Death and the Enlightenment<\/a><\/em>), the term \u201cdechristianization\u201d refers \u201cto the anti-religious manifestations of the French Revolution,\u201d which were \u201cneither homogenous in character nor unambiguous in meaning.\u201d Dechristianization refers in part to administrative, institutional changes: \u201cThe transfer to the secular authorities of the registration of births, marriages, and deaths, and the institution of divorce marked an overthrow of the concept of a \u2018Christian civilization,\u2019 of the hope that the Republic would be as \u2018Christian\u2019 as the Monarchy had been\u201d (440\u20131).<\/p>\nMore aggressively, revolutionaries engaged in \u201cprofanation of churches and tombs, the changing of religious personal names and place-names, the anticlerical masquerades, the forced abdication of priests, the celebration of festivals of Reason and of the Etre Supreme<\/em>\u201d (441).<\/p>\nPrior to 1789, the French church was undergoing a reform movement and French civilization was trending toward \u201cdeism, scepticism, irreligion and anticlericalism.\u201d Dechristianization was a \u201csudden intensification and focusing\u201d of these trends, so much that \u201cthere is a radical discontinuity between manifestations of opposition to Catholicism under the ancien regime<\/em> and in the febrile days of the high Revolution\u201d (442). McManners prefers to call the pre-Revolution trends a process of \u201claicization,\u201d which suggests \u201cthe erosion of the Church\u2019s alliance with power rather than a threat to the essence of revealed religion\u201d (442).<\/p>\nIndeed, dechristianization trades on the questionable assumption that pre-Revolutionary France was deeply Christianized in the first place. McManners summarizes Jean Delumeau\u2019s skeptical question: \u201cwhat would be left of eighteenth-century Catholicism if we took away routine conformity, official observances, the unhealthy religiosity which turns its back on the problems of society, the magical and superstitious undertones, Manicheism, and fear?\u201d (442).<\/p>\n
Point taken, yet an officially Christian public order is not nothing.\u00a0It expresses some, albeit very thin, response to the biblical demand to \u201ckiss the Son.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cOriginally and properly,\u201d writes John McManners (Death and the Enlightenment), the term \u201cdechristianization\u201d refers \u201cto the anti-religious manifestations of the French Revolution,\u201d which were \u201cneither homogenous in character nor unambiguous in meaning.\u201d Dechristianization refers in part to administrative, institutional changes: \u201cThe transfer to the secular authorities of the registration of births, marriages, and deaths, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1880,866],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dechristianization","category-french-revolution"],"yoast_head":"\n
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