The Burden of Power – Giving the Revolutionaries Their Due

You cannot understand the Reformation, the French Revolution, or the Russian Revolution until you understand one simple truth: the Catholic Church had overstepped its boundaries. The same institution that once preserved learning through the Dark Ages had become an empire unto itself. It owned land. It controlled kings. It operated its own courts. It collected taxes. And when it strayed from its mission, the backlash was not only justified – it was inevitable.

This essay is a corrective. In our previous discussion of secularism and theology, we examined how revolutions usurped the church’s authority. Now, we give those revolutionaries the benefit of the doubt. Because they were right – in their diagnosis, in their necessity, and even, in their most noble aspirations. Where they failed was not in their ideals but in their implementation, and in the unchecked power they handed to small groups of administrators.

Part I – The Church Had Become a Monster

By the late Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was the largest landowner in Europe. In many countries, as much as a fourth to a third of all land belonged to the Church. In France, one contemporary estimate suggested that three quarters of all French wealth was ecclesiastical. The Church collected tithes – a mandatory 10% tax on all agricultural production – from every peasant, even when the harvest failed. It operated its own courts, maintained its own prisons, and could excommunicate kings who displeased it.

Sources for this paragraph:

Page: A Short History of the World; Wikisource
Case against the Church; erenow.org

The corruption was not occasional – it was systemic. Simony (the purchase of church offices), nepotism (appointing family members to lucrative positions), pluralism (holding multiple church offices simultaneously), and the sale of indulgences were not marginal abuses. They were the operating system of the late medieval church. A Catholic historian calculated the Church’s share as a third in Germany and a fifth in France. The appetite for property grew with what it fed upon, and by the 13th century, it was already being said that “the priests were not good men, that they were always hunting for money and legacies”.

Sources for this paragraph:

PhilPapers; research on medieval corruption
Page: A Short History of the World; Wikisource

The Inquisition was the Church’s enforcement arm. Approved by Pope Innocent IV in 1252, torture became a standard tool of interrogation. The Spanish Inquisition refined public displays of punishment – the auto da fé – into instruments of social control for the benefit of the state. Suspected heretics were arrested, interrogated, and tried; penalties ranged from prayer and fasting to imprisonment to execution by burning at the stake.

Sources for this paragraph:

Britannica; Inquisition summary
Whittier College Library; The auto da fé
Perez, Joseph; The Spanish Inquisition; described techniques of torture

The witch hunts that followed were not a Protestant invention – they were a pan‑Christian horror. Between 40,000 and 60,000 people, and this is an extremely conservative figure, were executed for witchcraft in early modern Europe, almost all of them in Europe. The witch‑hunts were particularly severe in the Holy Roman Empire, with two thirds of executions concentrated in west‑central Europe. In some estimates, as many as 100,000 to 200,000 were officially tried, with up to 100,000 executed. Prosecutions reached their peak from 1560 to 1630, during the Counter‑Reformation and the European wars of religion.

Sources for this paragraph:

Wikipedia; Witch trials in the early modern period
Cornell University; The World Bewitch’d
BYU ScholarsArchive; Judicial Murder

The Church had become what it had once fought against: an oppressive, extractive, jurisdictionally overreaching institution. It had ceased to be merely spiritual. It had become temporal. And when temporal power becomes absolute, it must be resisted.

The Mirror of History: Political Islam and the Ghost of the Medieval Church

The corruption that consumed the medieval Catholic Church – the conflation of spiritual authority with worldly power, the extraction of wealth from the poor, the use of terror to silence dissent, the unaccountable bureaucracy that answered only to itself – has a modern mirror. Political Islam today occupies a similar structural position in many Muslim‑majority countries that the Catholic Church once occupied in Europe.

Both institutions claim a transcendent mandate. Both claim jurisdiction over virtually every domain of human life – law, family, education, economics, and governance. Both have produced clerical hierarchies that are often more loyal to the institution than to the faithful. Both have used state power to enforce orthodoxy. Both have resisted internal reform. And both, in the face of external critique, have retreated into defensive dogmatism.

