Anticlericalism

Anti-clericalism is opposition to religious authority, typically in social or political matters. Historical anti-clericalism has mainly been opposed to the influence of Roman Catholicism. Anti-clericalism is related to secularism, which seeks to remove the church from all aspects of public and political life, and its involvement in the everyday life of the citizen.

Anarchist and Communist movements are anti-religion and anti-clerical, but not all anti-clericals are irreligious or anti-religion. Some have opposed clergy on the basis of moral corruption, institutional issues and/or disagreements in religious interpretation, such as during the Protestant Reformation. Anti-clericalism became extremely violent during the French Revolution because revolutionaries believed the church had played a pivotal role in the systems of oppression which led to it. Many clerics were killed, and French revolutionary governments tried to control priests by making them state employees.

Anti-clericalism appeared in Catholic Europe throughout the 19th Century, in various forms, and later in Canada, Cuba, and Latin America. Various rumblings can be seen erupting from time to time in the Islamic world, and anticlericalism has not been absent among Protestants either, with many sects doing without clergy entirely.

The French Revolution, particularly in its Jacobin period, initiated one of the most violent episodes of anti-clericalism in modern Europe as a reaction against the dominant role of the Catholic church in pre-revolutionary France; the new revolutionary authorities suppressed the church; destroyed, desecrated and expropriated monasteries; exiled 30,000 priests and killed hundreds more. As part of a campaign to de-Christianize France in October 1793 the Christian calendar was replaced with one reckoning from the date of the Revolution, and an atheist Cult of Reason was inaugurated, all churches not devoted to that cult being closed. In 1794, the atheistic cult was replaced with a deistic Cult of the Supreme Being. When anticlericalism became a clear goal of French revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries seeking to restore tradition and the Ancien Régime took up arms, particularly in the War in the Vendée (1793 to 1796).

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