The Temple That Outlasted the Others

Positivist chapels and temples were built in France, in Britain and, most extensively, in Brazil during the decades following Comte's death in 1857, but almost all of them eventually closed as their small congregations aged and were not replaced. The Porto Alegre temple, raised by the local positivist community over roughly a dozen years from 1916 to 1928, is the exception: it has continued to hold services into the twenty first century, making it, by a wide margin, the longest continuously active site of the Religion of Humanity anywhere. Its survival owes something to Brazilian positivism's unusually deep institutional roots, which ran through the military and civilian figures who founded the Brazilian republic in 1889 and left the positivist motto, Ordem e Progresso, permanently inscribed on the national flag, a level of civic embedding the religion never achieved in France or Britain, where it remained a small philosophical sect from the outset.