The parallels are not superficial. Comparative political science research has documented “a similar deep historical and theological backdrop animating the rise of political Catholicism and political Islam.” Both traditions emerged from pre‑Westphalian religious political orders – Catholic Christendom and Muslim Dar al‑Islam – where religious and political authority were fused, and where the modern distinction between church and state would have been incomprehensible. Both experienced the trauma of colonial domination, which dismantled indigenous religious institutions and replaced them with foreign‑controlled structures. Both produced movements that sought to reclaim religious authority from secularising states. And both developed parties that, despite their theological differences, followed strikingly similar historical trajectories in their conflicts with existing religious authorities and their negotiations with modern state structures.

Sources for this sub‑section:

Michael Driessen, The Politics of Islam, Catholicism, and the State – comparative historical and institutional parallels.

The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire – How the Caliphate’s Fall Gave Way to Radical Islam

The Catholic Church was not broken by the Reformation alone. It was broken by a convergence of forces: the rise of nationalist monarchies, the printing press, the discovery of the New World, and the Enlightenment’s critique of all inherited authority. Similarly, the traditional Islamic order was not broken by any single event. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire – the last great Sunni Muslim power – created a vacuum that radical Islam would eventually fill.

The Ottoman Empire, once the terror of Europe, had been in slow decline for three centuries. By World War I, it was a “sick man” maintained only by the balance of European power. The Ottoman entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers sealed its fate. The Sykes‑Picot Agreement of 1916 – a secret Anglo‑French treaty – carved up the Ottoman Middle East into spheres of influence. It was “a geostrategic move to divide, defeat, and dismantle the Ottoman Empire during World War I.” The “modern colonial borders of the Arab nation‑states eventually emerged in the course of World War II.”

The destruction of the empire was followed by the abolition of the last institution that could claim to speak for Sunni Islam. On March 3, 1924, the Turkish Grand National Assembly abolished the Caliphate – the office of the successor to the Prophet Muhammad, which had existed in some form for nearly 1,300 years. The decision precipitated a serious debate in the Muslim world, “the effects of which are still being felt via the discourse of religious fundamentalist groups.”

The abolition of the Caliphate had three profound consequences for the emergence of radical Islam:

First, it dismantled a unifying Islamic authority. For centuries, the Caliph had been a symbol of Muslim unity, even if his actual power had waned. His removal left a “leadership vacuum” that fragmented the Muslim world, “sparking fragmented efforts to revive Islamic governance, which later shifted toward radical movements.”

Second, it shocked the Sunni clerical establishment. The caliphate’s abolition “shocked the Sunni clerical world, and some felt the need to present Islam not as a traditional religion but as an innovative socio‑political ideology.” This ideological shift – from faith to politics – provided fertile ground for the emergence of Islamist movements that sought to restore Islam’s lost glory through state power.

Third, it created a long‑term grievance that radical groups would weaponize. “Although it had been abolished in 1924, restoring the Caliphate is still the ultimate aim of some radical Islamist groups (i.e. Al‑Qaeda, Hizb al‑Tahrir).” The abolition became a rallying cry, a symbol of Muslim humiliation at the hands of secularists and Western powers, and a justification for violence against those who had “destroyed” the Caliphate.

The vacuum created by the Caliphate’s fall was filled by new forces: secular Arab nationalism (Nasser, the Ba’ath parties), monarchical capitalism (Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states), and, eventually, revolutionary Islamism (the Muslim Brotherhood, Al‑Qaeda). The radicalisation did not happen overnight. A 2025 study identified four factors that drove the emergence of radical political Islam in the late 20th century, with the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate as the first and foundational factor.

Based on the 2025 study “Study on the Reason why Radical Political Islam not Appear until the Late Twentieth Century” by Yin Zhengqing, the four factors that drove the emergence of radical political Islam are:

1. ⛓️‍💥 The Collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate (1924)
This event dismantled the unifying authority of Sunni Islam, creating a leadership vacuum. This fragmentation shifted efforts to revive Islamic governance away from traditional structures and toward decentralized, often militant radical movements.

