Robespierre on religion as social glue

 One of the recurring ideas in these notes is the notion that religion has a basis in human nature — that it makes sense when you consider human evolution.

The historian Lynn Hunt, in an article in the New York Review of Books, said that 

Robespierre worried that religion was an essential element of the glue that holds societies together. She writes:

Robespierre viewed the campaign for de-Christianization in late 1793 with growing alarm and eventually denounced it. He then tried to inaugurate a Rousseau-style deistic alternative known as the Cult of the Supreme Being, whose festival he presided over in early June 1794.

The article is accompanied by an engraving illustrating the festival inaugurating the new state religion.

The article was a reminder that improvements to the social glue are not always lasting successes. Neither the new state religion nor Robespierre survived for long.

• Lynn Hunt, “I, the People,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. LXIX, No. 11, pp. 25-26. For other examples of notes on this theme, see “E.O. Wilson on religion,” June 12, 2022, and “Whitehead’s broad interests,” May 14, 2022.