Fields of Blood

by Karen Armstrong

  41. Martin Luther, “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants” (1525), trans. Charles M. Jacobs, rev. Robert C. Schultz, in SPW, p. 86.

  42. Steven Ozment, The Reformation of the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven, CT, 1975), pp. 10–11, 123–25, 148–50.

  43. Charles A. McDaniel Jr., “Violent Yearnings for the Kingdom of God: Münster’s Militant Anabaptism,” in James K. Wellman, ed. Belief and Bloodshed: Religion and Violence Across Time and Tradition (Lanham, MD, 2007), p. 74. The social danger persisted, even though in the last days of Anabaptist Münster, its leader Jan of Leyden set himself up as king and introduced a pseudo-imperial court and a reign of terror.

  44. Cohn, Pursuit of Millennium, pp. 255–79.

  45. I have discussed this at length in The Case for God (London and New York, 2009). See also Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind (New York, 1962); Smith, Belief in History (Charlottesville, VA, 1985); Smith, Faith and Belief (Princeton, NJ, 1987).

  46. William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (Oxford, 2009), pp. 72–74.

  47. Thomas More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. Thomas M. C. Lawlor (New Haven, CT, 1981), p. 416.

  48. François André Isambert, ed., Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises depuis l’an 420 jusqu’à la Révolution de 1789 (Paris, 1821–33), 12:819.

  49. Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1999), p. 201.

  50. Raymond A. Mentzer, Heresy Proceedings in Languedoc, 1500–1560 (Philadelphia, 1984), p. 172.

  51. Philip Spierenberg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Pre-Industrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge, UK, 1984); Lionello Puppi, Torment in Art: Pain, Violence, and Martyrdom (New York, 1991), pp. 11–69.

  52. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, pp. 77–79.

  53. David Nicholls, “The Theatre of Martyrdom in the French Reformation,” Past and Present no. 121 (1998); Susan Brigdon, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), p. 607; Mentzer, Heresy Proceedings, p. 71.

  54. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, pp. 80–81.

  55. Deuteronomy 13:1–3, 5, 6–11, quoted by Johannes Eck, Handbook of Commonplaces (1525), and by Calvin to justify his execution of Michael Servetus, who denied the doctrine of the Trinity.

  56. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, pp. 84–87, 111, 154, 261–69.

  57. William Allen, Apologie of the English College (Douai, 1581); Gregory, Salvation at Stake, p. 283.

  58. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, pp. 285–86.

  59. Kamen, Spanish Inquisition, pp. 204–13, 203, 98.

  60. Ibid., pp. 223–45.

  61. Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, p. 122.

  62. J. V. Poliskensky, War and Society in Europe, 1618–1848 (Cambridge, UK, 1978), pp. 77, 154, 217.

  63. Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, pp. 142–55.

  64. Richard S. Dunn, The Age of Religious Wars, 1559–1689 (New York, 1970), p. 6; James D. Tracy, Charles V, Impresario of War: Campaign Strategy, International Finance, and Domestic Politics (Cambridge, UK, 2002), pp. 45–47, 306.

  65. Wim Blockmans, Emperor Charles V, 1500–1558 (London and New York, 2002), pp. 95, 110; William Maltby, The Reign of Charles V (New York, 2002), pp. 112–13.

  66. Tracy, Charles V, p. 307; Blockmans, Charles V, p. 47.

  67. Klaus Jaitner, “The Pope and the Struggle for Power during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Klaus Bussman and Heinz Schilling, eds., War and Peace in Europe, 3 vols. (Münster, 1998), 1:62.

  68. Maltby, Reign of Charles V, p. 62; Tracy, Charles V, pp. 209–15.

  69. Tracy, Charles V, pp. 32–34, 46.

  70. Maltby, Reign of Charles V, pp. 62–62.

  71. Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, p. 164.

  72. Dunn, Age of Religious Wars, pp. 49, 50–51.

  73. Steven Gunn, “War, Religion, and the State,” in Cameron, Early Modern Europe, p. 244.

  74. Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, pp. 145–47, 153–58.

