Church-state Conflict Research Articles

At the Intersection of Faith, Allegiances Toward the State, and Economic Deprivation: The Case of the Christian Democratic Unions in 19th Century Western Europe

Why were Christian democratic unions (CDUs) among workers and farmers more proactive in some Western European states than in others? Marxist theories explain union activity by industrialization. However, CDUs were not the most active in the late 19th century in rapidly industrializing states, e.g., Italy and Germany. Using social identity theory and Lipset’s & Rokkan’s cleavage theory, this paper conducts process tracing on the German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Belgian cases to test the following argument: CDUs were more likely to develop in states where anticlerical attacks unleashed a center-periphery conflict. CDUs are less likely to expand in states where anticlerical attacks precipitated a church-state conflict. The presence of a Catholic minority moderated this relationship. In the Protestant-dominant states, Catholicism allowed for mobilizing individuals and maintaining cohesion. The Lutheran states’ hostility toward Catholic activism and the regional concentration of the minority accentuated this denominational difference, which catalyzed CDU development.

Explaining Morality Policy Coalitions in Spanish Parliamentary Votes: The Interaction of the Church-State Conflict and Territorial Politics

ABSTRACT In this article we empirically explore the impact of the state-Church conflict on progressive moral policies. Taking Spain as a case study, we analyse the parliamentary interaction of political parties in a number of policy domains that provoke a moral conflict. We examine the principal legislative acts relating to abortion, divorce, same-sex marriage, euthanasia and gender equality from the early 1980s to 2021. We look beyond the religious divide and argue that its interaction with territorial politics, which is in turn shaped by specific institutional features, explains the formation of political coalitions that are conducive to moral legislation. Furthermore, we show that political coalitions vary depending on how explicit or implicit a given morality conflict is.

Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico's Religionero Rebellion

Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico's Religionero Rebellion

Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico's Religionero Rebellion by Brian A. Stauffer

Reviewed by: Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico's Religionero Rebellion by Brian A. Stauffer Julian F. Dodson Victory on Earth or in Heaven: Mexico's Religionero Rebellion. By Brian A. Stauffer. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2019. Pp. 392. $75.00. ISBN: 9780826361271.) Brian A. Stauffer's masterfully written and researched monograph treats one of the lesser-known or understood religious conflicts of the nineteenth century—Mexico's Religionero Rebellion, 1873–1877. One of the more significant contributions that Stauffer makes (one of a list certainly far too long to include in this brief review) is that the Religionero Rebellion established, or made possible, the mending of the relationship between Church and state that came with the liberal and anticlerical governments of Benito Juarez and Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. Church-state détente, as Stauffer asserts, provided the lasting stability of the Mexican state over the course of the Porfiriato, "allowing for both the consolidation of the Porfirian state and the institutional renaissance of the Catholic Church" (p. 2). More precisely, Stauffer argues that Porfirio Díaz's rise to power depended on his capacity to negotiate with a rising Catholic conservatism typified by the Religioneros in Michoacán. There is welcomed nuance in the analysis of the institutional history of the Church in the period of rapid political and social change between Independence and the Religionero Rebellion. "Catholic restorationism," as Stauffer terms it, involved a series of internal Church reforms that reinforced the Church's alignment with the Vatican and the prerogatives of the Pope, but also often bowed to the liberal and secular state. This restorationism divided rural parishioners in their support of the Church and shaped the regional character of the Religionero Rebellion itself. In his analysis, Stauffer makes clear that the rebellion often spilled over the neat boundaries of Church-state conflict. With sources ranging from local newspapers and military reports to the personal correspondence of Porfirio Díaz and his supporters in the state of Michoacán, the details of the rebellion, its context, and the federal military response are incredibly well researched. As Stauffer points out, however, motivations of those involved in popular movements are notoriously difficult to identify. In order to approach the problem of motivations, Stauffer employs a rich combination of parish records, correspondence between rural priests and urban counterparts, and records pertaining to the division of indigenous lands in the years leading up to the rebellion that allow the author to identify convincingly the impacts of the liberal-era reparto on local Religionero mobilization. It is his attention to the local-level dynamics, as well as his grasp on the push and pull between popular faith and major reforms within the nineteenth-century Church that makes Stauffer's research of particular import to the field of nineteenth-century Mexican history. Unlike previous works on the topic, which tended to paint participants as the unwitting dupes of the clergy, driven on by the admonitions of the priest and the landlord, and the Church itself as predatory, monolithic, and unflinchingly anti-modern, Stauffer provides an important view of the rebellion from the local level and a much more nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of factors that motivated the belligerents in the rebellion. The more nuanced understanding of a Church in transition and internally divided regarding its relationship with liberalism and the state is a much-needed [End Page 231] revision to the extant historiography on the nineteenth-century Church. Stauffer's research and methodologies are of value not only to the scholar of the late nineteenth-century Mexican Church, but certainly also the historian of popular religious and agrarian conflict of the postrevolutionary period. Victory on Earth or in Heaven is refreshingly clearly written, well-researched, and a much-needed addition to the literature on religious conflict in nineteenth-century Mexico. Julian F. Dodson Washington State University Copyright © 2022 The Catholic University of America Press

