After the murder of Henry III in 1589, the Huguenot leader Henry of Navarre succeeded to the throne as Henry IV and brought the French Wars of Religion to an end by converting to Catholicism and adopting a policy of strict neutrality. In the Edict of Nantes (1598), he granted religious and civil liberties to the Huguenots, and when the parlement expelled the Jesuits from France, he had them reinstated. This did not mark the birth of the tolerant secular state, however, since Henry had not abandoned the ideal of une foi; the Edict of Nantes was simply a temporary settlement, an attempt to buy time by winning the Huguenots over. The French crown was still too weak to achieve the religious uniformity that, the kings believed, would help to centralize the state and bind the nation together.89
Despite Henry’s policy of toleration, though, Europe drifted inexorably toward the horror of the Thirty Years’ War, which would kill about 35 percent of the population of central Europe. Here again, though religious solidarities were certainly a factor in this series of conflicts, it was never their sole motivation.90 This was already clear in 1609, nine years before the war began, when the Calvinist Frederick V, elector palatine, tried to create a pan-European Union of Protestant principalities against the Habsburgs. Very few of the Protestant princes joined, but the union did gain Catholic support from Henry IV and Carlo Emmanuele of Savoy. The war started in earnest with an uprising in Catholic Bohemia against the Catholic Habsburg emperor Ferdinand II: in 1618 the rebels defiantly offered the crown of Bohemia to the Calvinist Frederick V, but the other members of the Protestant Union refused to support him, and two years later the union disbanded.91 It took two years for the Habsburgs to quash the revolt and re-Catholicize Bohemia, and meanwhile the Dutch had opened a new round of hostilities against Habsburg rule.
The princes of Europe resisted Habsburg imperialism, but there was rarely a wholly solid “Catholic” or “Protestant” response. Catholic France nearly always supported the Protestant princes of Germany against the empire. The war was fought by mercenaries available to the highest bidder, so Protestants from Scotland and England, for example, served in the armies of Catholic France.92 The Catholic general Ernst von Mansfeld led the imperial army against the Catholic Bohemian rebels at the start of the war but in 1621 switched sides and commanded the troops of the Calvinist Frederick V in Bohemia.93 Albrecht von Wallenstein, the Bohemian mercenary leader who became the supreme commander of the Catholic imperial army, was a Lutheran, and many of his foot soldiers were Protestants who had fled Catholic persecution in their own countries. Wallenstein seemed more interested in military entrepreneurism than religion.94 He transformed his huge estates into a vast arsenal for his private army of half a million men. Indifferent to the social standing or religious convictions of his associates, he demanded only obedience and efficiency from his troops, who were allowed to live off the countryside and terrorize the rural population.
By 1629 Emperor Ferdinand seemed to have regained control of the empire. However, a year later the tide turned, when Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of France, persuaded the Protestant warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden to invade the Habsburg Empire. Adolphus is often presented as the hero of the Protestant cause, but he did not mention religion in his declaration of intent in June 1630 and found it difficult at first to attract allies.95 The most powerful German Protestant princes saw the Swedish invasion as a threat and formed a third party, holding aloof from both the Swedes and the Habsburgs. When Lutheran German peasants tried to drive the Lutheran Swedes out of their country in November 1632, they were simply massacred.96 Eventually, however, after Adolphus’s first victory over the Catholic League of German princes at Magdeburg in 1631, many territories that had tried to remain neutral joined the Swedish offensive. Inadequate methods of financing, supplying, and controlling the troops meant that Swedish soldiers resorted to looting the countryside, killing huge numbers of civilians.97 The mass casualties of the Thirty Years’ War can partly be attributed to the use of mercenary armies who had to provision themselves and could only do so by brutally sacking civilian populations, abusing women and children, and slaughtering their prisoners.
Catholic France had come to the rescue of the Protestant Swedes in January 1631, promising to supply their campaign, and later dispatched troops to fight the imperial forces in the winter of 1634–35. They received the backing of Pope Urban VIII, who wanted to weaken Habsburg control of the Papal States in Italy. To counter the combined Swedish, French, and papal alliance, the Protestant principalities of Brandenburg and Saxony were reconciled with the Catholic emperor at the Peace of Prague (1635), and within a few months most of the Lutheran states also made peace with Ferdinand. The Protestant armies were absorbed into the imperial forces, and German Catholics and Protestants fought together against the Swedes. The rest of the Thirty Years’ War now became largely a struggle between Catholic France and the Catholic Habsburgs. Neither could achieve a decisive victory, and after a long, enervating struggle, treaties were signed, known collectively as the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which left the Austrian Habsburgs in control of their hereditary lands and the Swedes in possession of Pomerania, Bremen, and the Baltic region. Prussia emerged as the leading German Protestant state, and France gained much of the Alsace. Finally Calvinism became a licit religion in the Holy Roman Empire.98 By the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Europeans had fought off the danger of imperial rule. There would never be a large unified empire on the Persian, Roman, or Ottoman model; instead, Europe would be divided into smaller states, each claiming sovereign power in its own territory, each supported by a standing, professional army and governed by a prince who aspired to absolute rule—a recipe, perhaps, for chronic interstate warfare.
