Bayle's Republic of Atheists

[R]eligion…is one of the greatest instruments of morality and civilization which God ever decided to employ. – Alexis de Tocqueville If I spoke badly…about the devout, it is only because I am revolted every day when I see petty people in their gossipy circles with their foolish affairs who are capable of every sort of despicable and violent action talking devoutly of their holy religion . I am always tempted to shout at them: “Rather than be Christians of this kind, be pagans with pure conduct, proud of your soul and with clean hands!” – Alexis de Tocqueville [I]t is certain that the greatest part of the peoples of the earth are still plunged in the frightful shadows of infidelity. – Pierre Bayle One enters into disputes concerning dogma, and one in no way practices morality. Why? Because practicing morality is difficult and pursuing disputes concerning dogma is very easy. – Montesquieu I saw that there were professions of faith, doctrines, forms of worship that were followed without belief, and that, since nothing of all that penetrated either heart or reason, it influenced conduct very little. – Jean-Jacques Rousseau The civil-religion theorists were not oriented toward the possibility of secular politics. As Joshua Mitchell writes, for Hobbes the “alternatives are either a ‘Christian Commonwealth’ (Part III [of Leviathan ]) or a ‘Kingdom of Darkness’ (Part IV [of Leviathan ]). A secularized world is not a genuine possibility ; the attempt to deny religion its due leads not to a world enlightened by autonomous reason, but rather, ironically, one dominated by superstition and steeped in the kingdom of darkness!” A secularized world first becomes a possibility in Bayle (and of course Rousseau is explicit in his rejection of Bayle). Hence one could say that Pierre Bayle is the first thoroughgoing anti-civil-religion theorist in the Western tradition. In fact, Sally Jenkinson argues that Bayle was unique among early modern political philosophers in his rejection of civil religion: [It was] accepted by natural law philosophers such as Grotius, Hobbes, Selden, Spinoza, Harrington and Locke, no less than by Gallican Catholics such as Richelieu and Bossuet…that a civil religion, whose clergy was subordinate to the secular authority, was a requisite part of the internal process of orderly government. All parties would agree, though for subtly different reasons, that society itself was cemented through holding in common certain [religious] beliefs, [and that the clergy] should form a corps of civilizing educators. The notion that a religion so understood was vital to the public good was so generally insisted upon that in contesting it Bayle would find himself confronting all parties – Catholics and Protestants, lay men and clergy. What Bayle offers, according to Jenkinson, is “a general critique of post-Reformation [E]rastian theory,” and all the predecessors or contemporaries of Bayle cited in the preceding quotation count as various kinds of Erastian, that is, civil-religion, theorists. One might add that Rousseau represents the culmination of this Erastian tradition, because he sums up the underlying notion with the very conception of a “civil religion.”

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