The Politics of Religion

Abstract

In the later Middle Ages, the Christian basis of European society was so widely assumed and enforced that, notwithstanding the rise in academic circles of naturalist and Aristotelian thinking about politics since the thirteenth century, in practice it was difficult for European Christians to imagine that stable societies could exist on any other foundation than the Catholic faith. One of the main long-term outcomes of the changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the spreading realisation that societies could not only exist but even flourish on radically different theological or ideological foundations. The possibility of such a shift in thinking was evident even before Henry VIII’s Reformation, in the alternative worlds presented respectively by Thomas More and Niccolo Machiavelli in the sixteenth century’s two most original works of political thought, Utopia and the Prince. But the fact that these texts were seen by most readers as exercises in, respectively, light-hearted satire and satanic depravity shows just how far away that possibility still was. Those long processes of change which we call the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, with their manifold political consequences for the internal arrangements and the external relations of European kingdoms and republics, were central to the gradual shifts in thinking which took place over those centuries, culminating in the radically different understanding of the place of religion in society which dominated the thought of the Enlightenment and of the American and French Revolutions.