Religious belief, fundamentalism, and intolerance

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Procession de la Ligue 1590 Carnavalet. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

By Desmond M. Clarke
Desmond M. Clarke is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Ireland and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. His recent publications with Oxford University Press include The Equality of the Sexes: Three Feminist Texts of the Seventeenth Century (OUP, 2013) and French Philosophy, 1572–1675 (OUP, 2016). His translation of Voltaire’ Treatise on Toleration will be published by Penguin (2016).

January 16th 2016

Religious belief has been allied, for centuries, with fundamentalism and intolerance. It’s possible to have one without the other, but it requires a degree of self-criticism that is not easily acquired.

When Calvin endorsed the execution of Michael Servetus in 1553, he justified his decision by appeal to (1) the certainty of his own religious faith and (2) the obligation of civil authorities to protect the citizens of Geneva from what he classified as heresy. Théodore de Bèze later defended that rationale in a lengthy Treatise in 1560.

When the Jesuit Cardinal Bellarmine subsequently considered how the Catholic Church should treat heretics, he invoked Calvin’s principle; he quoted Bèze to show that the state must support the eradication of heresy and, if necessary, execute those whom the Roman church classified as heretics (i.e. Calvinists!).

The two Christian churches were symmetrically intolerant of each other. They each appealed to the certainty of their own (incompatible) religious beliefs and to a political theory based on their common reading of the Bible. There followed, in France, decades of religious wars, which petered out only with victory for the majority church at the end of the century.



$45.00
Hardcover

This item is not yet published. It is available for pre-orders and will ship on 14 May 2016.
Published: 14 June 2016
288 Pages
9.2 x 6.1 inches
ISBN: 9780198749578

http://blog.oup.com/2016/01/religious-belief-fundamentalism/