People Love Their Religion: Political Conflict on Religion in Early Independent Mexico

Global histories commonly attribute the secularization of the state exclusively to Europe. However, the church state conflict over these issues has been an important thread in much of Latin America. In Mexico, questions about the role of religion and the church in society became a major political conflict after independence. Best known for the Mexican case are the disputes over the constitution of 1857, which laid down the freedom of religion, and the Cristero Revolt in the 1920s. However, the history of struggles over secularization goes back further. In 1835, the First Republic ultimately failed, because of the massive protests against the anticlerical laws of the government. In the paper, this failure is understood as a genuine religious conflict over the question of the proper social and political order, in which large sections of the population were involved. Beginning with the anticlerical laws of 1833, political and religious reaction in Mexico often began with a pronunciamiento (a mixture of rebellion and petitioning the authorities) and evolved into conflicts over federalism vs. centralism.

Catholic Monroeism: U.S. Support for the Catholic Church During the Mexican Revolution, 1914–1929

In 1823, President James Monroe declared the Western Hemisphere off-limits to European powers, and in 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt offered a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, claiming a role for the U.S. in policing Latin America. The term Catholic Monroeism describes the application of the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary to support the Catholic Church in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. Facing anticlerical rhetoric and policies that restricted the Catholic Church's freedom in Mexico between 1914 and 1929, the U.S. government intervened on behalf of the Church. State Department records show the church-state conflict in Mexico was at the forefront of diplomatic discussions between the two countries. The U.S. government, in weighing intervention in Mexico, believed that the Church could promote harmony and order during a time of national upheaval and violence. Defending Catholicism in Mexico served as a vital component of American foreign policy and a matter of national self-interest for U.S. Catholics, whose previous attention to foreign relations focused on their European homelands.

Culture and tax avoidance: the case of Italy

ABSTRACT Culture is increasingly used as an explanatory variable for tax evasion. So far, we know, however, little about the mechanisms that link culture and tax behavior. This paper is a historical-sociological study of how religion influences tax behavior. The contribution focuses on the Italian case, among Western-European countries one with the highest evasion rates. It argues that the willingness of Italians to pay their taxes still suffers today from the Church–state conflict of the 19th century. To the Vatican, territorial integration of the Italian state posed an existential threat, both at the political (loss of territory) and at the spiritual level (diffusion of liberalism). The paper shows how Catholic socio-economic thinkers developed ideas about just taxation in response to Italian reunification that were directed against the Italian state and used by the Vatican to delegitimize it. The paper shows that it is not only rational decisions about the possibility to get audited or low public service provision that drives tax evasion. Instead Italian tax evasion is legitimized through a historically grown mistrust toward the state.