  75. James Westfall Thompson, The Wars of Religion in France, 1559–1576 : The Huguenots, Catherine de Medici, Philip II, 2nd ed. (New York, 1957); Lucien Romier, “A Dissident Nobility Under the Cloak of Religion,” in J. H. M. Salmon, ed., The French Wars of Religion: How Important Were Religious Factors? (Lexington, MA, 1967); Henri Hauser, “Political Anarchy and Social Discontent,” cited in Salmon, French Wars.

  76. Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 59 (1973).

  77. Mack P. Holt, “Putting Religion Back into the Wars of Religion,” French Historical Studies 18, no. 2 (Autumn 1993); John Bossy, “Unrethinking the Sixteenth-Century Wars of Religion,” in Thomas Kselman, ed., Belief in History: Innovative Approaches in European and American Religion (Notre Dame, IN, 1991); Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: La violence au temps des troubles de religion (Seyssel, 1990); Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (New York, 1991). Some scholars have argued that Davis was herself incorrect to describe the conflict as “essentially” religious, because religion still permeated all human activities; see Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, pp. 159–60.

  78. Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge, UK, 1995), pp. 17–18.

  79. Bossy, “Unrethinking the Sixteenth-Century Wars of Religion,” pp. 278–80.

  80. Virginia Reinberg, “Liturgy and Laity in Late Medieval and Reformation France,” Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (Autumn 1992).

  81. Holt, French Wars of Religion, pp. 18–21.

  82. Ibid., pp. 50–51.

  83. J. H. M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1975), p. 198; Henry Heller, Iron and Blood: Civil Wars in Sixteenth-Century France (Montreal, 1991), p. 63.

  84. Holt, French Wars of Religion, p. 99; Salmon, Society in Crisis, pp. 176, 197.

  85. Salmon, Society in Crisis, pp. 204–5.

  86. Holt, French Wars of Religion. pp. 50–51.

  87. Heller, Iron and Blood, pp. 209–11, 126.

  88. Holt, French Wars of Religion, pp. 156–57; Salmon, Society in Crisis, pp. 282–91.

  89. Holt, French Wars of Religion, pp. 3–4, 126, 168–69; Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, pp. 173–74.

  90. Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, pp. 147–50.

  91. Geoffrey Parker, The Thirty Years’ War (London, 1984), pp. 29–33, 59–64.

  92. Ibid., p. 195.

  93. Dunn, Age of Religious Wars, pp. 71–72.

  94. William H. McNeill, Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since AD 1000 (Chicago, 1982), pp. 120–23; Robert L. O’Connell, Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression (New York and Oxford, 1999), pp. 143–44.

  95. Ibid., pp. 121–23.

  96. Parker, Thirty Years’ War, pp. 127–28.

  97. Jeremy Black, “Warfare, Crisis and Absolutism,” in Cameron, Early Modern Europe, p. 211.

  98. Parker, Thirty Years’ War, pp. 142, 216–17.

  99. Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, p. 159; John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400 – 1700 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 170–71.

  100. Andrew R. Murphy, “Cromwell, Mather and the Rhetoric of Puritan Violence,” in Andrew R. Murphy, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence (Chichester, UK, 2011), pp. 528–34.

  101. Thomas Carlyle, ed., Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, 3 vols. (New York, 1871), 1:154, 2:153–54.

  102. Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, p. 172.

  103. Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War (London, 1998), pp. 25, 10–25, 58–59, 90–97, 89, 85.

  104. Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, pp. 160–72.

  105. Parker, Thirty Years’ War, p. 172.
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br />   106. Jan N. Brenner, “Secularization: Notes Toward the Genealogy,” in Henk de Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York, 2008), p. 433.

  107. Heinz Schilling, “War and Peace at the Emergence of Modernity: Europe Between State Belligerence, Religious Wars, and the Desire for Peace in 1648,” in Bussman and Schilling, War and Peace in Europe, p. 14.

  108. Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, UK, 1997), p. 4.