“Religious” sentiments were certainly present in the minds of those who fought these wars, but to imagine that “religion” was yet distinguishable from the social, economic, and political issues is essentially anachronistic. As the historian John Bossy has reminded us, before 1700 there was no concept of “religion” as separate from society or politics. As we shall see later in this chapter, that distinction would not be made until the formal separation of church and state by early modern philosophers and statesmen, and even then the liberal state was slow to arrive. Before that time, “there simply was no coherent way yet to divide religious causes from social causes; the divide is a modern invention.”99 People were fighting for different visions of society, but they had as yet no way to separate religious from temporal factors.
This was also true of the English Civil War (1642–48), which resulted in the execution of Charles I and the creation in England of a short-lived Puritan republic under Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658). It is more difficult to list examples of participants in this war crossing denominational lines, since Cromwell’s Puritan army and the royalist troops were all members of the Church of England. They held different views of their faith, however. The “Puritans” were dissatisfied with the slow and limited progress of the Reformation in their country and wanted to “purge” the Anglican establishment of “popish” practices. Instead of worshipping in elaborate church buildings with authoritarian bishops, they formed small, exclusive congregations of those who had experienced a “born-again” conversion. Certainly the heavy-handed attempts of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury (1573–1645), to root out Calvinism in the English and Scottish churches, his suspension of Puritan ministers, and his support of royal absolutism were crucial irritants. Cromwell was convinced that God controlled events on earth and had singled out the English to be his new chosen people.100 The success of his New Model Army in defeating the royalists at the Battle of Naseby in 1645 seemed to prove the “remarkable providences and appearances of the Lord,” and he justified his brutal subjugation of Ireland as a “righteous judgment of God.”101
But the civil war is no longer regarded as a last eruption of religious bigotry laid to rest by Charles II’s constitutional monarchy in 1660.102 It too was part of the larger European struggle against state centralizati
on. Charles I had been trying to achieve an absolute monarchy similar to those established on the continent after the Thirty Years’ War, and the civil war was an attempt to resist this centralization and protect local interests, freedoms, and privileges. Again, transcending sectarian divisions, Scottish Presbyterians and Irish Catholics had for a time fought alongside the Puritans to weaken the monarchy. Even though Charles had tried to impose episcopal rule on the Scots, they made it clear in their Proclamation of 1639 that they were fighting not only for religion but also “to shake off all monarchical government.” In the Grand Remonstrance, presented to Charles in 1641, the Puritans took it for granted that religion and politics were inseparable: “The root of all this mischief we find to be a malignant and pernicious design of subverting the fundamental laws and principles of government upon which the religion and justice of this kingdom are firmly established.”103
As William Cavanaugh explains in The Myth of Religious Violence, these wars were neither “all about religion” nor “all about politics.” Yet it is true that these wars helped create the idea of “religion” as a private and personal activity, separate from mundane affairs.104 Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, who masterminded Sweden’s participation in the Thirty Years’ War, told the Swedish Council that the conflict was “not so much a matter of religion, but rather of serving the status publicus, wherein religion is also comprehended.”105 He could speak in this way because the Lutheran church had already been absorbed or “comprehended” by the Swedish state. New configurations of political power were beginning to force the Church into a subordinate realm, a process that involved a fundamental reallocation of authority and resources. When the new word secularization was coined in France during the late sixteenth century, it originally referred to “the transfer of goods from the possession of the Church into that of the ‘world’ [saeculum].”106 Legislative and judicial powers that had been in the Church’s remit were gradually transferred to the new sovereign state.
Like most states, these early modern kingdoms were achieved by force: all struggled to annex as much land as possible and had internal battles with the cities, clergy, local associations, and aristocracies who jealously guarded traditional privileges and immunities that sovereign states could not permit.107 The modern state had come into being by militarily defeating rival political institutions: the empire, the city-state, and the feudal lordship.108 The church, which had been so integral to medieval government, also had to be subdued. Thus the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars were “the crucible in which some of the competing forces from an earlier age were consumed in the fire and others blended and transmuted into new compounds … the matrix of all that came after.”109
These political and social developments required a new understanding of the word religion. 110 One of the characteristics of early modern thought was a tendency to assume binary contrasts. In an attempt to define phenomena more exactly, categories of experience that had once co-inhered were now set off against each other: faith and reason, intellect and emotion, and church and state. Hitherto, the “internal” and “external” worlds had been complementary, but now “religion” was becoming a private, internalized commitment separate from such “external” activities as politics. Protestants, whose reinterpretation of Christianity was itself a product of early modernity, would define religion and set an agenda to which other faith traditions would be expected to conform. This new definition mirrored the programs of the new sovereign states, which were relegating “religion” to the private sphere.