Without enemies, without friends. Morality policies, the Roman Catholic Church, and Ireland’s ‘secular’ party system

ABSTRACT The ‘two worlds of morality politics’ framework suggests that the historical structure of the party system has a major influence on the politics of morality issues. This study uses the case of Ireland to examine that proposition. Ireland is unusual in that it combines the absence of an historical church-state conflict in its party system with an historically strong Roman Catholic Church. It is therefore a ‘critical case’ for the ‘two worlds’ framework, which brings to the fore the interaction of the Church and the party system. It is also a puzzling case in the timing and sequence of its reforms. Focusing on the politics of contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage, and divorce, we show that the Church had no strong secularising opponents (‘enemies’); however, when public attitudes changed and when liberalising interest groups mobilised, nor did the Church have parties who were close allies (‘friends’). Case studies of abortion and same-sex marriage show in greater depth how, in the presence of changing attitudes and mobilisation, the Church lacked a foothold in the party system that would allow it to obstruct reforms. The study’s findings open a conversation between the heretofore separate literatures on morality politics and Church influence.

Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War by Julia G. Young

Reviewed by: Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War by Julia G. Young Anne M. Martínez Mexican Exodus: Emigrants, Exiles, and Refugees of the Cristero War. By Julia G. Young. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. Pp. xii, 271. $82.00. ISBN 978-0-19-020500-3.) My nonagenarian father has vivid memories of going to a “bootleg” Catholic kindergarten in the early 1930s, trying to avoid soldiers in Pénjamo, Guanajuato on his way to the house of the week, where Catholic nuns offered elicit lessons on the faith to young Mexicans in the aftermath of the Cristero War. My American-born father, whose family fled to Chicago during the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s, grew up in his mother’s hometown in the Catholic heartland of Mexico. His story, like those recounted in Julia Young’s Mexico Exodus, reveals the transnational nature of Mexican communities, and the ways Catholicism permeated the journeys abroad and returns home for many Mexicans across multiple generations. Dr. Young writes that her primary argument is that the Cristero War had a much wider geographic impact than previously understood. Indeed, this is her [End Page 179] intervention in Mexican historiography. For American Catholic historians, “the transnational forms of popular activism and resistance that occurred within the Mexican emigrant diaspora” (13) are much more significant. The book describes countless failed attempts by Cristeros in exile in the United States to overthrow their government. These failures do not reduce the impact of Cristero exiles; rather they illustrate the abiding commitment to the Cristero cause despite the overwhelming odds when two governments and many of their own emigrant countrymen were against them. Chapter 1 details the long history of Church-State conflict in Mexico. Chapter 2 brings Cristero migrants—both lay and clerical—into focus, highlighting their journeys to cities across the U.S. Southwest and Midwest. Young centers the work among Cristeros in the United States to keep pressure on the Mexican government to repeal the Calles Law in the third chapter, creating tensions within local communities and building networks of Cristero exiles across the United States. In the fourth chapter, Young considers largely unsuccessful efforts to mobilize the U.S. Catholic hierarchy and lay communities in support of the Cristero resistance. Chapter 5 outlines the lasting influence of the Cristeros in the Catholic patriotism of Mexicans like my father in the decade following the 1929 settlement between Church and state. The final chapter features the lasting resonance of the Cristero era and its martyrs for Mexicans and Mexican Americans. In the epilogue, Young displays contemporary commemorations of the Cristero era by American Catholic groups and Mexican American Catholics. The strength of Mexican Exodus is the unearthing of countless stories of Mexicans in exile rallying around their faith and against their government from the United States. Though occasional glimpses of Catholic practice among early twentieth-century Mexican American communities have been captured in previous texts, they rarely mention Cristeros or political dissension around issues of religion. Young describes the tensions the Cristero War brought to these communities in vivid detail and shows that Cristeros in the United States did not just bide their time until they could return to Mexico, or settle in to established Mexican communities in the United States. They continued the fight for their faith within local communities and kept their focus—emotional, political, and financial—on removing the Calles regime from power. The book would benefit from a thorough copy edit. In addition to wording issues here and there, for example, Francis Kelley’s surname is misspelled twice in a paragraph in which it appears three times (48). These kinds of errors detract from the narrative and make the reader wonder what other oversights there might be. Mexican Exodus is a significant contribution to the growing historical literature on Mexican American Catholicism. Julia Young’s vital history illustrates the lived religion of Cristeros and their descendants in the United States. [End Page 180] Anne M. Martínez University of Groningen Copyright © 2019 The Catholic University of America Press

The Routes of Intransigence:Mexico's ‘Spiritual Pilgrimage’ of 1874 and the Globalization of Ultramontane Catholicism

