Ridicule at Home, Institutions Abroad

Reception in Comte's own intellectual milieu was harsh: Thomas Henry Huxley's dismissive summary of the project as Catholicism minus Christianity captured the common objection precisely, that Comte had rejected the god of the church he opposed while keeping nearly all its institutional apparatus, priesthood, sacraments and calendar included, and that verdict has proven considerably more durable in general memory than any detailed account of what the religion actually taught. Despite the ridicule, the Religion of Humanity found genuine organized followings in France and Britain and, most consequentially of all, in Brazil, where positivist temples were actually built and used for regular observance rather than existing only on paper.

Brazilian positivism reached directly into national symbolism: the motto Ordem e Progresso, order and progress, taken straight from Comte's own formula, was placed on the Brazilian national flag when the country became a republic in 1889, giving Comte's deliberately constructed religion a permanent, if largely unrecognized by most Brazilians today, place in the visual identity of an entire nation. Brazilian positivists were especially active in public life beyond the temples themselves, arguing in print and in politics for causes including the separation of church and state and the abolition of slavery, so the movement's practical influence on Brazilian public affairs in this period reached considerably further than its comparatively small number of formally organized adherents would suggest on its own.