2. 🌍 Western Colonialism and the Creation of Israel
The intensified colonial influence in the Muslim world after World War II, most notably through the establishment of the state of Israel, fueled widespread anti-Western sentiment. These geopolitical and religious tensions were key catalysts that transformed political grievances into extremism.

3. 🤝 The Collapse of Islamist-Secular Alliances
After decolonization, the temporary alliances between Islamists and secular nationalists broke down, leading to internal strife. This is evident in Egypt, where the conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s secular regime escalated into violence and repression.

4. 📡 Technological Advancements
New technologies enabled unprecedented cross-regional mobilization (e.g., of Afghan jihadists) and the globalized, digital dissemination of radical propaganda. This allowed for the creation of a cohesive transnational jihadist network.

Sources for this sub‑section:

Yin Zhengqing, “Study on the Reason why Radical Political Islam not Appear until the Late Twentieth Century” (2025) – four factors including Caliphate collapse.
SOAS paper on abolition of Caliphate (1924) and its radicalisation consequences.
History of Islamism – abolition of Ottoman Sultanate (1922) and Caliphate (1924).

The Funding of Radicalism: How Oil Money Gave the New Church Its Teeth

The Catholic Church’s power rested on landed wealth and tithes. Political Islam’s power in the late 20th century rested on a different source of revenue: petrodollars.

“In the 1970s, Saudi Arabia, flush with the wealth generated by large increases in the price of oil, launched a project to expand its influence by funding the global spread of Wahhabism, its brand of Islam.” The project became vast – “the Saudi version of China’s infrastructure‑building campaign, or the United States’s projection of military power.” But unlike those disciplined campaigns, “the Saudi religious mission matches a great deal of money to a very low degree of central control. That means the Saudi government has wound up funding religious organizations that have turned extreme and violent, even if that wasn’t its intention.”

The numbers are staggering. “In the past 50 years, Riyadh has invested at least 76 billion euros ($86 billion) in Wahhabi extremism, the ideological basis of extremist and jihadist movements throughout the world.” The money funded thousands of religious schools and colleges in Muslim countries, “that spread the Wahhabi vision of Islam and advocate Islamic ‘holy war’ against infidels.”

The catalyst was the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The revolution “had dramatically shaken the Saudis. When Iran started exporting its Shiite ideology, the Saudis felt threatened by it. Around that time, in 1979, hardliners seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The Saudis launched an ideological offensive and said, ‘Now we are exporting our own ideology.’” The promotion of Wahhabism was deliberately targeted – “through intermediaries and organizations like the World Muslim League in different countries throughout Asia, Africa and parts of Europe.”

The impact was devastating. In many parts of the world, “a radical form of Islam is gaining the upper hand.” In Southeast Asia, “there has been a dramatic development towards radicalism over the past three decades. It is perfectly clear that this development has been encouraged by Saudi money.” “Young intellectuals have been recruited with generous scholarships at Saudi universities. These people return to their homes after having studied at Saudi universities and suddenly carry out Wahhabi missionary work in all their home countries.”

Sources for this sub‑section:

Columbia Global Reports, The Call – Saudi oil wealth and Wahhabi funding.
DW report on Saudi Arabia ’exporting extremism’ – $86 billion funding of Wahhabi extremism.

The Structural Parallel

The medieval Catholic Church and modern political Islam share a structural pathology: the fusion of spiritual authority with coercive temporal power. Both institutions claimed jurisdiction over domains that secular governance could handle more efficiently and with less violence. Both developed internal hierarchies that became more concerned with their own preservation than with the spiritual welfare of the faithful. Both used terror – the Inquisition, the auto da fé, the witch hunt – to enforce orthodoxy. And both, when their authority was challenged, responded not with humility but with greater coercion.

The difference is that the Catholic Church has, over five centuries of reformation, revolution, and internal renewal, been forced to retreat from direct governance. It no longer owns a third of the land in any European country. It no longer operates its own prisons. It no longer executes heretics. It has, however imperfectly, learned to coexist with secular power.

Political Islam has not yet undergone its Reformation. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the Caliphate did not produce a Muslim Luther. They produced a vacuum filled by secular nationalists, monarchical capitalists, and, eventually, oil‑funded radicals. The structural conditions for a Muslim Reformation – the independence of civil authority from clerical control, the separation of law from theology, the protection of minority rights – have not yet been established in most Muslim‑majority countries.