In the fall of 1874, in the midst a particularly severe round of Church-state conflict, Mexico's archbishop, Pelagio Antonio Labastida y Dávalos, introduced a novel weapon in the Catholic Church's struggle against liberal anticlericalism. He had sought and obtained a special dispensation from Pope Pius IX for all Mexicans to participate in a “spiritual pilgrimage,” a month-long exercise of mental travel, prayer, and contemplation that would figuratively transport the faithful out of Mexico's anticlerical milieu and into the purified air of Jerusalem, Rome, and other Old World holy sites, where they would pray for divine intercession on behalf of the embattled Church. The practice had been inaugurated a year earlier by lay Catholics in Bologna, as a response to the prohibition of mass pilgrimages in the flesh in the former Papal States. Labastida y Dávalos felt that spiritual pilgrimage could be especially effective in Mexico, where the anticlerical government of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada had embarked on a radical program of secularization. In fact, the recently codified Laws of Reform had likewise prohibited acts of public religiosity in Mexico, attempting thus to suppress the myriad local processions and mass pilgrimages that helped to define Mexican Catholicism.

Relações Igreja-Estado no Brasil no período da ditadura militar

A recente publicação do Relatório Final da Comissão Nacional da Verdade (CNV) recupera algumas discussões temáticas vinculadas à atuação política de influentes atores e instituições sociais no período histórico que abrange o golpe de Estado de 1964 e os anos de ditadura militar. O Relatório Final concede destaque à Igreja Católica, mas considera contraditória a atuação política desta instituição eclesiástica diante da ruptura institucional e vigência do regime de exceção. A proposta deste artigo é problematizar alguns aspectos teóricos e analíticos subjacentes à produção de pesquisas acadêmicas sobre o catolicismo contemporâneo, com a finalidade de reavaliar a trajetória política da Igreja Católica no Brasil, com ênfase em explicitar as relações Igreja-Estado, no período de vigência da ditadura militar (1964-1985).

Between ‘National Community’ and ‘Milieu’: German Catholics at War, 1939–1945

This article examines German Catholics’ sense of community and identity during the Second World War. It analyses how far they were able to reconcile their religious faith with support for Nazism and the German war effort and questions the extent to which Catholicism in the Rhineland and Westphalia represented either a sealed confessional subculture or a homogenising Nazified ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft). The article argues that, in their pure forms, neither of these analytical paradigms accounts for the complexities of German Catholics’ attitudes during this period, which were far more contested and diverse than outlined by much existing historiography. Religious socialisation, Nazi propaganda and older nationalist traditions shaped Catholics’ mentalities during the Third Reich, creating a spectrum of opinion concerning the appropriate relationship between these influences and loyalties. At the level of lived experience, Catholics’ memberships of religious and national communities revealed themselves to be highly compatible, a tendency which in turn exerted a restraining influence on church–state conflict in wartime Germany.

Education, religion, and risk in Peshawar: A missional self-examination

Religious freedom is at stake as the Church of Pakistan and its Diocese of Peshawar struggle to regain oversight of Edwardes College in Peshawar, an institution the church founded and managed for almost 75 years, and to resist the attempt of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial government to complete the seizure it began in 1974. As the missionary principal of the college since 2011, I was inevitably affected by the conflict and became a player in it. This study is an effort in missionary self-examination as I interrogate my motives and actions as a mission companion with the church and as a partner in education with the community at large. The inquiry is conducted under six headings: missionary motivation, national identity, change dynamics, religious relations, missionary predecessors, and the church–state conflict. While a self-interrogation cannot claim to be completely objective, the attempt is to be both honest and fair. The issues are important for missionary work and identity generally, but most acutely for mission work in Muslim-majority settings in the increasingly conflicted relations between Muslims and Christians in the 21st century.

