Dual Loyalties

After the ascendancy of Christianity to a position of worldly power, the issue of loyalty to God became entangled with the problems of loyalty to the church as an institution with influence in the world. The theologist Saint Augustine (354–430) believed that the church should be the supreme ruler of all Christian nations. Underpinning Saint Augustine's idea of the unity of Christendom was the notion that secular kings owed loyalty to the pope, the earthly leader of Christianity. This idea of rule by the church did not appeal to the secular world, and history records a divergence of views about the proper role of the church. Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the most prominent of the dissenters, made a sharp distinction between a person's loyalty to God and to an earthly superior by declaring a right to resist tyranny.

The Renaissance and Reformation witnessed the emergence of dual loyalties as the hold of the Catholic Church weakened and power concentrated in the hands of European monarchs. The Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) did not rely upon religion to justify loyalty but instead advised rulers to use cruelty to keep subjects united and faithful. The first loyalty tests grew out of the development of a new religious-political system during this time. When in the 1530s Henry VIII split with the Catholic Church and elevated Protestantism in England, he needed to identify and intimidate his opponents to maintain power. Loyalty tests weakened domestic enemies by forcing them to publicly declare allegiance to the English monarchy. As late as the seventeenth century, they would be required of Catholics settling on English land in the New World.