Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict > Status Update

"The story goes that, after the Protestant Reformation divided Christendom along religious lines, Catholics and Protestants began killing each other for holding to different doctrines. The wars of religion, which encompassed over a century of chaos and bloodletting, demonstrated to the West the inherent danger of public religion. The solution to the problem lay in the rise of the modern state, in which religious loyalties were marginalized and the state secured a monopoly on the means of violence. Henceforth, religious passions would be tamed, and Protestants and Catholics could unite on the basis of loyalty to the religiously neutral sovereign state."

"There was a time when religion played an all-powerful role in European politics, with Protestants and Catholics organizing themselves into political factions and squandering the wealth of Europe in sectarian wars. English liberalism, as we saw, emerged in direct reaction to the religious fanaticism of the English Civil War. Contrary to those who at the time believed that religion was a necessary and permanent feature of the political landscape, liberalism vanquished religion in Europe." - Fukuyama

"The victory of liberalism is the victory of the peaceful pursuit of material comfort over irrational ideological strife, of which the wars of religion are the prime example."

"For this overall narrative to be true, each of the following components must be true:

A. Combatants opposed each other based on religious difference.

B. The primary cause of the wars was religion, as opposed to merely political, economic, or social causes.

C. Religious causes must be at least analytically separable from political, economic, and social causes at the time of the wars.

D. The rise of the modern state was not a cause of the wars, but rather provided a solution to the wars."

Against A.

After the Ninety-Five Thesis were nailed to the door, the first groups to attack each other were the Holy Roman Emperor (a Catholic) attacking the Pope and sacking Rome.

Afterwards it was the Catholic French King and the Catholic Emperor who would war back and forth for the next 40 years. The French would eventually ally themselves with the Muslim Turks to gain the upper hand. In turn, the Emperor allied himself with the Protestant princes in his realm, granting them religious freedom in exchange for their military support. Now Catholics and Muslims were fighting against Catholics and Protestants.

The Pope would launch one of his largest attacks against the devoutly Catholic Phillip II of Spain.

And on and on. In fact, there were only a handful of times when an army consisting entirely of Catholics lined up against an army consisting entirely of Protestants (and in these cases, the all-Catholics were always the armies of the Pope, the Emperor tended to utilize Protestant mercenaries). "Religious difference" does not seem to be any more than a factor.

"The absence of war between Lutherans and Calvinists also undermines the standard tale. If theological difference tends toward a war of all sects against all [as Hobbes would later claim], we should expect to find Lutheran-Calvinist wars, but in fact we find none. Although there were internal tensions in some principalities between Lutheran princes and Calvinist nobility or Calvinist princes and Lutheran nobility, no Lutheran prince ever went to war against a Calvinist prince. The absence of such wars cannot be attributed to the similarity of Lutheranism and Calvinism. There were sufficient theological differences to sustain a permanent divide between the two branches of the Reformation."

Against B.

"Why, in a war over religion, would those who share the same religious beliefs kill each other? Why, in a war over religion, would those on opposite sides of the religious divide collaborate? If the answer is that people prioritized other concerns over their religious views, then it does not make sense to call them wars of religion. If Catholics killed Catholics for political and economic reasons, did Catholics also kill Protestants for political and economic reasons?"

After citing the opinions of many historians about the Wars of Religion in France: "We have, then, one group of historians that dismisses religion as an important factor in the French civil wars of the sixteenth century, and another group that wants to reclaim religion as an important driving force among others in these conflicts. (We should note that similar conflicts of interpretation are present in the historiography of the other wars of religion beyond France.) We must at least note that historians have given us ample reason to doubt the straightforward tale of theological zealotry run amok that Voltaire, Rawls, Shklar, and others tell. No academic historian, with the possible exception of Crouzet, tells the story that way. With regard to component (B) of the myth of the wars of religion, then, we must conclude that the myth is at best a distorted and one-dimensional narrative; at worst, it eliminates so many of the relevant political, economic, and social factors as to be rendered false."

Against C.

"What happens, however, if, as Diefendorf says, the Eucharist creates a social body? What if, as Crouzet says, the monarchy is sacral?"

"Up to the sixteenth century, there simply was no coherent way yet to divide religious causes from social causes; the divide is a modern invention... I think we must conclude that any attempt to assign the cause of the wars in question to religion—as opposed to politics or other secular causes—will get bogged down in hopeless anachronism. The same, of course, is true of attempts to pin the blame on political and economic causes as opposed to religion. There is simply no way to isolate religion as the source of the conflict from the whole fabric of the status publicus. It is clear, then, that the standard narrative of the wars of religion will not stand up to scrutiny of the term religion."

Against D.

"Wolfart thinks that it is not quite right to claim that the distinction between religion and politics was simply absent. Wolfart believes, rightly I think, that it is more accurate to say that the distinction between religion and politics was being born in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."

The shoe is, actually, quite apparently on the other foot.

"The so-called wars of religion appear as wars fought by state-building elites for the purpose of consolidating their power over the church and other rivals... The point here is not that these wars were really about politics and not really about religion. The point is that the very distinction of politics and religion made possible by the rise of the modern state against the decaying medieval order—the transfer of power from the church to the state—was itself at the root of these wars... Much of the violence of the so-called wars of religion is explained in terms of the resistance of local elites to the state-building efforts of monarchs and emperors. "

The rise of the secular state, therefore, was emphatically NOT the solution to the wars. Far, far from it.