A Keeper of the Flame

A Keeper of the Flame Gerard S. Sloyan (bio) Keywords TUDOR (Temple University Dept. of Religion), Oberammergau, Indonesia, Vatican CDF, ARCC, St. Xavier College Symposium, Leonard Swidler An account of the major influences on Professor Leonard Swidler as an ecumenist and protagonist of interreligious dialogue and his long-term membership in TUDOR, the Temple University Department of Religion (1966–), is very much in order. When the chair of TUDOR offered me a position as a full professor there, a title I had been awarded at the Catholic University of America some three years before, I knew that if I accepted the offer I would know only two of my new academic colleagues. One was Swidler, a layperson with a university degree in theology from the Catholic state faculty of the University of Tübingen. I knew from the grapevine and a few of his publications that there was such a man and that he had come the year before from the faculty of Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University. He and I had never met, but I knew of his publishing record even in his thirties on matters touching on the life of the Catholic Church, membership in which we had in common. He turned out to be my close friend at Temple University from day one. Identifying him as my sole academic co-religionist upon my arrival in Philadelphia is not quite accurate. I was hired by a department committed to teaching about the world’s major religions—but dispassionately with respect to the religion to which each department member was committed. I began my teaching duties in a company of five that included T. Patrick Burke, an Australian Catholic who held a doctorate in Catholic theology from the state faculty of Munich (the other person I had known previously); Samuel Laeuchli, a Swiss who had studied under Karl Barth but who, upon coming to the United States, had earned a degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York City; Robert Gordis, a congregational rabbi who had edited Conservative Judaism’s revision of its prayer book; Maurice Friedman, who had served on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, Westchester County, NY, who was a specialist in the writings of Martin Buber; and Swidler. A year or so later, there were two additions to the burgeoning faculty—Jacob Agus, a European-born congregational rabbi in a Baltimore suburb, who represented liberal Judaism; and Isma’il al-Faruqi, a native of Jaffa in Palestine who, upon immigration to the U.S., had enrolled in the Harvard Divinity School to learn what he could of Christian faith and practice, but who shortly transferred to the department of philosophy at Indiana University, where he earned a Ph.D. Most influential of all on the department’s aims and purposes was the man who assembled the others: Bernard Phillips, a Jew of Minneapolis whose doctorate in philosophy was from Yale University. As a result of his wide reading habits he had become acquainted with the basics of Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism and was teaching courses at the University of Delaware calculated to reduce the ignorance of undergraduates there of the religions practiced by many millions outside North and South America. When Temple University—founded by Philadelphia [End Page 29] Baptist minister Russell Conwell and named for his church, the Baptist Temple—became an institution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the early 1960’s, its president and later chancellor, Millard Gladfelter, knew he had to close down Temple’s small mission seminary for reasons of church-state conflict. (The Con-well School of Theology moved to South Hamilton, MA, to merge with Gordon Divinity School, forming in 1970 the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.) Being a committed Lutheran, Gladfelter was unwilling to see religion study leave the campus, so he inaugurated a religion department of the kind described above, leaving Phillips to retain any seminary faculty member of his choice for the TUDOR staff. One other development that had an influence on Swidler’s teaching was the symposium arranged by Burke while on the faculty of St. Xavier College in Chicago (Religious Sisters of Mercy) to bring a number of European theologians who had been...

Religion and inequality: the lasting impact of religious traditions and institutions on welfare state development

A strong correlation exists between inequality and religion, such that societies marked by high inequality are more religious than those with more egalitarian income distributions. What explains this correlation? Insecurity theory argues that high inequality generates intense insecurities, leading the poor to seek shelter in religion for both psychological and material comfort. This article develops an alternative perspective that reverses the chain of causality. It argues that religious institutions and movements frequently resist both the centralization of state power and socialist efforts to organize the working class. As a result, powerful religious movements constrain state-led efforts to provide social protection, increasing income inequality. Analysis of the historical record and contemporary data from 19 Western democracies reveals strong evidence that past periods of church-state conflict shaped the size and structure of welfare state institutions and, by extension, contemporary patterns of inequality.

