Ippei Kawano
Jan Hus, Czech Secularism, and the Forgotten Christian Roots of Modern Individualism
If you wander through the beautiful streets of Prague, you will soon encounter the figure of Jan Hus, a national hero whose memory is preserved not only in statues scattered across numerous squares—most notably in the famous Old Town Square—but also in the form of a national holiday. Yet for all the reverence he receives, few, even among the Czechs themselves, seem to fully grasp who Hus was or what he tried to do.
Hus lived in 14th- and early 15th-century Prague, when the city was at its prime. Yet curiously, most of his monuments reflect a distinctly modern, 19th-century aesthetic. There is a simple explanation for this: the Jan Hus whom the Czechs celebrate today is not exactly the 14th-century theologian, but rather a 19th-century national symbol. For generations, Hus had largely faded from public consciousness, until he was plucked from obscurity during the wave of nationalism that swept across Europe.
It originated in France and spread to the Germans, who, struggling to find a purely historical basis for their nationhood, claimed that language should serve as the defining marker of a people. The Czechs responded not by asserting a deep-rooted historical identity—since the boundary between Czech and German had long been porous—but rather by embracing the same linguistic logic: if the Germans were to define themselves by their language, then the Czechs were certainly not Germans, as they did not speak the same tongue. And if the Germans were to construct their Wagnerian national mythology around the German-speaking people, then the Czechs would do the same around Czech-speakers. The reality, of course, was more ambiguous—especially in cities like Prague, where many people spoke both languages.
Hus was resurrected to conveniently resolve this ambiguity. When he came into conflict with the Catholic Church, it happened that Czech-speaking students at the University of Prague largely supported him, while their German-speaking counterparts sided with the Church. This division offered, retrospectively, a useful narrative—proof, as it were, that the Czechs had long possessed a distinct cultural and national consciousness. That the theological concerns which animated Hus’s life bore little resemblance to modern nationalist ideals was, by then, a trivial inconvenience.
Jan Hus himself was likely a universalist, concerned above all with what it meant to be a good Christian—regardless of whether one came from a Czech-speaking land or not. While Jesus undoubtedly lived a modest life, Christianity, as it became the religion of the Roman Empire, also absorbed its imperial structure—with the pope at the top, followed by bishops, archbishops, and so on. Over time, the Church arranged Christian life in such a way that practicing the faith required a significant transfer of authority to the institutional Church. It governed life’s major milestones—from birth and marriage to reproduction and death—controlling not only rituals and sacraments but also a significant share of wealth. And with institutional power came corruption: sins could now be forgiven through the payment of indulgences.
Christianity is essentially a morality of the powerless—those without worldly influence—turning inward to spiritual purity and discovering moral supremacy through it. Conversely, it casts power itself as morally corrupting, even evil—a dynamic Nietzsche famously described as slave morality. With this inversion at its core, it was only a matter of time before the Catholic Church, which had become immensely powerful by the 14th century, faced accusations of betrayal. One of its most articulate critics was Jan Hus, as well as John Wycliffe and his followers, the Lollards, in England. These reformers began to ask: why must Christianity accumulate wealth and mirror imperial hierarchies, when Christ had lived a life of modesty? Such structures, they argued, distracted the faithful from the truth—that salvation is not granted through indulgences purchased from priests, but through a private relationship between the soul and God. Institutions like the Catholic Church do not possess inherent moral authority; they must justify themselves before this relationship. Being a good Christian became, above all, a matter of individual conscience—and only upon that could any church rightfully claim legitimacy.
Jan Hus was ahead of his time—by which I mean, ahead of the printing press. He and many of his contemporaries had already arrived at conclusions that Martin Luther would later echo during the Protestant Reformation. But where Luther’s words spread rapidly across Europe thanks to the newly invented press, Hus was less fortunate. When he appeared before the Council of Constance, he was imprisoned, condemned as a heretic, and executed by fire—before his ideas had the chance to fully circulate.
The people who followed Hus became known as the Hussites. Among their most influential supporters were the Czech aristocrats, whose motives were not always purely theological. One of Hus’s most provocative ideas was that the Church should not inherit the wealth of Christians after death—that property should remain in the hands of lay society. This was a convenient doctrine for the nobility, who stood to gain from curbing ecclesiastical power. But whatever the precise motivations, once the idea took root that there could be valid theological grounds to challenge Church authority, the “roasting of the goose”— Hus in Czech means goose—was not enough to extinguish the movement. The Hussites eventually engaged in open warfare against Catholic crusaders, in what became known as the Hussite Wars. That Christians should take up arms over their interpretation of faith may seem ironic, but history is replete with such contradictions. Just as the Church had long borrowed the administrative scaffolding of the Roman Empire, so too had it absorbed the warrior ethos of the Germanic knights to defend its interests. Violence, it seems, was not a perversion of Christian institutions but a structural necessity. Perhaps reality, rather than undermining doctrine, simply revealed its limits.
