Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONmost three-quarters of all churches in the USA belonged to these threedenominations. 8 The disruption of established churches, the secessionand rise of sects, also marks the religious history of this period inScotland (the 'Great Disruption 5 of 1843), the Netherlands, Norwayand other countries.The reasons for the geographical and social limits of Protestantsectarianism are evident. Roman Catholic countries provided no scopefor and tradition of public sects. There the equivalent break with theestablished church or the dominant religion was more likely to take theform of mass dechristianization (especially among the men) than ofschism.* (Conversely, the Protestant anticlericalism of the Anglo-Saxon countries was often the exact counterpart of the atheist anticlericalismof continental ones.) Religious revivalism was likely to takethe form of some new emotional cult, some miracle-working saint orpilgrimage within the accepted framework of the Roman Catholicreligion. One or two such saints of our period have come to wider notice,e.g. the Cure d'Ars (1786-1859) in France. The Orthodox Christianityof Eastern Europe lent itself more readily to sectarianism, and inRussia the growing disruption of a backward society had since thelater seventeenth century produced a crop of sects. Several, in particularthe self-castrating Skoptsi, the Doukhobors of the Ukraine andthe Molokans, were the products of the later eighteenth century and theNapoleonic period; 'Old Believers' dated from the seventeenth century.However, in general the classes to which such sectarianism made thegreatest appeal—small craftsmen, traders, commercial farmers andother precursors of the bourgeoisie, or conscious peasant revolutionaries—were still not numerous enough to produce a sectarian movement ofvast size.In the Protestant countries the situation was different. Here theimpact of the commercial and individualist society was strongest (atall events in Britain and the USA) while the sectarian tradition wasalready well-established. Its exclusiveness and insistence on the individualcommunication between man and God, as well as its moralausterity, made it attractive to, or a schpol for, rising entrepreneurs andsmall businessmen. Its gaunt, implacable, theology of hell and damnationand of an austere personal salvation made it attractive to men wholived harsh lives in a harsh environment: to frontiersmen and seamen,to small individual cultivators and miners, to exploited craftsmen. Thesect could easily turn into a democratic, egalitarian assembly of thefaithful without social or religious hierarchy, and thus appealed to the* The sects and breakaways to Protestantism which occurred—not as yet very frequently—remained, and have since remained, numerically tiny.226