A crucial figure in this development was Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), who was not only a philosopher but also a statesman committed to the state control of ecclesiastical affairs. His most important work, De Veritate, which influenced such important philosophers as Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), René Descartes (1596–1650), and John Locke (1632–1704), argued that Christianity was neither an institution nor a way of life but a set of five truths that were innate in the human mind: (1) a supreme deity existed, (2) which should be worshipped (3) and served by ethical living and natural piety; (4) human beings were thus required to reject sin and (5) would be rewarded or punished by God after death. Because these notions were instinctive, self-evident, and accessible to the meanest intelligence, the rituals and guidance of a church were entirely unnecessary.111 These “truths” would, however, seem strange indeed to Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, or Daoists, and many Jews, Christians, and Muslims would also find them bleakly unrepresentative of their faith. Herbert was convinced that “all men will be unanimously eager for this austere worship of God,” and since everybody would agree on “these natural tokens of faith,” it was the key to peace; “insolent spirits” who refused to accept them must be punished by the secular magistracy.112 Emphasis on the “natural,” “normal,” and “innate” character of these core ideas implied that those who did not discover them in their minds were in some way unnatural and abnormal: a dark current was emerging in early modern thought. This extreme privatization of faith, therefore, had the potential to become as divisive, coercive, and intolerant as the so-called religious passions it was trying to abolish.
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) also saw state control of the church as essential to peace and wanted a strong monarch to take over the church and enforce religious unity. A committed royalist, he wrote his classic Leviathan (1651) in exile in Paris after the English Civil War. The disruptive forces of religion, Hobbes argued, must be curbed as effectively as God had subdued Leviathan, the biblical chaos-monster, to create an ordered universe. Hobbes was adamant that pointless squabbling about irrational dogmas had been entirely responsible for the Wars of Religion. Not everybody shared this view, however. In Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), the English political theorist James Harrington discussed the economic and legal issues that had contributed to these conflicts, but Hobbes would have none of it. The preachers alone, he insisted, had been “the cause of all our late mischief” by leading the people astray with “disreputable doctrines.” The Presbyterian divines, he believed, had been particularly culpable in stirring up unruly passions before the English Civil War and were “therefore guilty of all that fell.”113 Hobbes’s solution was to create an absolute state that would crush the tendency of human beings to cling obstinately to their own beliefs, which doomed them to perpetual warfare. Instead, they must learn to recognize the frailty of our grasp on truth, enter into a contractual relationship with one another, elect an absolute monarch, and accept his ideas as their own.114 This ruler would control the clergy in such a way as to prevent even the possibility of sectarian conflict.115 Alas, history would show that Hobbes’s solution was too simplistic; the states of Europe would continue to fight one another savagely, with or without sectarian strife.
John Locke’s solution was religious freedom, since, in his view, the Wars of Religion had been caused by a fatal inability to entertain other points of view. “Religion,” he argued, was a “private search” and as such could not be policed by the government; in this personal quest, everyone must rely on “his own endeavours” rather than an external authority. To mingle “religion” and politics was a grievous, dangerous, and existential error:
The church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immoveable. He jumbles heaven and earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these two societies, which are in their original end, business, and in everything perfectly and infinitely different from each other.116
Locke assumed that the separation of politics and religion was written into the very nature of things. But this, of course, was a radical innovation that most of his contemporaries would find extraordinary and unacceptable. It would make modern “religion” entirely different from anything that had gone before. Yet because of the violent passions it supposedly unleashed, Locke insisted that the segregation of “religion” from government was “above all things necessary” for the creation of a peac
eful society.117 In Locke we see the birth of the “myth of religious violence” that would become ingrained in the Western ethos.
It is true that Western Christianity had become more internalized during the early modern period. This is evident in Luther’s conception of faith as an interior appropriation of Christ’s saving power, in the mysticism of Teresa of Ávila (1515–82), and in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). In the past the exploration of the inner world had compelled Buddhist monks to work “for the welfare and happiness of the people” and Confucians to engage in a political effort to reform society. After his solitary struggle with Satan in the wilderness, Jesus had embarked on a ministry of healing in the troubled villages of Galilee that led to his execution by the Roman authorities. Muhammad had left his cave on Mount Hira for a political struggle against the structural violence of Mecca. In the early modern period too, the Spiritual Exercises had propelled Ignatius’s Jesuits all over the world—to Japan, India, China, and the Americas. But modern “religion” would try to subvert this natural dynamic by turning the seeker in upon himself, and inevitably, many would rebel against this unnatural privatization of their faith.
Unable to extend the natural human rights they were establishing to the indigenous peoples of the New World, the Renaissance humanists had already revealed the insidious underside of early modern ideas that still inform our political life. Locke, who was among the first to formulate the liberal ethos of modern politics, also revealed the darker aspect of the secularism he proposed. A pioneer of tolerance, he was adamant that the sovereign state could not accommodate either Catholicism or Islam;118 he endorsed a master’s “Absolute, Arbitrary, Despotical Power” over a slave that included “the power to kill him at any time.” Himself directly involved in the colonization of the Carolinas, Locke argued that the native “kings” of America had no legal jurisdiction or right of ownership of their land. Like the urbane Thomas More, he found it intolerable that the “wild woods and uncultivated waste of America be left to nature, without any improvement, tillage and husbandry,” when it could be used to support the “needy and wretched” of Europe.119 A new system of violent oppression was emerging that would privilege the liberal, secular West at the expense of the indigenous peoples of its colonies.
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