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How Revolution Became The Religion Of Our Modern Age
The Religious Heart of Revolution
If revolution seems like a political event, James H. Billington’s Fire in the Minds of Men reveals something deeper. Revolution, he argues, is not just a matter of class struggle or reform—it is a faith. A new religion. This has particular value today as the U.S. and many other countries face a breakdown in confidence and trust. When trust goes… it all goes.
Billington calls it “perhaps the faith of our time,” and his sweeping historical study shows how modern revolution has always carried religious overtones, often mimicking Christianity while replacing its core with secular or occult ideology.
Far from being a product of rational Enlightenment thinking alone, Billington traces the revolutionary impulse to 18th-century Germany, where secret societies blended Christian symbolism with pagan mysticism. This mix, as potent as it was heretical, birthed the belief that salvation could come not through Christ’s blood but man’s own. Revolution would be the path to a new world, redeemed not by grace but by violence.
From Berlin to the Bastille
Though commonly associated with the French Enlightenment, the revolutionary faith was conceived earlier in the German court of Frederick the Great. Frederick, a secular militarist with occult interests, helped forge the vision of revolution as redemptive chaos.
This vision traveled to France, where the French Revolution turned theory into bloodshed. There, a radical ideology rooted in anti-Christian sentiment defined the modern idea that history could be reborn by replacing God with Man.
The French Revolution provided the template: abolish the past, centralize power, and purify the people through terror. The revolutionaries even coined the political terms “Left” and “Right” based on their seating in the National Assembly—intentionally subverting the biblical imagery of the saved on the right and the damned on the left. Billington points out that the Reign of Terror’s 40,000 deaths were only the beginning. Revolutionaries coolly estimated that two-thirds of France’s population might need to be exterminated for the new order to rise.
Radical Simplicity and the Press as Prophet
Revolution is also a simplification—a drive to reduce the complexity of Christian civilization into a single, controllable system. The diversity of medieval estates gave way to the centralized State. The richness of biblical language gave way to political slogans. In this monistic vision, salvation meant uniformity.
One engine of this simplification was the press. Revolutionary journalists didn’t just report the news; they became the new prophets, replacing the clergy. Their tools included vulgarity, shock, and the ritual mockery of traditional authority. Old words were redefined, new ones invented. Language itself was seen as magical, used more for incantation than explanation. Writers attempted to compile dictionaries that would unify thought and language, hoping to conjure a new world by redefining reality… thus weaponizing language. This is very similar to how “weaponized words” are used today.
The Secret Circles and Elitist Equality
Revolution also flourished in secret societies. Among the most influential was the “Social Circle” founded by radical journalist Nicholas Bonneville. This elite group of self-styled intellectual superiors pushed for “permanent insurrection” in the name of equality and direct democracy.
Their press served as the unifying authority, spreading their vision of global transformation. The pattern they established—elitist egalitarianism enforced by media and secrecy—became the model for revolutionary movements that followed.
Liberty, Fraternity, Equality—And Their Collapse
The revolutionary slogans—liberty, fraternity, and equality—soon revealed internal tensions. Liberty, once the rallying cry, often gave way to tyranny. Fraternity, especially in the form of nationalism, inspired poetic visions of national resurrection. But it also led to mass mobilization, myth-making, and cults of personality like that surrounding Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, who saw virtue enforced by terror as a path to salvation.
Equality, meanwhile, evolved into socialism. François Noël Babeuf organized society like an army, calling for communal property, forced labor, and the abolition of money. His spiritual heir, the pornographer-journalist Restif de la Bretonne, dreamed up blueprints for utopias on the planet Venus. Both were united by an anti-Christian, romantic occultism that used Christian terms—regeneration, brotherhood, redemption—but emptied them of meaning.
The Occult Core of Revolutionary Thought
Billington’s most striking insight is that the organizational and symbolic structures of revolution originated in occult Freemasonry and Pythagorean mysticism.
Billington’s most striking insight is that revolution’s organizational and symbolic structures originated in occult Freemasonry and Pythagorean mysticism. These weren’t practical clubs—they were religious temples, modeling themselves after ancient mystery cults and using Masonic metaphors like the architect or the triangle to structure both belief and activism.
The infamous Order of the Illuminati, founded in 1776, exemplified this ideology, advocating for a new world order without God, private property, or tradition. Though it was officially shut down, its influence continued, as revolutionaries adopted its symbols and methods. Ironically, it was fear of the Illuminati—especially among their right-wing critics—that kept their ideas alive.
Revolutionary mysticism also found inspiration in music and geometry. Shapes like the circle and triangle symbolized equality and strategy. Music was viewed as a mystical language, offering cosmic communion. Revolutionaries believed they were building not just new governments, but new forms of man, society, and meaning.
Nationalism and the Rise of Mythic Peoplehood
From 1815 onward, romantic nationalism gained ground. Secret societies like the Carbonari spread across Europe, blending Christian imagery with revolutionary goals. They saw themselves as continuing an “Unfinished Revolution” and modeled their meetings on both Christian rituals and the natural world.
Giuseppe Mazzini brought nationalist movements together into a single cause, founding revolutionary youth groups like Young Italy and Young Germany. Opera houses became temples of the revolution, stirring patriotic emotion and even sparking riots and assassinations. Music had replaced sermons, and the People had replaced God.
By 1848, nationalist dreams were fading. Social revolution—focused on class, not culture—was taking over. Red flags replaced national tricolors, and talk of “workers” overtook talk of “the people.”
From Brotherhood to Dictatorship
As socialist theory matured, revolutionaries concluded that the masses needed leadership. The people had proven unreliable in completing the Unfinished Revolution. Now, elite vanguards must take control. Dictatorship, secret police, and terror were seen not as evils, but necessary tools for enlightenment and justice.
This dark turn was aided by romanticized versions of Christianity. Concepts like the “Brotherhood of Man” were twisted to promote class envy and socialism. Christian vocabulary was retooled to support revolution against the very faith that birthed it.
Why Didn’t It Happen Here?
Billington ends with a haunting question: Why didn’t the same revolution engulf England, Switzerland, or the United States?
His answer, though understated, is profound. Protestant Trinitarianism and parliamentary systems acted as immune systems against the virus of revolutionary simplicity. Where Europe moved toward totalitarian democracy, the U.S. preserved a republican structure of dispersed authority.
It resisted the trend to centralize everything into one will, one voice, one state. And this resistance flowed from a Protestant Trinitarianism worldview that emphasized both unity and diversity, authority and liberty, individual and community—principles rooted in Scripture, not slogans.
In the end, Billington’s study is more than a history of ideas. It’s a warning. When the gospel of salvation is replaced by the gospel of autonomous man, the result is not heaven on earth, but hell in the streets. The revolutionary faith may promise light, but it too often delivers fire. Read this important book if you want to know our future…. unless we repent.
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