Religion and the State

During the sixteenth century, Protestant reformers such as Martin Luther (1483–1546) and John Calvin (1509–1564) challenged the Roman Church's monopoly over the interpretation of Christian doctrine and its maintenance of clerical obedience. The Reformation generated waves of violent persecution and the suppression of religious dissent as well as forceful resistance by the oppressed confessions. Catholic princes and cities burnt reformers of all stripes; Protestant rulers and communities did the same to Catholics as well as to members of other reforming sects. The state as an agent of confessional enforcement only reinforced the impression that effective use of coercion and violence (even if in the name of the salvation of souls) were the real qualifications for political leadership.

The controversial role of religion in public life in turn spawned major reappraisals of the relationship between religion and the state. Authors began to argue in favor of tolerating differences of conviction and rite. Sebastian Castellion (1515–1563) argued that coercion is an inappropriate tool for effecting a change of religious views since Christian belief must be held with sincere conviction; hence clerics and magistrates must refrain from persecution of convinced Christians who cling to doctrines that do not coincide with official teachings. Major figures in European philosophy weighed in on the side of religious toleration. Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) claimed a broad application for the right to liberty of thought and belief without inference from a sovereign power's (or a church's) determination of the truth or falsity of one's ideas. Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) asserted that persecution of religious diversity encouraged hypocrisy and eroded social order and that an erring conscience, if it be held in good faith, deserves as much protection as a correct one—a principle he extended even to atheists. Perhaps the most famous, although by no means the most original, proponent of toleration, John Locke (1632–1704), advocated toleration for most Christian (and perhaps some non-Christian) rites in his Epistola de Tolerantia (1689). For Locke, the role of the state should be confined to the maintenance of public tranquility and the defense of individual rights rather than the care of the soul.

Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1690) also stood at the culmination of another important line of early modern thought concerning the rights of populations to refuse obedience to tyrannical rulers, especially in matters of religion. Reforming Christians of a Calvinist persuasion led the way in articulating a theory of resistance to illegitimate applications of power. Initially, John Knox (1505–1572) and other British exiles propounded the view that government has a responsibility to God to eliminate all forms of idolatry (by which he meant Catholicism). If the ruler refuses to act on this duty, then lesser magistrates and even the common people must step in to suppress idolaters and their sympathizers—that is, Catholic priests and their royal protectors. The Huguenot reformers of France transformed this basic insight into a general account of resistance. According to them, a regime that aids, abets, and even guides the violent persecution of religious minorities may be licitly resisted. Authors including François Hotman (1524–1590) and Theodore Beza (1519–1605) produced a sizeable literature combining traditional Christian prohibitions against popular rebellion with the view that so-called intermediary magistrates—officials in service to a prince—are obliged to repel and contravene commands by their superiors that require religious persecution.

Finally, some thinkers of an Erastian bent wished to place religion entirely under the command of secular rule precisely in order to eliminate the conflicts that it seemed perpetually to engender. Intimations of this idea can be discovered in medieval authors such as Marsiglio of Padua (c. 1280–c. 1343) and Christine de Pisan (1364–c. 1430), for whom the priesthood constituted nothing more than a branch of temporal society under the control of the ruler. But the most robust statement of the secular position may in found in the Leviathan (1651) by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Hobbes, who identified the maintenance of peace and order as the sovereign state's principal function, singled out religion as an especially fertile source of political disruption. To remedy the divisiveness of religion, he offered a rather extreme solution in the second half of Leviathan: strictly limiting the autonomy of ecclesiastical officials and offices and reinterpreting Christian theology in a manner consonant with his conception of political sovereignty.