By 1939, there were only four out of about 150 bishops still not only alive but actually practising in their dioceses.

Hello, I'm Neil McGregor, and in this series of podcasts, I'm looking at objects to see how shared beliefs help shape societies.

In this final set of programmes, we explore the relationship between

faith and the political sphere.

This is the BBC.

Faith makes people kill other people, settle off bombs and start wars and dehumanise others who

disagree. That is a serious problem.

Anthony Grayling, philosopher and a powerful

advocate of secular humanism. The last programme was about states where the political order

sits directly under divine governance. This programme is about attempts to make a state with no

religion at all, about living without the gods.

In the core sense of faith as it relates to religious commitment,

I think it is a very dangerous thing.

One would always want to try to confront and challenge faith in that sense with reason.

Paris, Notre Dame, Sunday, 10th November, 1793.

If you had been here on that day, you would have found not a Catholic cathedral celebrating mass,

but modern Europe's first officially godless state,

celebrating in splendour its new scientific atheist religion,

the cult of reason. The revolutionaries had guillotined the king and abolished not just the Catholic

Church, but God. Here, on that November Sunday of 1793, to music specially composed by Francois Gossack,

the first Fete de la raison, the festival of reason, was celebrated in full pomp.

Here, inside the former cathedral, maidens and Roman tunics surrounded the goddess of reason,

...