This is not an argument against Islam. It is an argument against clerical overreach, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Muslim. The Church had become a monster. Political Islam, in its radical and state‑capturing forms, risks becoming the same monster under a different banner. The lesson of the Reformation is that temporal power must be separated from spiritual authority – not because religion is bad, but because power corrupts, and corrupt power dressed in sacred robes is the most dangerous kind.

Sources for this sub‑section:

Author’s synthesis of the above sources.

Part II – The Reformation Was Necessary

The Reformation was not an act of vandalism against a holy institution. It was a reaction against institutional decay. When Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses in 1517, he was not attacking the faith – he was attacking the corruption that had attached itself to the faith. The sale of indulgences, the simony, the nepotism, the absentee bishops – these were not features of the church; they were cancers. The Council of Trent would later abolish the profession of pardoner, but too late. The damage was done.

Sources for this paragraph:

Wikisource; A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages

The Reformation was necessary because the church had refused to reform itself. For centuries, popes had resisted efforts to curb simony and pluralism. The Investiture Controversy had demonstrated that the church would rather fight wars than surrender its grip on secular power. By the 16th century, the only language left was the language of schism. The Reformation was not an act of destruction. It was an act of surgery.

Part III – The French Revolution Was Necessary

The French Revolution stripped the nobility of wealth and privilege and forced the king to recognize the right of the nation to rule itself. The basic ideals of the French and the American revolutions are closely related: that all men are created equal and that government should rest on the consent of the governed. France was bankrupt, supported only by taxes levied on the Third Estate – the commoners, who bore the entire weight of a parasitic nobility and an unreformed clergy.

Sources for this paragraph:

Two Revolutions – AHA
Causes of the French Revolution; webarchive
IPL; Compare And Contrast The American Revolution And French Revolution

The French Revolution was necessary because feudalism had become a machine for extracting wealth from the poor and delivering it to the already rich. The clergy owned vast lands, collected tithes, and paid no taxes. The nobility held sinecures and monopolies. The monarchy borrowed endlessly and spent profligately. When the Estates‑General convened in 1789, the Third Estate arrived with grievances that had been accumulating for centuries. The revolution did not create the rage; it merely gave it a voice.

Part IV – The American Revolution Was Necessary

The American Revolution was a revolt against royal tyranny. The Declaration of Independence listed “a history of injuries and usurpations” designed to establish “an absolute Tyranny over these states.” The King had impeded the development of the colonies by prohibiting the naturalization of foreigners and raising the purchase price of western lands. The colonists, some of whom had already received land grants west of the Appalachians, viewed the edict as equivalent to tyranny and disregarded it.

Sources for this paragraph:

Digital History; Declaration of Independence grievances
Western Civilization II; revolt against British tyranny

The American Revolution was necessary because the British Parliament claimed the right to tax the colonies without representation. No assembly, no voice, no consent – only demands. The founding generation did not seek independence lightly; they sought it after a decade of failed petitions, ignored grievances, and escalating coercion. The revolution was not a rebellion against lawful authority. It was a rebellion against authority that had become lawless.

Part V – Communism Is Based on a Noble Idea

The Russian Revolution, for all its horrors, was born from a noble aspiration. Its revolutionary ideals included equality, communal living, proletarian morality, and the dream of a world free from want – all rooted in Russian utopianism. In the first decade of the Russian Revolution, these ideals found expression in festival, symbol, science fiction, city planning, and the arts. The dream was a world without exploitation, where no one would be poor, where no one would be hungry, where the worker would finally own the fruits of their labour.

Sources for this paragraph:

Revolutionary Dreams; utopian ideals
BBC; The road to revolution

Communism was not invented by monsters. It was invented by people who had seen the squalor of industrial capitalism, the misery of the peasantry, and the indifference of the Tsarist autocracy. Lenin believed that the revolution would lead to an ideal society – a communist society – where things would be shared and no one would exploit anyone else. The impulse was utopian. The error was in how it was implemented.

