Church and State

 In the US we believe in the separation of church and state.  It's written both into the Constitution and into law.  There is no state religion, and people are not told that they can or cannot follow a particular religion.  Employers (other than churches) cannot refuse to hire someone based solely on their religious beliefs.  And yet many people feel that their own beliefs ought to be enshrined in law.  How did we get here?  And hey! isn't this supposed to be a blog about the Middle Ages?

 

Of course it is.  To understand why our founders wanted to separate church and state, one has to look at history going back to the eighteenth century and, before then, back to the Middle Ages.  The American War of Independence was fought against England, where the king (or queen) was (and is) the official head of the English (Anglican) church.  The seventeenth-century pilgrims came to North America because they could not worship as they wanted back in England.  No wonder our founders wanted to ensure separation of church and state.  (Modern Britain has freedom of religion now, even though it still has a state church.)

England and the rest of Europe had had extensive religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as first Catholics and Protestants went to war with each other, then different Protestants with each other.  A semi pause in all the fighting was the idea that each ruler got to declare the religion for his territory, "Cuius regio, eius religio" (His region means his religion).  If you didn't like the local state religion, tough, move somewhere else.

(Some of my Protestant ancestors left the little German state where they lived because the ruler was Catholic. They settled in France, because at the time Protestants, called Huguenots, were tolerated.  When the French crown decided everyone had to be Catholic, their descendants moved to Ireland, where at the time the English crown encouraged Protestantism.  You can see where this is going.)

But how about the Middle Ages?  There the separation of church and state would have made no sense.  Part of the responsibility of a ruler was supposed to be to bring his people to God, and that was understood to be by making sure they followed the True Religion, whatever that was.

Now in the Middle Ages there was not the wide mix of different versions of Christianity we have now, with all the Protestant denominations and variations of Catholicism and orthodoxy.  Everyone in the medieval West was supposedly following the same version of Christianity.  Of course in practice there was lots of variation, as different areas might well be different without even realizing they were, and there were reasonably sized communities of Muslims and Jews in Europe, who alternated between being persecuted and being tolerated.  Western Catholicism supposedly was open to Greek Orthodoxy (and its variants, like Russian Orthodoxy), but Eastern and Western Christianity declared the other heretics in the eleventh century and never made up.

The apparent unity of western Europe's religion was indeed often broken by certain groups being declared heretical, that is (as it was understood then) following deviant Christianity even though they ought to have known better.  Heretics of course always believed they were the true Christians, and the other guys were the heretics.  The wars of northern France against southern France in the thirteenth century with the support of the crown, the Albigensian Crusade, were efforts to overcome heresy.  With examples like this from history, it's not surprising that America was founded on the idea of not imposing a religion on anyone.

In recent years this has become complicated by some people arguing that their religious freedom is violated by other people doing things that their own version of religion considers Wrong, and that laws allowing them to do so are oppressive on their own religious freedom.  Examples of countries like Iran, where there really is a state religion enforced on everybody, ought to give such folks pause.  Suppose they discovered they were the ones the state declared heretics?  The overall level of religious tolerance in the modern US (and modern Europe for that matter) has made it too easy to forget what can happen when church and state really are united.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval religious and social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.