Three Ways

This chapter discusses how three principal ways or options for removing religious power from the state presented themselves in the course of the long nineteenth century: passive secularism, combative secularism, and eliminationist secularism. Each in its own way aimed to achieve a secular polity, but their means and ends differed markedly. Proponents of passive secularism sought to achieve a cordial modus vivendi between a neutral government advancing political liberty and religious communities, convinced that a climate of freedom, while politically desirable, might also benefit religious life. By contrast, channeling Voltairean anticlericalism, combative secularists villainized organized religion and sought to achieve an assertive, more comprehensive statist secularism, at once conflicting with and seeking to control inherited traditions. Finally, eliminationist secularism, apotheosized after the century's end by Marxism-Leninism, entertained a still more sweeping anti-religious vision, best realized above the grave of all traditional faiths, which its proponents either intended to dig themselves or await the dialectical exigencies of history to dig on their behalf.