Part VI – Where the Revolutions Went Wrong: Implementation and Unchecked Power

All four movements – the Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the American Revolution – were necessary. All four were justified. And all four, in their implementation, gave too much unchecked power to small groups of administrators.

The French Revolution devolved into the Reign of Terror. By the time the Terror concluded in July 1794, some 17,000 people had been officially executed, and as many as 10,000 had died in prison or without trial. Large numbers of civilians were executed by revolutionary tribunals, with estimates ranging from 16,000 to 40,000, from aristocrats to ‘suspected’ enemies of the revolution. The Jacobins, who had been the most influential political club during the revolution, presided over a period during which well over 10,000 people were put on trial and executed for political crimes. The guillotine became not a tool of justice but an instrument of paranoia.

Sources for this paragraph:

Britannica; Reign of Terror statistics
Jacobins – Wikipedia
Nation.com.pk; civilians executed

The Russian Revolution – from which grew the gulags and the police state of the Stalinist epoch – soon gave rise to a highly centralized and bureaucratic party‑state, which eventually became committed to propelling rapid national industrialization by command and terror. The inherent principle of Soviet social life ran: “Unless you know, we shall teach you; unless you want, we shall force you.” The revolution that promised liberation became a system of forced collectivization, slave labour, and the Gulag.

Sources for this paragraph:

Dictator, The Revolution, The Machine
Cambridge; States and Social Revolutions
The Party and the KGB; Springer

The American Revolution, too, had its excesses. The founding elite remade governments to scale back the meaning and practice of democracy. The ideal of universal liberty coexisted with the reality of slavery. Indigenous peoples were displaced. Women were excluded from the franchise. The revolution that declared “all men are created equal” did not intend that promise to be fulfilled immediately – or, in some cases, ever.

Sources for this paragraph:

Taming democracy; library.tri

The Reformation, for its part, led to religious wars that devastated Europe. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) killed an estimated 8 million people – a mortality rate that exceeded that of World War I. The Reformation’s slogan of sola scriptura (“scripture alone”) did not prevent Catholics and Protestants from slaughtering each other over differing interpretations of that same scripture. The reformers, once they gained power, often proved as intolerant as those they had replaced.

Part VI‑B – The Capture of Revolutionary Elites by Collective Interest Groups

The pattern is not accidental. It is structural. Every revolution is led by a coalition of counter‑elites – ambitious, educated, often idealistic individuals who have been excluded from power under the ancien régime. They rally the masses with promises of liberation, equality, and justice. They overthrow the old order. And then – almost inevitably – they begin to act like the old order.

Why? Because they are not neutral instruments of the people. They are collective interest groups with their own agendas. The Jacobins were not the French nation; they were a political club. The Bolsheviks were not the Russian proletariat; they were a disciplined vanguard party. The American founders were not the entire colonial population; they were propertied white men, many of them slaveholders. The Protestant reformers were not the universal church; they were rival factions of theologians and princes.

The capture mechanism works in four stages:

Revolutionary coalition forms – counter‑elites unite around a shared enemy (the monarchy, the church, the capitalist class, the colonial power).
Coalition wins power – the old regime collapses or is overthrown.
Coalition fragments – without a common enemy, the counter‑elites turn on each other. The most ruthless, most organised, or most ideologically extreme faction purges the others.
Surviving faction becomes the new elite – it now faces the same temptations as the old elite: to preserve its own power, suppress dissent, and extract resources from the masses. The rhetoric of liberation is retained; the reality of liberation is deferred – indefinitely.

Thus, the revolution repeats the excesses of the ancien régime, but now under new branding. The Jacobin terror was not a deviation from the French Revolution; it was a logical consequence of revolutionary power concentrated in a faction that had no institutional checks. The Stalinist purges were not a betrayal of Leninism; they were a logical consequence of a one‑party state with no independent judiciary. The American founders’ failure to abolish slavery was not a minor oversight; it was a trade‑off to keep the Southern elite in the coalition, which then perpetuated plantation capitalism for another century.

