What do American courts have in common with the revolutionaries who gave France the “Terror?”

What do American courts have in common with the mobs who gave revolutionary France the “Terror?” Those who have attended American schools in the last 40 years may not know what I am talking about when I refer to the French Revolution or the “Terror.” After all, it happened many years ago in a land far away.

But for students of history, the French Revolution that overthrew the monarchy is a fascinating study of human nature freed of all restraint. It was a time in which a group of men – primarily lawyers – were given the power to reshape society and all its institutions.

Out with the old, in with the new has never been as thoroughly established as a philosophy of governing. The old were “shortened” by the guillotine, shot, beaten to death and their heads paraded around on pikes. Religion was not just disestablished, it was outlawed. Even the measurement of time was changed.

Eventually even the lower classes found themselves worse off than under the old regime and in fear of their lives so they eagerly embraced the dictatorship of Napoleon; the same Napoleon who changed the game of war. No longer were wars the playthings of Princes using hired mercenaries in wars that were as stylized as chess. Now armies were made up of mass conscripts who clashed in battles that left tens of thousands dead, cities burned and nations dismembered.

But I digress.

Because I find history endlessly fascinating, I was re-reading “The Age of Napoleon” by Will and Ariel Durant. It’s a magisterial review of that era and part 11 of their series “The Story of Civilization.” That period is at once tragic, bloody, revealing and inspiring. It illuminates the men (and women) who made that era and gives us glimpses of the depravity and violence of that time.

Until the “Revolution,” education was the province of the Church. After the Revolution, the State took over that function. As the revolutionary government was violently anti-clerical, on October 8, 1798 sent the schools the following instructions:

You must exclude from your teaching all that relates to the dogmas or rites of any religion or sect whatever. The Constitution certainly tolerates them, but the teaching of them is not part of the public instruction, nor can it ever be. He Constitution is founded on the basis of universal morality; and it is morality of all times, all places, all religions – this law engraven on the tablets of the human family – it is this that must be the soul of your teaching, the object of your precepts and the connecting link to your studies, as it is the binding knot of society.

The Durants then state:

Here clearly put, was one of the most difficult enterprises of the Revolution, as it is one of the difficult problems of our time: to build a social order upon a system of morality independent of religious belief. Napoleon was to judge the proposal impracticable; America was to cleave to it till our time.

Their comment about Napoleon was correct. I take issue with their comment about America.

Americans has never felt any reason for the militant anti-clericalism that consumed France after the revolution. American schools have, until fairly recently, accepted the premise that we were a "Christian” nation in a practical if not an official sense. Spare me the protestations about the particular theologies of the Founders; to deny the overwhelmingly Christian nature of the people in this country since its founding is simply silly. Thus we, as a society, have – like a fish in an ocean – swum in an ethical and moral environment that is essentially Christian in virtually all respects.

Only recently have the courts and schools tried to create an educational environment that rejects Christianity and tries to substitute for that an alternative: call it ethical humanism or, as the French revolutionaries did, “universal morality;” it aims to supplant Christian morality by suppressing all expressions of that faith.

The eradication of Christianity from education has not had an immediate dramatic impact on American society because, outside of school, children are still immersed in a society enriched by the penumbras and emanations of faith. But secular forces in society are busy working remove that faith-suffused sea in which we swim. In Europe, that process if far advanced.

The French revolution provided an experiment in a petrie dish of what happens when all manifestations of supernatural religions are removed from a society and men are provided with the opportunity to create their own morality. For an actual example of what that kind of a society is like, read “The Age of Napoleon.”