Anticlericalism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Anticlericalism is an attribute of a political movement or ideology that refers to animosity or opposition to the established religious leadership, often associated with broad disapproval of the public role of religion. While secularism describes the dissociation of religion and public life, anticlericalism seeks the deliberate limitation and reversal of the influence of religious leaders through legal and behavioral constraints. Anticlericalism was a foundational premise of many of the revolutionary movements from the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s to the Iranian White Revolution of the 1960s and continuing in various forms to the present day.

Anticlericalism arose originally in European politics in response to the power of the Roman Catholic papacy and clergy in the Middle Ages. The Reformation challenged the power of the Roman Catholic Church as the sole interpreter of doctrine and practice, and it led parts of northern Europe to break with the church, sparking almost a century of warfare. For example, Martin Luther’s major works beginning in 1520 directly challenged the authority and sanctity of the Roman Catholic priesthood and the papacy. As a result, the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 committed the nations of Europe to refrain from attempting to enforce Roman Catholic orthodoxy and, more generally, introduced the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, under which the religion of the leader was made the religion of the people.

Nevertheless, the Roman Catholic Church remained a powerful force in Europe and colonial areas up to the modern age. In countries such as France, Italy, and Spain that had resisted the Reformation, the clergy was commonly associated with conservative and monarchical power, while radical and leftist forces typically espoused anticlerical attitudes as a form of opposition to the dominant classes.

Enlightenment Europe brought many new anticlerical forces to power. The Jacobin movement that inspired the French Revolution (1789–1799) was ardently opposed to the established power of the church in addition to its opposition to aristocracy and monarchy. Acts of the revolutionary National Assembly up to and including the 1790 Civil Constitution of the Clergy led to the confiscation of church property and dissolved religious orders.

Anticlericalism was equally a force in colonial resistance movements. For example, a persistent theme of Mexican politics has been the limitation of the power of the Roman Catholic clergy through deliberate anticlerical policies, such as article 27 of the 1917 Mexican constitution (since amended), which forbid the church from owning property. Early postcolonial constitutions specifically laid out restraints on the church, and church properties were held by the revolutionary governments with a view toward redistribution of these assets.

The totalitarian movements of the 1930s brooked no dissent from any societal force and the religious establishment was no exception. Marx’s famous dictum that “religion is the opiate of the masses” inspired an antagonism toward religious authorities in most all communist states from the Soviet Union to Cuba. Fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the 1930s were more ambiguously anticlerical, combining a vague tolerance of religion with a desire to subordinate and persecute clergy should they present a strong philosophical challenge to chauvinistic nationalism. In non-Christian contexts, movements of both the left and the right have likewise pursued an anticlerical bent, from Maoist suppression of the Buddhist religion in China to the enforced secularism in Kemalist Turkey and Iran under Muhammad Reza Shah.

Anticlericalism remains a part of many modern and secularizing political movements and has had an important influence on many feminist and structuralist analyses. For example, leading feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether has criticized traditional religion and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican. Likewise in critical texts on colonialism such as that of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, organized religion is castigated for its role in perpetuating relationships of dominance. The resurgence of religion as a militant force, beginning in the 1990s and demonstrated in the attacks of September 11, 2001, in the United States, also has led many to argue that it is inherently regressive and should be subordinated to liberal norms.

Bibliography:

Barnett, S. J. Idol Temples and Crafty Priests: The Origins of Enlightenment Anticlericalism. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.
Burleigh, Michael. Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror. New York: Harper Collins, 2007.
Dykema, Peter A., and Heiko A. Oberman, eds. Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1993.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove, 2004.
Sanchez, Jose. Anticlericalism: A Brief History. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972.