error and its rights

Secularism versus religion in 19th century Belgian politics:

There were Catholic butchers, bakers, chemists and doctors and there were Liberal butchers, bakers, chemists and doctors: the customer shopped with his own sort. Liberal processions went through the streets with blue flags and cornflowers in the buttonhole, while catholic processions used pink flags and poppies. The Priests on the one side and the Freemasons on the other roused this football crowd clamour to a frenzy at local and national elections. In the towns, where Liberals were strong, resolute atheists attacked religious processions with walking sticks; in the villages, the faithful broke up civil funerals and desecrated coffins.

From Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated. Both sides proceeded from the position best summed up by the Catholics: error has no rights. Ascherson comments that some of the more extreme secularists erected a kind of teleology of reason and progress that eventually led them a self-conception as a kind of tribe of reason, with Calvin as their boss shaman - much to the amusement of the Dutch. Present day jibes at secular fundamentalism may be overblown but you can see the same kind of thing in formation.