason' never really had state sponsorship and died out pretty quick.
There were so many factions that referring to the goals of "the Revolution" is almost meaningless. People couldn't agree what "the Revolution" meant. It could span from people who just wanted a few constitutional guarantees from the king to people like Babeuf who were essentially proto-communists. But even the more radical Jacobins at the height of the Terror would probably sit on the conservative end of a European social democratic party today, by their political positions.
Rather than blaming the centralization of the Republic on its founders' faith in human reason, I would note that France had been centralizing her government and smashing competing power centers for centuries under the Bourbon kings. That's what absolutism was all about. The revolutionaries simply continued, and maybe expedited, a process that had been ongoing for a long time. IMO centralization of government is inevitable in an industrializing world.
I think you significantly underrate the extent to which the ideals of social equality and universal brotherhood are based on Christianity. Most of the stuff conservative Christians like, property, patriarchy, patriotism, tradition, family, virtue, sexual continence, aren't actually Christian. That's not to say they're anti-Christian (though I would argue some of them might be), but that none of those values owe anything to Christianity. They are identified with Christianity in the present day, because western society was Christian for so long, to the extent that a lot of leftists end up agreeing and saying, "and that's a bad thing!" and then wrongly lionizing pre-Christian pagan societies as bastions of tolerance and libertinism. But those values existed long before Christianity, and continued to exist in societies that never Christianized. On the other hand, the ideas that all men are brothers, or that everyone has something fundamental in them that makes them equal by virtue of being human, or that there is virtue in being the oppressed rather than the oppressor, are all Christian in origin. That's not to say that Christianity must have necessarily produced the enlightenment, but the enlightenment would certainly have never existed without Christianity. A reactionary Christian may say that Jesus didn't mean social equality, or he didn't mean we all have to be brothers this side of heaven, but the surest way for a reactionary to make certain the revolution never rears its ugly head again is to junk the cross. Otherwise it's always going to be just a matter of time before someone comes along and interprets--wrongly or otherwise--the sermon on the mount to mean "to each according to his need" all over again.
I've seen the argument made (though I don't recall where) that one of the central tensions when thinking about Christianity is that much of the writings about Jesus in the Gospels, and the immediate social movement around Jesus, were expecting an immediate end of the world and Apocalypse, and thus insist on a kind of intense radicalism that is wholly unsustainable in any kind of longer lived community. And then, even by the time of Paul, the fact that the imminent Apocalypse hasn't shown up yet starts being more and more disruptive to making a church with any kind of continuity, and so much of the work of Paul was to reformulate Christianity into a faith that could grow and maintain its own communities through time and space, which required dampening a lot of the especially radical Christian tendencies and shifting them from a material interpretation towards a more spiritual one.
At least by this kind of argument, this is why, when Christian sects show up insisting on returning to the roots of Christianity and ditching everything other than the actual words and actions of Christ, they generally end up burning out in a decade or two at best, or else they age past their radical phase and revert to more sustainable, less radical social forms.
But if you're sympathetic to this kind of radicalism, you end up having to say, for example, that the writings of Paul (which is to say, a large chunk of the New Testament) aren't really Christian. Which some people kind of implicitly do! But certainly for a lot of people, a definition of Christianity probably ought to include the writings of Paul and all the early church traditions.
And then someone else might very well argue that the tension between the unwavering apocalyptic, unsustainable idealism of Christ, and the "how do we live in the world and keep this ship afloat through time and space" concerns of Paul and the early church is itself, in fact, at the very core of Christianity. The pulls of both idealism and pragmatism / sustainability both serve extremely important functions in the world, with different people needing to steer towards one or the other at different times and places.
I think this is pretty unambiguously true, but it includes Paul, who apparently expected the end to come very shortly, and said things like:
He also suggested people not even get married, and only grudgingly sanctioned marriage as a necessary evil to prevent "burning with lust," hardly conducive to family formation.
He may or may not have mellowed out later, depending on whether you believe all of the letters attributed to him were written by him.
I do agree this is a fundamental problem at the heart of Christianity though. It is a faith that was never. meant to be a civilizational faith which has been jury-rigged into just that. All it really takes is for someone to look around at all the kings and princes, and then look at the New Testament, and say, "hey, wait a minute, this isn't what Jesus taught!"
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The relevant distinction is that they made the overthrow of the Church an explicit policy goal, and won on popular acclaim. Sure, the peasants in the Vendée didn't agree, but they weren't really part of the revolution, were they?
Clearly "Militant Atheists" is the wrong term.
via wikipedia:
...Did any of the Revolutionaries approve of a religion or a system of faith that they did not themselves personally invent, based on their revolutionary principles, purely as an expression of their understanding of human reason?
Meanwhile, none of this would have been within the Overton window of the American public. To my knowledge, the American revolution spawned zero novel state religions, reason-based or otherwise.
I disagree. We can look at which factions won, and we can look at which arguments were decisive. Sure, lots of Revolutionaries wanted different things. Only a few revolutionaries got what they wanted, and they won based on a narrow set of arguments. Therein lies the true nature of the revolution, I argue.
It was a Revolution, though. France might have been centralizing power for hundreds of years, but they had kings for hundreds of years too. The revolutionaries ditched the crown and ran away with the power-centralization, and doing so was an affirmative choice, made for ideological reasons. Faced with the task of rewriting their social structure from scratch, the French deliberately chose to centralize all power and remove every check on that power's exercise. They deliberately and consciously embraced the mob.
And yet, the Americans a mere 13 years earlier did the exact opposite, and restrained that tendency better than most other places in the world. Why?
property, patriotism, and depending on definitions patriarchy I'll grant you unequivocally. Those aren't Christian in any way. Tradition, Family, Virtue, and Sexual Continence aren't Christian in the sense that other cultures have had other expressions of these ideas without any influence from Christianity. They are Christian in the sense that the western world was decisively shaped by the Christian versions of these ideas.
This seems... unlikely to me. Doesn't Buddhism have analogues to all of those concepts, for example?
It's entirely possible that this is true, but to my mind the question is not whether the Enlightenment was possible without Christianity, but rather whether the Enlightenment necessarily rejects Christianity. I think it does, and I think that is another reason why the French Revolution was the true offspring of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, properly understood, is flatly incompatible with Christianity. Further, while you may be correct that Christianity is a perpetual source of leveling arguments, I disagree that it is a perpetual source of the Enlightenment specifically. Christianity ruled a lot of terrain for a very long time, and over that time there were many abortive leveling revolutions, just as there have been leveling revolutions in previous societies far back into antiquity. There has only been one Enlightenment, because the idea of leveling is not, at the end of the day, the core concept that makes it what it is. The core of the Enlightenment is not "things should be more equal". The core is "We know how to solve all our problems." that claim, and that claim made credible by a conflux of unique historical forces, is why the Enlightenment could succeed where previous movements failed.
The central message of Buddhism is not "every man for himself", as the quote goes, but neither is it "every man a brother
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If the premise is that industrialisation causes this trend, then a country with 1/10th the population spread out over a much wider area not being as far along the path as one of the most populous and industrialised countries in Europe is no contradiction.
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