This is the shared disease of all revolutions. The counter‑elites who challenge the old order are no more virtuous than the elites they replace. They simply have different badges. The solution is not to abolish revolutions – some are necessary – but to institutionalise checks that survive the revolutionary transition. Written constitutions, independent courts, free press, civil society organisations – these are not ornaments of liberal democracy. They are the only known antidotes to the capture of revolutionary power by a new ruling class.

Sources for this sub‑section:

Author’s synthesis based on comparative revolutionary studies (Crane Brinton, Theda Skocpol, Hannah Arendt).
Historical analysis of Jacobin club dominance, Bolshevik party discipline, American founding compromises, and Protestant princely ambitions.

Part VII – What This Means for Our Current Inquiry

The point of this essay is not to excuse the excesses of revolutions. It is to recognize that revolutions happen for a reason. The church had overstepped its boundaries. The monarchy had overstepped its boundaries. The capitalist class had overstepped its boundaries. In each case, the revolutionary impulse was a response to real, substantial, and sustained injustice.

In our previous essay on secularism and theology, we examined how revolutions usurped the authority of the church. This essay is the necessary counterpart: an acknowledgment that the pre‑revolutionary order was unjust, that the revolutionary ideals were noble, and that the failure was not in the revolution itself but in the failure to distribute power widely enough after the revolution – and in the inevitable capture of revolutionary elites by their own collective interest groups.

The lesson for today is simple: concentrated power corrupts, whether it is held by bishops, monarchs, oligarchs, or revolutionaries. The solution is not to oppose revolution – some revolutions are necessary. The solution is to ensure that after the revolution, power is not re‑concentrated in the hands of a small group of administrators. The solution is institutional design that disperses authority, checks ambition, and protects the vulnerable – even the vulnerable who were once the revolutionaries themselves.

Part VIII – Conclusion: The Benefit of the Doubt

We owe the revolutionaries the benefit of the doubt. Not because they were perfect, but because they faced an impossible task: to dismantle a corrupt order without becoming corrupt themselves. Nearly all of them failed in that second task. But that failure does not erase the justice of the first task.

The church had overstepped its boundaries. The monarchy had overstepped its boundaries. The capitalist class had overstepped its boundaries. The revolutions that followed – the Reformation, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution – were necessary responses to those overreaches. They were not mistakes. They were corrections.

Where they went wrong was not in their ideals but in their implementation. They gave too much power to too few people, and those people, predictably, repeated the sins of the old regime. That is not an argument against revolution. It is an argument for better institutional design.

The question for us is not whether to revolt. The question is how to revolt without becoming what we revolted against.

Sources for this blog post (by section):

Part I (Church overreach): Page: A Short History of the World; Wikisource ; Case against the Church; erenow.org ; PhilPapers; medieval corruption ; Britannica; Inquisition summary ; Whittier College Library ; Perez, Joseph; The Spanish Inquisition ; Wikipedia; Witch trials ; Cornell University; The World Bewitch’d ; BYU ScholarsArchive

Part I sub‑sections (Political Islam): Michael Driessen, The Politics of Islam, Catholicism, and the State ; Yin Zhengqing, “Study on the Reason why Radical Political Islam not Appear until the Late Twentieth Century” (2025) ; SOAS paper on abolition of Caliphate (1924) ; Columbia Global Reports, The Call ; DW report on Saudi ‘exporting extremism’ – $86 billion funding.

Part II (Reformation): Wikisource; A history of the Inquisition

Part III (French Revolution): Two Revolutions – AHA ; Causes of the French Revolution ; IPL; Compare And Contrast

Part IV (American Revolution): Digital History; Declaration grievances ; Western Civilization II

Part V (Communism): Revolutionary Dreams; utopian ideals ; BBC; The road to revolution

Part VI (Excesses): Britannica; Reign of Terror ; Jacobins – Wikipedia ; Nation.com.pk ; Dictator, The Revolution, The Machine ; Cambridge; States and Social Revolutions ; The Party and the KGB ; Taming democracy

Part VI‑B (Capture of revolutionary elites): Author’s synthesis (informed by Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution, Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions, Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, and historical case studies of the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, American founders, and Protestant reformers).

Part VII (Implications): Author’s synthesis

Part VIII (Conclusion): Author’s synthesis

End of post.