by David Sellnow
In the early 1800s, revolution was in the air. The French Revolution had introduced ideas of liberty and equality to the masses, and the masses were restless. Napoleon enforced law and order by a willingness to shoot shrapnel out of cannons into crowds of protesters (in 1795, as he rose to power). He believed he was destined to take the Revolution to its proper conclusion. But his portrayals of himself as a man of the people were more about ensconcing himself in power as leader than about the people’s hopes and dreams. Napoleon knew the people revered religion, so he sought to reinstate the Catholic Church’s position within France (which had been damaged during the Revolution). Napoleon’s Concordat (agreement), however, made the church endorse his government and, essentially, serve his government. In 1804, Napoleon arranged a grandiose ceremony in Notre Dame Cathedral. He compelled the pope to be present and hand him a crown, which Napoleon then placed on his own head to designate himself as “Emperor of the French.” To Napoleon, the backdrop of a church was not due to any deep personal faith. The cathedral was a place to present himself to the people as the man God wanted to lead them. He had said, “In Egypt I was a Muhammedan; here I will be a Catholic, for the good of the people.” Religion was an expedient tool for him to gain public support.
Other princes and kings fought against Napoleon and his new world order. They wanted to preserve the ways of the past and their own hold on power. But their approach to the church was not unlike his, endorsing religion as a stabilizing force while conducting themselves in ways that contradicted faith-based convictions.
Prince Klemens von Metternich of Austria, dominant in Europe from 1815 to 1848, championed the church as an institution of society, saying that “religion cannot decline in a nation without causing that nation’s strength also to decline.” In his Memoirs, Metternich wrote that rulers must protect their authority against radical forces that would overthrow “everything which society respects as the basis of its existence: religion, public morality, laws, customs, rights and duties.” He urged all rulers to follow his example and “maintain religious principles in all their purity, and not allow the faith to be attacked.” Yet this selfsame Metternich was a “great womanizer” who went from woman to woman over a series of three wives, multiple mistresses and additional lesser trysts and affairs. One biographer said of him, “‘His favorite recreation was the seduction of high-born women.” Metternich would attend mass, but that seemed a matter of propriety and formality. According to a historian’s description, Metternich’s capital of Vienna was “a city lukewarm to religion. Attending mass was, to be sure, still the custom. But the priest who could say the quickest mass (about twelve minutes by some reports) would attract the largest crowds.” Metternich, government defender of the institution of religion, was not himself a particularly spiritual person. As Czech historian Miroslav Šedivý puts it, “Metternich’s own Catholicism had no real significance in his Weltanschauung (worldview).” Religion was primarily for policing the behavior of commonplace people.
This was the societal context in which Karl Marx made a remark about religion for which he has become famous: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” That’s a clipped version of a larger thought. The broader statement, as published in an article by Marx in 1844, was: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
Marx may have been wrong about many things. But he wasn’t altogether wrong in his assessment of how religion was being used by persons in power as a tool to tamp down criticism and subdue protests by the people underneath them. The answer is not, as Marx proposed, to abolish religion. Rather, we pray for men and women of genuine conviction who live by faith. We pray for that in ourselves. We admire it when we see it in societal leaders.
Standing beside a church and holding up a Bible does not make someone a person of faith or a friend of the faith. The Bible is not a prop and the church is not a showpiece–though plenty of political figures in past history have sought to use it that way. May we not look at the Bible that way in our own lives. James, the brother of Jesus, urged us, “Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like” (James 1:22-24).
James also had something to say about religion’s role in society and our lives: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 1:27). Honest, heartfelt religion is not a drug we use to numb ourselves against injustices in this world (as Marx suggested it was). Rather, it gives us the grace and resolve to do good for one another in our world. Believing in Jesus Christ and his resurrection not only prepares us for the next life but also invigorates our living in the present. Faith means having “the eyes of your heart enlightened” to know “the immeasurable greatness of God’s power” which is in at work in us as believers — the same power that God “put to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion” (Ephesians 1:18-21).
The Bible is not merely something to hold up for show. “Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).
Religion is not a means to cover over society’s problems or inequities. Rather, earnest faith will motivate us to do all we can for one another as fellow children of God. “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).
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Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
