Christianity on Trial

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Many in the next generation, the first of the eighteenth century, felt fewer obligations to the Christian past, so instead of trying to harmonize nature and Scripture, they simply set aside revelation. Many intellectuals claimed that the parts of the Bible that agree with reason are clearly unnecessary. The parts that contradict reason – the myths, miracles, and priestly mumbo jumbo – are simply untrue. This more militant attitude towards the faith was especially evident in France.

In the eighteenth century, Paris arose as the capital of a new cosmopolitan culture. Ideas circulated freely throughout Europe and the American colonies. To a degree unmatched before or since, the social and intellectual leaders of Europe were united in a community of thought and interests.

In Paris, a group of thinkers and writers known as the philosophes brought the Age of Reason to its climax. The philosophes were not Philosophers devoted to an academic discipline. They were men of letters, students of society who analyzed its evils and advocated reforms. They aimed to spread knowledge and emancipate the human spirit.

Curiously enough, atheism was not at all fashionable in this “polite society.” Most of the prominent infidels who ridiculed Christianity during the eighteenth century believed in a “Supreme Being” but regarded it as superstitious to hold that he interfered with the world-machine. This belief was called deism.

The God of the deists has sometimes been called the watchmaker God. God created the world as a watchmaker makes a watch, and then wound it up and let it run. Since God was a perfect “watchmaker,” there was no need for his interfering with the world later. Hence the deists rejected anything that seemed to be an interference of God with the world, such as miracles or a special revelation through the Bible.

The deists believed that their religion was the original religion of man. From it had come, by distortion, all other religions. These distortions were the work of priests who concocted the theologies, myths, and doctrines of the various religions to enhance their own power.

The most influential propagandist for deism was Voltaire (1694-1778), who personified the skepticism of the French Enlightenment. Above all others, Voltaire popularized Newton’s science, fought for personal liberty and freedom of the press, and spread the cult of reason. He turned out a prodigious number of works: histories, plays, pamphlets, essays, and novels.

In his correspondence – estimated at 10,000 letters – he wittily spread the virtues of Enlightenment and scathingly attacked the abuses of his day. Voltaire achieved his greatest fame as the most relentless critic of the established churches, Protestant and Catholic alike. He was sickened by the intolerance of organized Christianity and disgusted by the petty squabbles that seemed to monopolize the time of many priests and clergymen. Yet, in spite of his biting criticism of Christianity, his aim was not religion’s destruction. He once said that if a God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent one.

Voltaire had many disciples, but his only serious rival in spreading the gospel of deism was a set of books – the famous French Encyclopedia edited by Denis Diderot (1713-1784). The seventeen volumes of the Encyclopedia constituted the chief monument of the philosophes. They heralded the supremacy of the new science, championed tolerance, denounced superstition, and expounded the merits of deism. Diderot’s article on “Christianity” professed high regard for the religion of Jesus, but its effect was to stir the reader to a profound contempt for Christianity’s social failures.

Unlike most previous critics of the church, the philosophes were not heretics or dissenters who attacked the church in the name of Christ. These men launched their attack from outside the church. And they aimed their missiles not at a single point of dogma but at the foundation of all Christian truth. Their well-publicized purpose was to demolish the citadel.

Christianity, they insisted, was a pernicious plot, designed to turn the earth over to the oppressive powers of a priestly caste. Revealed religion was nothing less than a scheme to exploit the ignorant. Voltaire liked to refer to Christianity as the “infamous thing.” His most ruthless charge against the faith pictured the thousands upon thousands of victims of Christianity’s intolerance.

These intellectuals judged Christianity by the simple human standards of good and evil. If the church in the name of purity of doctrine sanctioned the bloody carnage of fellow Christians – as it had in the wars of religion – then Christianity, far from being sacred and holy, was a wicked institution. It had prevented peace, harmony, and progress among the peoples of the earth.

The primary weapon aimed at the church was “truth.” “We think that the greatest service to be done to men,” said Diderot, “is to teach them to use their reason, only to hold for truth what they have verified and proved.”

But the standards of truth ruled out Christian doctrine from the start. When the orthodox tried to reason from their basic premises, the infidels only scoffed because they refused to allow arguments drawn from authority or tradition embodied in the Bible or the church. These simply were not
“reasonable.”

Appeals to miracles met with similar disdain. The “proof” of a position was found in reason or human experiences and since miracles failed this test they were dismissed as medieval nonsense.

“You see,” Diderot argued, “once one sets foot in this realm of the supernatural, there are no bounds, one doesn’t know where one is going nor what one may meet. Someone affirms that five thousand persons have been fed with five small loaves; this is fine! But tomorrow another will assure you that he fed five thousand people with one small loaf, and the following day a third will have fed five thousand with the wind.”

The critics were thoroughly aware that they were fomenting a revolution in the fundamental beliefs of Europeans. Voltaire reported on each new triumph of reason over the church with the exultation of a commander winning battles.

In the end, deism collapsed from its own weaknesses. It was based on a false optimism. It had no explanation for the evils and disasters of life. Because the laws of nature were clear and unalterable, deists assumed that man’s moral choices drawn from nature were also simple and unchanging. If asked, “Why don’t men always see clearly the religious truths in nature?” the deist could only respond with, “the lies of priestcraft.” But that was too simple to be true, and few were convinced.

The eventual rejection of deism, however, did not restore Christianity to a central place in Western culture. The negative work of the Age of Reason endured. Modern culture – its art, its education, its politics – was freed from formal Christian influence. Men made a deliberate attempt to organize religiously neutral civilization. This meant that faith had to be confined to the home and the heart. That is what we find today in modern secular societies.

This leaves Christians with a basic problem in the modern era: How far should believers go in trying, as citizens, to get the state to enforce Christian standards of Conduct? Or if Christians give up the idea of enforcing Christian behavior, then what norm of conduct should they, as citizens, try to make an obligation for everyone?

What do you think? Should Christians seek to enforce Christian standards of conduct on non-believers? What is the other option? How did we get to this point? Can we push back the tide of secularization? Should we? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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