The Hussites, however, did not ultimately prevail. Bohemia came under the control of the Habsburgs, and the region was gradually re-Catholicized. For a time, Prague experienced a final period of cultural glory under Rudolf II, the artistic and eccentric emperor who maintained a degree of tolerance toward Protestants with Hussite roots. But his successor, Emperor Matthias, and his heir, Ferdinand II, reversed that policy. The imperial court was moved from Prague to Vienna, and religious tolerance was swiftly withdrawn. Mounting Counter-Reformation pressures culminated in the infamous Defenestration of Prague: two Catholic noblemen and their unfortunate secretary—likely collateral damage—were thrown out of a castle window by angry Protestant nobles. Remarkably, all three survived, landing in a pile of manure. This dramatic gesture triggered the Bohemian Revolt, which in turn ignited the Thirty Years’ War—one of the deadliest conflicts in European history. An estimated 15–30% of the population of Central Europe perished, with no clear victor. But the long-term result was profound: the Peace of Westphalia permanently recognized Protestantism within the Holy Roman Empire, and the moral authority of the Catholic Church emerged visibly weakened. The stage was set for the emergence of secular thought.
While the Thirty Years’ War would eventually engulf much of Europe and reshape its political and religious landscape, the Bohemian Protestants who had sparked the conflict were decisively defeated early on. Their hopes for religious and political autonomy were crushed at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, scarcely two years after the Defenestration of Prague. The Habsburgs responded by forcefully reasserting Catholic control over Bohemia. Among their cultural tools was the elevation of John of Nepomuk—a 14th-century priest executed because of some obscure political reasons. According to historical accounts, he had supported the Archbishop’s choice of abbot over the king’s, and the paranoid King Wenceslaus IV had him tortured and killed. Centuries later, the Habsburgs revived his image in a way strikingly similar to how 19th-century Czech nationalists would later elevate Jan Hus: not simply as a religious figure, but as a symbol crafted to serve a political purpose. Just as Hus came to embody Czech resistance and identity, John of Nepomuk was reshaped into a Catholic counter-icon. His canonization was vigorously promoted by the Habsburgs, and he became the patron saint of the confessional seal. The popular legend claims that he refused to betray a queen’s confession and was thrown from Charles Bridge into the Vltava River. Statues of him—typically with five stars circling his head—proliferated across Bohemia and Moravia in the 18th century. Today, in St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague Castle, John of Nepomuk rests in one of the most extravagant baroque caskets in Central Europe: a gleaming emblem of Habsburg rule and re-Catholicization.
If you were to ask me today what most defines the Czech people, I would answer: their secularism—radical, even by European standards. But Czech secularism is not merely the absence of organized religion; it is the absence of sanctity itself. Ceremonies are not sacred, sex is not sacred, professions—even teachers or doctors—are not sacred. At times, it seems that life itself is not sacred. I have never seen a terminal cancer ward with less existential weight than in a Czech hospital. In most measurable ways, Czechs do not differ dramatically from their neighbors. But in this regard, they are unmistakably distinct. Their secularism is not a simple loss of faith, nor a passive detachment from church institutions—it is an active, deeply internalized posture toward life. It is a mindset that places personal judgment and conscience above any larger-than-self order whose intentions are unknowable. How did this mindset arise in Europe—and why is it especially strong in Czechia?
The radical shift in Christianity initiated by the Hussites—and later completed by Protestantism after much bloodshed—amounted to what Larry Siedentop calls the democratization of reason. The Catholic Church had long held a monopoly on interpreting the Christian way of life, shaping it into a system of behavioral rules designed to consolidate its institutional power. Confession, marriage, burial—each required the sanction of a Church-appointed priest. Sin could be absolved not merely through repentance, but through payments: indulgences sold as shortcuts to salvation. The grandeur of Catholic churches across Europe stands in stark contrast to the lives of the medieval faithful who funded them—peasants who subsisted on stale bread and watery cabbage stew, reheated endlessly from the same pot. Yet this disparity provoked little outrage at the time. The Church was seen not merely as powerful, but as just—its authority morally unassailable. That is, until Hus, Wycliffe, and later Luther each—largely independently—recognized a contradiction at the heart of Christian life: that the faithful should not be guided by the institutional Church, but by God directly. This conceptual separation between God and Church gave rise to the radical idea that institutions must be answerable to conscience. Once released into the public imagination, this idea profoundly weakened the Church’s claim to absolute authority.
So, if the Catholic Church was no longer a reliable guide to morality, how was a good Christian to follow the way of the Lord? Unlike Islam—which tends to regard divine revelation as closed to interpretation—Christianity has long permitted a degree of human mediation in understanding God’s will. This is partly because the New Testament was written not by Christ himself, but by his followers—human authors interpreting divine events. To reconcile this interpretive flexibility with doctrinal unity, Christianity introduced the concept of the Holy Spirit as a validating presence. Later theological disputes—especially the tension between monotheism and Christ’s divinity—led to the formalization of the Holy Trinity, a conceptual framework that not only reconciled Jesus with God but also elevated the Holy Spirit as the divine presence within each believer. It was a doctrine, agreed upon by council vote, that quietly legitimized the individual conscience as a site of religious truth. Yet this theological leniency had enormous implications: it opened the door to replacing the Church’s interpretive monopoly with the judgment of each believer. It was a spiritually democratizing moment. What now mattered was not the Church’s pronouncements, but your own relationship with God—mediated through your own conscience. The “individual” emerged as the new unit of religious meaning.