The Persistence of the Church-State Conflict in Mexico's Evangelical Vote: The Story of an Outlier

While ties between Protestants and anticlerical Liberal parties were common throughout Latin America during the nineteenth century, the resolution of the church-state conflict in most countries by the early twentieth century resulted in the near complete disappearance of these alliances. Using historical analysis and survey data, this article demonstrates that Mexico is an exception to this rule, as the evangelical vote continues to be shaped by the perception and reality of Catholic anti-Protestant persecution. Mexico's anomalous status is explained as a result of the intensity and late resolution of the church-state conflict, ongoing sectarian violence, and the PRI becoming both a dominant party and the best electoral option for evangelicals

The Persistence of the Church-State Conflict in Mexico’s Evangelical Vote: The Story of an Outlier

While ties between Protestants and anticlerical Liberal parties were common throughout Latin America during the nineteenth century, the resolution of the church-state conflict in most countries by the early twentieth century resulted in the near complete disappearance of these alliances. Using historical analysis and survey data, this article demonstrates that Mexico is an exception to this rule, as the evangelical vote continues to be shaped by the perception and reality of Catholic anti-Protestant persecution. Mexico’s anomalous status is explained as a result of the intensity and late resolution of the church-state conflict, ongoing sectarian violence, and the PRI becoming both a dominant party and the best electoral option for evangelicals

Cristero Diaspora: Mexican Immigrants, The U.S. Catholic Church, and Mexico's Cristero War, 1926-29

The author examines the connections between Mexico's Cristero War, a bloody church-state conflict that raged across west-central Mexico from 1926 to 1929, and the great wave of Mexican emigration to the United States that occurred during the same period. Although historians have generally treated the Cristero War and Mexican emigration as two distinct and unrelated subjects, a rich array of archival evidence from both sides of the border demonstrates that thousands of Mexican immigrants during the late 1920s supported the Cristero cause from the United States. By elucidating the geographical and political interconnections between the Cristero War and Mexican emigration and exploring the instrumental role played by the U.S. Catholic Church in placing religious exiles from Mexico within immigrant communities, the author demonstrates the development of a diaspora of Mexican Cristero supporters across cities and regions in the United States.

Law, Religion, and Kissing Your Sister

This paper was written as a commentary chapter for a forthcoming book titled "Matters of Faith: Religious Experience and Legal Response" (Austin Sarat, ed.). The book is based on a conference held at the University of Alabama School of Law in October 2011. Five papers were presented at that conference: on the principal issues discussed, the result was a stark 2-2 tie (with the fifth paper, by a historian, valuable in itself but not taking sides on the disputed matters.) Given the normative orientation of legal scholars, the normal course of business would be to say who is right. But this comment instead focuses on a broader but perennial question: the nature of "tie games" in law and legal scholarship in the area of law and religion.Church-state conflicts, given the contested and incommensurable issues they involve, are particularly prone to end in ties. That fact has recently encouraged some scholars (myself included) to focus more on the "tragic" nature of church-state law, and the moral remainders that are inevitable in this field, than on the "comic" search for a single value or approach that might resolve some of these disputes once and for all. From that perspective, rather than try to "break the tie," there may be more value in considering why church-state issues are prone to end in ties, and what if anything we ought to do or feel about it. In this short paper, I first examine the principal papers and oral discussion at the Matters of Faith conference, which dealt primarily with two issues - the Hosanna-Tabor litigation and the ministerial exception, and the question of whether government may strip tax-exempt status and other subsidies or privileges from churches that engage in "invidious discrimination" - and argue that they end clearly in a deadlock. I then discuss several common methods employed by scholars in the field to resolve these deadlocks, and argue that they are all unsuccessful. The tie remains. Finally, for purposes of analogy, I address another arena in which ties, and the breaking of ties, is common: sports. The similarities and differences between sports and law offer a useful way of thinking about the deadlock in law and religion. I argue that in law and religion, unlike in sports, tiebreaking mechanisms are both necessary and impossible. I conclude with some thoughts on what we might do to at least reduce the moral remainders inherent in church-state conflict, and find ways of keeping the participants involved in the law "game" without creating or further alienating illiberal groups within society. The paper is still in draft, and comments are welcome.

The Politics of Biblical Interpretation: A ‘Criticism of Criticism’

AbstractFollowing Joseph Ratzinger's call for a ‘criticism of criticism’, this article situates the history of modern biblical criticism in its political context within the centuries long church state conflict. Beginning with Medieval Muslim polemical literature, this article traces through history the politically and theologically motivated philological analyses and hostility toward spiritual exegesis which formed the foundation upon which eighteenth and nineteenth century biblical criticism built. Rather than the result of some objective scientific enterprise, the methods modern Bible scholars employed often served state politics as well as other prior commitments.