In the Age of Revolutions, a period that began with the American Revolution and continued for several decades as revolts rocked both the Americas and Europe, individuals on both sides of the Atlantic were forced to reconsider the relationship between religion, society, and government. And despite the secular achievements of these developments, religion continued to hold sway with many. The famed French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, looked to Moses as the premier example for turning a “national body” into “a political Body” that lived together with stability and peace. Contemporary governments based on secular constitutions were feeble, he argued, while Moses’s was stable. Indeed, Rousseau’s primary critique of “modern nations” is that there are “many lawmakers among them but not a single lawgiver.” In his Social Contact, Rousseau insisted on the necessity of “a purely civil profession of faith” that, though steering clear of particular dogmas, helped instill “sentiments of sociability” shared by the entire nation. Similarly, in Germany, Friedrich Schlegel argued for a symbiotic relationship between religion and politics: “Politics (as the art and science of the community of all human development) is for the periphery what religion is for the centre.” If the two are incongruous, the entire system falls apart. Far from becoming inconsequential, religion only became more crucial to political discourse as nations were recognized as social constructions and expected to evolve in order to match society.
This anxiety became an even more potent during the debates surrounding the French Revolution, especially in the Anglo-American world. Though originally welcomed as a continuation of America’s cause for freedom, the revolution’s quick descent into terror and, to many observers’ eyes, anarchy, led conservative thinkers to believe it to be the example of democracy’s tragic excesses. Religion was a central part of the equation. In Britain, Edmund Burke accused the French of tossing out their federally established religion that had served as a stabilizing feature of government. “The spirit of nobility and religion” cultivated by a state-sponsored ecclesiastical structure, Burke argued, kept nations grounded in social, moral, and religious principles that were crucial for the country to survive. In response, the British radical Mary Wollstonecraft argued that a deluded devotion to state religion, rather than natural religious sentiments, was at the heart of this mistaken political theology. Religion is “the cultivation of the understanding and refinement of the affections,” she believed, and should naturally percolate from the citizen body rather than forced upon them by the state. Indeed, Wollstonecraft reasoned, Burke’s argument would “undermine” both religion and the state. These were merely two expressions, strung across a very dynamic spectrum, within a vigorous debate that had to change the course of religion’s role in society.