Yet decentralizing biblical interpretation created its own challenges. Once the authority to interpret Scripture was handed to the individual, disagreement became inevitable. Protestantism may have begun as a cohesive movement, but it quickly fractured—so thoroughly that even Luther himself could no longer maintain authority over its direction. Almost immediately, Protestantism splintered into competing sects, a development that would deeply shape the 17th-century Christian mindset, especially in the religious experiments of the American colonies (a fascinating story in its own right, though beyond the scope here). One side effect of this era was the emergence of a new language of “freedom.” Modern audiences often misinterpret freedom as the right to do whatever one wants—but if that were true, what would stop your neighbor from assaulting your family? Historically, freedom meant something far more precise: freedom from the Church’s control over one’s beliefs and practices. Speech, marriage, assembly—these were all once regulated by ecclesiastical authority. As a Protestant, you were now free from that structure. It was a negative liberty first: a space cleared for the conscience.
Christianity is a monotheistic religion—one God, one Truth, one ultimate Perspective that matters. Unlike the polytheistic traditions of the Greeks or the Japanese, where multiple gods could coexist and conflicting values were tolerated, Christianity carried an absolutist impulse. In such a framework, pluralism itself becomes a threat: if only one path is true, then all others must be false. That is why blood had to be shed before tolerance could emerge. The Thirty Years’ War did not end in unity, but in exhaustion—and in a grudging recognition that theological consensus was impossible. But that recognition came at a price: it undermined Christianity’s most basic claim to exclusive truth. How can one God command some believers to confess their sins aloud, and others to read silently? To be festive on Sundays in one region, and somber in another? To baptize infants in one church, and demand adult conversion in another? Even Protestantism, grounded in conscience, began to fracture under the weight of its contradictions. What eventually rose in its place was secularism—a worldview that preserved the moral architecture of Protestantism, but without God.
The land of Bohemia—later known as Czechia—embraced this mental shift toward individual conscience earlier than most of Europe, through the Hussite movement. The violent re-Catholicization imposed by the Habsburgs in the 17th century likely alienated Czech religious sentiment: the new Catholicism was seen not as spiritual salvation, but as a political obligation. When Jan Hus was revived in the 19th century as a nationalist symbol, he became the moral counterpoint to Catholic imperial authority—a cultural landmark around which a Czech identity could be drawn. Nowhere was the Czech historical “contour” more clearly visible than in the contrast between Hussite-Protestant resistance and Catholic-Habsburg domination. By the time the First Czechoslovak Republic was established, religiosity in Czech lands had already declined—well before communism arrived. That Czech secularism long predates the Iron Curtain is further underscored by the fact that neighboring countries like Poland and Hungary, which endured the same regime, remained far more religious.
This new form of Christianity—and later, secularism—also helps explain the rise of science in early modern Europe. Why didn’t ancient Greece, China, or the Islamic world develop the scientific method in the form it took in 17th-century Europe? One reason may be that science required a specific mindset: the belief that the universal order of the world must be discerned through the observations of the individual, and that even authority must submit to demonstrable evidence. If the Reformation taught believers to read Scripture without Church mediation, then it also taught them to search for truth without institutional permission. Observation became a sacred act. For some, this meant reading the Bible; for others, it meant reading the Book of Nature. William of Ockham, in particular, argued that the world as it exists is not a reflection of eternal abstractions but the product of God’s free choice—meaning it must be studied as it is, not as logic says it ought to be. The ancient Greeks, especially Plato and his followers, believed that the idea of an apple was more real than any actual apple—that truth lived in the realm of abstraction. Hence their preference for geometry, where ideal forms replace the messy world of matter. But in the new Christian imagination, reality itself—this specific, empirical world—became the arena of truth. That shift, from abstraction to observation, was the critical seed of the scientific mind.
I studied medicine at the University of Prague, where Jan Hus once taught—an institution now known as Charles University. Our graduation ceremony was held in the historic Karolinum, and inside stood yet another 19th-century statue of Hus. It’s become tradition for new graduates to pose beside him. The real Jan Hus was reportedly short and stout, but the statue—like many others—presents him as the Old Wise Man archetype: tall, lean, prophetic. It is a face onto which generations have projected meaning far beyond the man himself. As I looked up at his carved face, I found myself wondering what he would think if he knew that the theological disputes he once waged would one day shape Czech national identity, cause the demise of Christianity itself, and help give rise to the modern scientific mind. Such was the consequence of roasting the goose.
(All photos were taken from Wikipedia)
