Religion and State

Religion and the Shaping of the Modern State

The expansion of Christianity occurred with the support of imperial Roman power but would never eradicate the initial duality that came from the conditions of its birth in the margins of Roman power and its structures. Both the alliance made with the Church to constitute the pedestal of the medieval monarchies and the rivalry at the highest level between religious and political powers, the Holy See and the Christian Empire, presuppose the definition of two distinct spheres: temporal and spiritual. And if the emergence of the territorial state in the Middle Ages is attributable to many other factors, first and foremost the requirements of war and its financing, its existence was reinforced by the struggle of the monarchs against Rome.

In its nation-state form, the European state also owed a great deal to the effects of the Reformation. The first reaction to the rupture of Western Christian unity was an attempt to remain loyal to the principle of a sole religion as a national cement—already one of the principal driving forces of the conversion of pagan monarchies to Roman Catholicism since the beginning of the Middle Ages. The Treaty of Augsburg in 1550 adopted the saying cuius regio eius religio and engaged a whole portion of Europe in the process of “confessionalization” by creating a mosaic of homogeneous political groups held together largely by an attachment to the same religion.

This homogeneity, however, never became complete, and the war continued to tear Europe apart. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 decreed the break with the old principle. It brought to an end a century of religious wars by accepting religious pluralism among the European states. Henceforth, the main role of the state would be to guarantee the coexistence rather than the salvation of the populations [Page 1065]and their religions. The creation of a diversified and specialized administration and bureaucracy characteristic of the modern state would use the services of many clerics and especially their mastery of the written language, but the sphere of its activity and the increase of its capabilities were applied to domains beyond any spiritual preoccupations.

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