Fourierism and Christianity

Fourier's relation to Christianity was distant and often ironic. He was intellectually a child of the skeptical, hedonistic and libertine eighteenth century. His disciples, however, were romantic intellectuals with deep and unsatisfied religious longings, and they were moved by generous, high-minded and humanitarian impulses that found embodiment, in part, in a cult of Jesus that had little appeal for Fourier himself. There was no single Fourierist orthodoxy on religious questions. There was a great distance between "Voltairean" Fourierists like Victor Considérant and Catholic Fourierists such as Hippolyte de La Morvonnais. But all shared 1) the conviction that Fourier's ideas were an extension of Christ's teaching in the gospels, 2) a view of Jesus Christ as a preacher and creator of community, and 3) a view of Christianity as a potential source of the shared beliefs necessary to bind together a fragmented society. (JFB)