Religion and Security in the Post-Modern World
Steven Meyer Monday, 1 September 2008
Toward the end of his life, Denis Diderot reputedly said that "man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." The colorful and gruesome nature of this aphorism aside, Diderot's words are important for two reasons. First, they are a reaction to the context of the 18th century European Enlightenment—a context of revolution, corruption in the Church, the transformation of the state into the only legitimate, sovereign actor in the international system, the solidification of the Western imperial and colonial enterprise, and the rise of rabid nationalism. Second, Diderot's comments represent the spirit of an age in European history that has had a powerful impact on the evolution of Western philosophy and attitudes toward religion, state, and society. Specifically, Diderot and his cohorts in the 17th and 18th centuries arguably were the wellspring of the modern European assault on religion. This assault led to the expectation primarily among the intelligentsia and opinion makers that secularization was the historically determined path of the future.
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