When Atheists Persecuted Christians - The Cult of Reason [Religious History]

On September 2, 1792, at Carmes Prison in Paris, over a hundred Catholic priests were jailed within an old monastery. Their crime: refusing to forsake their church for the new secular republic. That day, a vicious mob stormed the prison and slaughtered 115 priests there. That bloodbath was just one of several, remembered today as the September Massacres, when over a thousand victims perished.

These atrocities were part of an escalating campaign of violence known as Dechristianization, by which radicals sought to purge religion from their nation. Atheists like Pierre Chaumette and Jacques Hebert argued these were steps were necessary so that reason would triumph over superstition and fanaticism. In their eyes, churches were weeds in need of plowing so that more “enlightened” ideas could grow. Crosses were seized from altars. Bells were plundered and melted down. Even the calendar was changed from a seven-day week to a ten-day week, removing Sundays so that there would not be a time to worship. And since secularists no longer wanted to base their dating system around the birth of Jesus, they reset the count and based it upon the birth of their revolution.

But some atheists had even grander aspirations than just erasing Christianity; they sought to replace it with their own belief system: the Cult of Reason. It was created as a godless alternative to churches, where citizens could hear sermons that instilled virtue without any of the biblical language. And so churches were converted into Temples of Reason, devoted to the worship of Reason, personified as a woman bearing a torch to symbolize enlightened thinking. The atheists even made up their own holiday for it: the Festival of Reason, held on November 10, 1793 at Notre-Dame Cathedral. The altars were rededicated to truth and liberty. But despite these lofty themes, the festival was not so much a dignified ceremony but rather a sensual spectacle akin to Mardi Gras.

Meanwhile, the persecution reached new heights of cruelty: the revolutionaries passed a law that called for all nonconforming clergy to be killed on sight, with anyone who harbored such enemies subject to the same penalty. Jean-Baptiste Carrier enforced out the law by loading priests and nuns like cattle onto boats and ferrying them down the Loire River. They were said to be stripped naked and bound together in pairs, one priest per nun, in “republican marriages”: meant to mock their vows of celibacy. The helpless couples were then thrown overboard together to their watery graves. But this method proved far too inefficient for mass executions, and soon Carrier simply sank the vessels with all the captives trapped onboard, drowning them in what was dubbed the “national bathtub”. More than four thousand souls perished in the Drownings at Nantes.

The Reign of Terror raged on for months and flooded the streets with innocent blood, claiming over 40,000 victims. On July 17, 1794 the Martyrs of Compiegne were led to the guillotine in Paris. The government had ordered all convents to disband. Yet these nuns refused to split apart and kept their community together. The revolutionaries judged the nuns as traitors for their defiance and condemned them to beheading. As each woman went bravely to the blade, the other nuns sang a hymn, which grew softer as their numbers dwindled, until at last, the final voice was silenced.