  109. Salmon, Society in Crisis, p. 13.

  110. Cavanaugh, Myth of Religious Violence, pp. 72–85; Russell T. McCutcheon, “The Category ‘Religion’ and the Politics of Tolerance,” in Arthur L. Greil and David G. Bromley, eds., Defining Religion: Investigating the Boundaries Between the Sacred and the Secular (Oxford, 2003), pp. 146–52; Derek Peterson and Darren Walhof, “Rethinking Religion,” in Peterson and Walhof, The Invention of Religion, pp. 3–9; David E. Gunn, “Religion, Law and Violence,” in Murphy, Blackwell Companion, pp. 105–7.

  111. Edward, Lord Herbert, De Veritate, trans. Meyrick H. Carre (Bristol, UK, 1937), pp. 303, 298.

  112. Edward, Lord Herbert, De Religio Laici, trans. and ed. Harold L. Hutcheson (New Haven, CT, 1944), p. 127.

  113. Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth; or, The Long Parliament, ed. Frederick Tönnies (Chicago, 1990), pp. 55, 95.

  114. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, UK, 1998), 3.26; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, UK, 1991), p. 223.

  115. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 315, 431–34.

  116. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Indianapolis, 1955), pp. 31, 27.

  117. Ibid., p. 17.

  118. Ibid., p. 15.

  119. John Locke, “Second Treatise,” 5:24, 5:120–21, 5:3, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, UK, 1988).

  120. Hugo Grotius, Rights of War and Peace, in Three Books 2:2:17; 2:20:40 (London, 1738), cited in Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, pp. 103–4.

  121. Hobbes, On the Citizen, p. 30.

  122. John Donne, Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley, 1959), 4:274.

  10 ♦ THE TRIUMPH OF THE SECULAR

  1. Thomas Morton, “New English Canaan” (1634–35), and John Cotton, “God’s Promise to His Plantations” (1630), in Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco, eds., The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology (Cambridge, MA, 1985), pp. 49–50.

  2. Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars: Religious Politics and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York, 1999), pp. 3–32; Carla Garden Pesteria, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia, 2004), pp. 503–15; Clement Fatoric, “The Anti-Catholic Roots of Liberal and Republican Conception of Freedom in English Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 66 (January 2005).

  3. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in Heimert and Delbanco, Puritans in America, p. 91.

  4. John Winthrop, “Reasons to Be Considered for … the Intended Plantation in New England” (1629), ibid., p. 71.

  5. Winthrop, “Model of Christian Charity,” p. 82.

  6. Cotton, “God’s Promise to His Plantations,” p. 77.

  7. Robert Cushman, “Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the Parts of America,” in Heimert and Delbanco, Puritans in America, pp. 43–44.

  8. Perry Miller, “The Puritan State and Puritan Society,” in Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1956), pp. 148–49.

  9. John Smith, “A True Relation,” in Edwin Arber and A. C. Bradley, eds., John Smith: Works (Edinburgh, 1910), p. 957.

  10. Perry Miller, “Religion and Society in the Early Literature of Virginia,” in Errand, pp. 104–5.

  11. William Crashaw, A Sermon Preached in London Before the Right Honourable Lord Werre, Lord Gouernour and Captaine Generall of Virginea (London, 1610), in Miller, Errand, pp. 111, 138, 101.

  12. David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1985), pp. 11–13; Louis B. Wright, Religion and Empire: The Alliance Between Piety and Commerce in English Expansion, 1558–1625 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1943); Miller, “Religion and Society,” pp. 105–8.

  13. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumous, or Purchas His Pilgrim, 3 vols. (Glasgow, 1905–6), 1:1–45.

  14. “A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia” (1610), in Peter Force, ed., Tracts (New York, 1844), 3:5–6.

  15. Miller, “Religion and Society,” pp. 116–17.

  16. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: From 1492 to the Present, 2nd ed. (London and New York, 1996), pp. 12, 13.

  17. Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York and Toronto, 2012), pp. 15–17.

  18. Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumous 1:41–45, 138–39.

  19. Preston, Sword of the Spirit, pp. 31–38.

  20. Bradford, History of the Plymouth Plantation, in Zinn, People’s History, p. 15.

  21. Ronald Dale Kerr, “Why Should You Be So Furious? The Violence of the Pequot War,” Journal of American History 85 (December 1998).

