Jeffrey Tyssens, born on 9 October 1965, is a Belgian historian and academic. He obtained his doctorate at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), where he is a professor in the Department of History, Archaeology, Arts, Philosophy and Ethics. He is known for his work within the Secular Studies Association Brussels and the Brussels Centre for Religious and Secular Studies (BCRS), a joint ULB–VUB research group.
His research focuses mainly on the contemporary political and social history of Belgium and Europe, processes of secularisation, church–state relations, freethought movements, and the secularisation of death and burial practices. He has also specialised in the history of European education policy, teachers' trade unionism and the history of Freemasonry, particularly in the context of 19th- and 20th-century fraternal organisations. In the course of his academic career he has received prestigious awards including the Prijs Prof. Dr. R. Doehard-De Bock (1987), Laureaat van de Reisbeurzenwedstrijd (1989), the Prijs der Alumni van de Universitaire Stichting (1998) and the Prijs Maurits De Vroede (2000).
Belgian Freemasonry is well known, in its great majority, as belonging to the liberal, secular, adogmatic tendency. As is so often the case, this configuration is the product of a confrontation with the Catholic Church. Although the Church had launched an assault on Freemasonry at the international level as early as 1738, this hostility did not really translate to the Austrian Netherlands, the territories that would later form Belgium: the public authorities did not endorse the condemnation, and the lodges therefore recruited a largely Catholic membership, even if theirs was a latitudinarian Catholicism.
After the French Revolution, and certainly after Belgian independence in 1830, tensions nevertheless mounted, and finally, with the episcopal letter of 1837 forbidding believers to belong to Freemasonry, a definitive break occurred. If, in 1837, Masons were still for the most part practising Catholics, despite their liberal political leanings, in the decades that followed they would increasingly distance themselves from the Church, and also from faith as such. A Masonic spiritualism took the place of the original Catholicism, evolving in turn towards a philosophical pluralism in which this deism did not disappear, but was nonetheless reduced to a minority position by individual philosophical conceptions of an agnostic or atheist kind.
This philosophical transformation went hand in hand, in the 19th century, with a growing societal commitment to the secularisation of the public sphere, notably with regard to state schooling (the “school struggle”) and to the status of cemeteries and funerary practices. In the course of the 20th century, this commitment became less a matter for the lodges and more one for individual Masons. The declining attention of the political left – an increasingly divided left, moreover – to these particular issues was accompanied by a certain depoliticisation of Belgian Freemasonry, in which secular sensibilities did not disappear, but became less decisive for the daily life of the lodges. The debates on regularity after the Second World War also held back Masonic engagement more generally.
Today, those discussions largely belong to the past. Secularisation – paradoxically – and the emergence of other societal sensibilities, such as ecology and diversity, mean that this secular profile no longer takes the self-evident forms it once did, and is giving way – not without internal tensions – to attitudes that are often more ambiguous than in the past.
