Hope For the Religious, The Revolutionaries and The Rest of Us

Perhaps you have heard from a friend or family member that "religious faith has caused more harm than good," and so religious faith of all kinds - but usually Christianity in particular - is to be rejected.

An oft-repeated example of the harm caused by religious faith is the Spanish Inquisition(1478-1834).  From wikipedia: According to modern estimates, around 150,000 people were prosecuted for various offences during the three-century duration of the Spanish Inquisition, of whom between 3,000 and 5,000 were executed, approximately 2.7 percent of all cases.  CLICK HERE  Surely, the Spanish Inquisition is a real and concrete example of a horrible abuse of power by the institutional religion.

But it would do us all well to put that human horror in a bit of context.

As it turns out, the ten-year French Revolution (1789-1799) occurred within the time frame of the Spanish Inquisition.  Within the decade of that events is a nine-month period of the Revolution referred to as The Reign of Terror.  Consider these paragraphs by John Dickson in his book Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History

Some seventeen thousand men and women were “tried” and put to death during the Reign of Terror (September 1793 to July 1794), whether by gunshot, drowning, or the newly invented guillotine. The public drowning of about two thousand men and women in the Loire River near the town of Nantes was coldly dubbed by officials “the national bath” and “republic baptisms.” In any case, the numbers are hard to fathom. In just nine months, the newly enlightened revolutionaries executed three times as many people as the Spanish Inquisition had killed in over three centuries. 

Those in command of the Revolution—all of them Enlightenment rationalists—insisted that what they were doing was “virtuous” and that the result of this policy of terror would be a “virtuous France.” The great leader of the revolution at the time of the Terror, Maximilien Robespierre, famously argued that “Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most urgent needs.” The Terror is a disturbing reminder that neither religion nor rationalism is protective against the human propensity toward cruelty. 

Let me be clear. My point here is not that secular liberty is more dangerous than religious dogmatism. Nor am I offering a kind of whataboutism. I wish only to highlight a fascinating historical phenomenon, a paradox: while no one today rails against the “ferocity of secular liberty” or the “viciousness of the French,” a great many of us (me included) have grown up decrying the legendary brutality of the Inquisition, as if it epitomized all that is worst in humanity and all that is wrong with religion.

Dickson, John. Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History (pp. 229-230). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.  CLICK HERE for Amazon Link

It would be my conviction that the problems that we see in both religion - including Christianity - AND revolutions is not so much about religion or revolution:  The problem rests within humans themselves, whether religious humans or revolutionary humans.  And the only real hope for the religious, the revolutionaries and the rest of us is a rescue that comes from outside humanity itself.