  22. Preston, Sword of the Spirit, pp. 41–45; Andrew R. Murphy, “Cromwell, Mather and the Rhetoric of Puritan Violence,” in Murphy, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence (Chichester, UK, 2011), pp. 525–35.

  23. Miller, “Puritan State,” pp. 150–51.

  24. Sherwood Eliot Wirt, ed., Spiritual Awakening: Classic Writings of the Eighteenth-Century Devotios to Inspire and Help the Twentieth-Century Reader (Tring, UK, 1988), p. 110.

  25. Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1968), p. 43.

  26. Miller, “Puritan State,” p. 150.

  27. Solomon Stoddard, “An Examination of the Power of the Fraternity” (1715), in Heimert and Delbanco, Puritans in America, p. 388.

  28. Perry Miller, “Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening,” in Errand, pp. 162–66.

  29. Ibid., p. 165.

  30. Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge, UK, 1985), pp. 14–15.

  31. The original draft of the Declaration listed the self-evident rights as “life, liberty and property”; only later was that amended to “the pursuit of happiness.”

  32. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 198.

  33. Bloch, Visionary Republic, pp. 81–88.

  34. Timothy Dwight, A Valedictory Address to the Young Gentlemen Who Commenced Bachelors of Arts, July 27, 1776 (New Haven, CT, 1776), p. 14.

  35. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in New World, p. 226.

  36. Thomas Paine, Common Sense and the Crisis (New York, 1975), p. 59.

  37. Bloch, Visionary Republic, pp. 55, 60–63, 29, 31.

  38.Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation (San Francisco, 1987), p. 38.

  39. James Madison to William Bradford, April 1, 1774, in William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal, eds., The Papers of James Madison, 17 vols. (Chicago, 1962–91), 1:212–13.

  40. James Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance” (1785), in Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers, p. 145.

  41. Jefferson, Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786), in Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers, p. 150.

  42. Henry S. Stout, “Rhetoric and Reality in the Early Republic: The Case of the Federalist Clergy,” in Mark A. Noll, ed., Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980 s (Oxford and New York, 1990), pp. 65–66, 75.

  43. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT, and London, 1989), pp. 22, 25–129.

  44. John F. Wilson, “Religion, Government and Power in the New American Nation,” in Noll, Religion and American Politics.

  45. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers, p. 44.


  46. Perry Miller, Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York, 1962), p. 192.

  47. Miller, “Puritan State,” p. 146.

  48. Thomas Jefferson to William Baldwin, January 19, 1810, in Dickenson W. Adams, ed., Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels (Princeton, NJ, 1983), p. 345; Jefferson to Charles Clay, January 29, 1816, ibid., p. 364.

  49. Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, pp. 68–157.

  50. Daniel Walker Howe, “Religion and Politics in the Antebellum North,” in Noll, Religion and American Politics, pp. 132–33; George M. Marsden, “Religion, Politics, and the Search for an American Consensus,” ibid., pp. 382–83.

  51. Mark A. Noll, “The Rise and Long Life of the Protestant Enlightenment in America,” in William M. Shea and Peter A. Huff, eds., Knowledge and Belief in America: Enlightenment Traditions and Modern Religious Thought (New York, 1995); cf. D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730 s to the 1980 s (London, 1989), p. 74; Michael Gauvreau, The Evangelical Century: College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression (Kingston, ON, and Montreal, 1991), pp. 13–56.

  52. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey Claflin Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, 2000), p. 43; Tocqueville’s emphasis.

  53. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford and New York, 2002), pp. 93–95.

  54. Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), pp. 24–25.

  55. John M. Murrin, “A Roof Without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity” in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward E. Carter II, eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American Identity (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987), pp. 344–47.

  56. Noll, Civil War, pp. 25–28.

  57. Claude E. Welch, Jr., Political Modernization (Belmont, CA, 1971), pp. 2–6.

  58. John H. Kautsky, The Political Consequences of Modernization (New York, London, Sydney, and Toronto, 1972), pp. 45–47.

  59. T. C. W. Blanning, “Epilogue: The Old Order Transformed,” in Euan Cameron, Early Modern Europe: An Oxford History (Oxford, 1999), pp. 345–60; Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the French Revolution to the Great War (New York, 1995), pp. 48–66.