The modern state, not ideas, brought about religious freedom (2017)

https://aeon.co/essays/the-modern-state-not-ideas-brought-about-religious-freedom

by arp242 • 2 years ago

6 2 2 years ago

aebtebeten• 2 years ago

...the Puritans believed in religious freedom only for Puritans; they were stricter enforcers of religious conformity than many European states.

I'd always figured the Puritans were horrified at the thought of their children growing up amongst the tolerant Dutch and promptly removed themselves to the New World?

EDIT: come to think of it, if lack of data processing technology was what drove religious freedom, what does our era of cheap bandwidth and storage imply? (with biometrics we no longer need tonsures to indicate clerical status, and the Nazis had bought IBM machines in order to implement their racial laws)

  You may put them on the list — you may put them on the list;
  And they'll none of them be missed — they'll none of them be missed!

jjk166• 2 years ago

What an absurd thesis. Saying that the growing power of the early modern state brought about religious freedom is like saying the growing reliance of the southern economy on cotton brought about emancipation - the newly powerful state was what people needed religious freedom from! Of course religious persecution has always been a thing, but in pre-modern times it was sporadic. Early modern states as a rule ramped up religious persecution in an effort to centralize and increase power. Indeed the modern concept of the state sovereignty stems from the Peace of Augsburg which made internal religious unity a state affair. Virtually every conflict both between and within states in the early modern period is at least partially over religion. Europe basically destroys itself in the 30 years war fighting over religious supremacy until states are so worn down by conflict that they have to compromise in the peace of Westphalia to grant some rights to minority religions, though even this is a far cry from what we think of as freedom of religion. For example 40 years later there is the Glorious Revolution in England as the English parliament asserted its supremacy by ousting a catholic monarch for a protestant. States granted limited religious tolerance where they lacked the means to maintain control without it - for example the Quebec Act of 1774 which was an effort to prevent unrest in Britain's newly acquired territory by permitting the continued practice of catholicism. Genuine religious freedom was first ushered in by revolutions (which took heavy inspiration from enlightenment philosophers) overthrowing or seriously curtailing the power of the preceding states, generally with the state support for a particular religion being a major instigating factor in the revolution, and still remained the exception to the rule. Only once the industrial revolution was well under way do states begin to shift from pragmatic toleration of religious minorities to actively supporting religious freedom. And of course this is assuming you are talking strictly about the parts of the West which embraced enlightenment ideals and liberalized - persecution of religion to assert and maintain state power remained a common strategy throughout the 20th century.

The modern state, not ideas, brought about religious freedom (2017)

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