Freemasonry: A Very Short Introduction - Andreas Önnerfors 2017

Perceptions, prejudices, and persecutions

Starting with early negative treatment in the press in the 18th century, freemasonry became an object of public persecution by governmental and Church authorities across Europe—persecution that peaked with the first papal ban in 1738 (the first of many). However, the brotherhood was first seriously exposed to governmental investigation when freemasonry was alleged to have contributed to the French Revolution in widespread political conspiracy theories. As a result, the Unlawful Societies Act was passed in 1799 by the British parliament, and was followed by restrictions and prohibitions in a number of other European countries. In the USA, an Anti-Masonic Party formed during the 1820s, fuelled by anti-masonic discourse in Europe. In Catholic and Orthodox countries, freemasonry was forced into secrecy due to predominantly religious prohibition, persecution, and accusations of ’Satanism’. This tendency towards secrecy deepened in these countries to protect freemasonry, which was frequently featured in liberal, national, and secular elite sociability.

At the turn of the 20th century, anti-masonic ideas were blended with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories such as the Russian Tsarist forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Anti-masonic ideas were then included in fantasies of a secret ’world conspiracy’, as formulated in Nazi imagination after the German defeat in World War I. Fascist rulers in Europe suppressed freemasonry, confiscated lodge property, and persecuted individual freemasons. The same pattern was repeated in the totalitarian communist systems of Eastern Europe. Although freemasonry had initially thrived, during the first ’Nahda’, the spiritual awakening of Arab nationalism during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the Middle East it has since been prohibited, its members persecuted, and included in virulent anti-Western conspiracy theories. Today, conspiracy narratives about freemasonry (and secret societies in general) are widely disseminated via the Internet and in pop culture references. Theories about a presumed plutocratic ’new world order’ (NWO) have re-emerged during the late 20th century, reinforcing the idea that our lives are governed by secret elites who orchestrate cover-ups of the ’truth’.