Talk:Anti-clericalism/Archives/2011/October

Thoughts about how to revamp this article

Upon reviewing this article, I am struck at what a poor job it does of presenting the topic. This article is too much of a coatrack and fails to present what anticlericalism is and what its history is. In its current state, the article mostly documents anti-clericalism by country but without presenting an integrated view of anti-clericalism as an international phenomenon that has persisted and evolved over the centuries. What I'm looking for at this point is some feedback as to how Wikipedia should present the topic of anti-clericalism. There are, IMO, three major topics: the history of anti-clericalism over the centuries, why anti-clericalism started and why it remains, what anti-clericalism looks like around the world today. This article addresses only the last of these three topics.

I'm still pondering whether all this can reasonably be covered in a single article or whether we need additional articles such as History of anti-clericalism. Creating such an article would allow this article to focus on anti-clericalism as it exists today.

My understanding of the history of anti-clericalism is that it developed in the Middle Ages as a reaction to the wealth of the Church and was further fueled by the Reformation, the Enlightenment, then ultimately the growth of socialism and atheist secularism in the modern era.

One question I have is whether anti-clericalism should be defined as just those ideas and actions targeted against clerics (i.e. priests) or also against religious (i.e. monks, nuns, brothers, sisters). It seems to me that anti-clericalism has targeted both clerics and religious, rarely making a distinction between the two. The recent sexual abuse scandal has tended to focus on Catholic priests although the experience in Ireland has involved members of Catholic religious orders as well.

--Pseudo-Richard (talk) 15:26, 19 October 2011 (UTC)