The 1648 Peace of Westphalia is commonly held as a paradigm shift in
European political tradition and the realization of the modern secular
nation-state. What people tend to forget, however, is that Westphalia
was not the formal separation of religion and politics.
Westphalia did mark the point at which the Catholic Church
officially lost the hegemonic influence it had held over European
politics since the fall of Rome, but it hardly abolished faith-based
politics: a key stipulation of the treaty was that the German princedoms
were free to choose which sect, Catholic or Protestant, would be
recognized as the official faith of their realm. It was not the freedom
of religion as the liberal tradition understands it today. It did not
pacify religion, merely compartmentalized the differences, and minority
faiths remained subject to persecution, anabaptists in particular the
universal enemy.
The linear triumphalist frame that so often mars Western historiography
overlooks the brutality that necessitated Westphalia. The Thirty Years'
War was, according to some estimates, the most destructive
conflict on the European continent prior to the First World War. It was
the product of the confessional period of the late Reformation, in which
each and every doctrinal difference between competing sects, Catholic
and Protestant alike, were exacerbated to such extremes that the
'heretics' might as well have been from a different planet. Westphalia
was not intended to reconcile these warring factions; all it could do
was disentangle the mess into manageable portions, with the side effect
of enshrining the concept of territorial sovereignty and all that
followed. Fortunately for early-modern peaceniks, society managed to
sort out the rest.
One question that has always nagged me, but that I only seriously began
to contemplate last Spring, is why we in the West, despite our constant
posturing as citizens of a free and egalitarian society, still maintain
such reflexive suspicion of foreigners and minority demographics. On the
one hand, the answer is very simple and self-evident; but
not-so-coincidentally, there are some scholars who argue that the
methodology that underwrote the system of racialization and the New
Imperialism it informed during the 19th and 20th centuries was,
essentially, a mere extension of the same schematic for self-other
dichotomy developed during the confessional period. In this sense,
Western secularity, much like its legal tradition, is imbued with
specific religious influences; in the case of Westphalia, this has less
to do with a particular creed than the need for post-Reformation
coexistence.
During the heyday of confessionalism, where entire cities sought to
homogenize their worship, each and every expression of faith was
rigorously scrutinized to determine who was 'in' and who was 'out'. As
the century turned and religious differences were not longer an accepted
casus belli in international politics, Europeans needed some way to curb
their impulse to hate each other. One of the least demanding methods (to
the State) was to make faith insular: our modern understanding of
secularism as the removal of religion from the public sphere. One could
practice whatever one wanted so long as one didn't make a scene of it;
the result was the gradual shift first toward creed-neutral
Christianity, and then outright atheism. We conditioned ourselves to
simply stop talking about faith.
(Of course, this process was neither inevitable, nor universal, nor
without resistance: as late as the early 20th Century, English Canada
still witnessed Orangemen pogroms against Catholics, and the Irish
divide degenerated into its present political stalemate, to say nothing
of the state of nigh-permanent antagonism endured by the Jews.)
Thus, when confronted by a culture that has not conditioned
itself to keep quiet, that feels no shame in expressing its faith, the
West is put on edge. Despite the official government rationale, when
France moves to ban head scarves, or Switzerland forbids the
construction of minarets, it is not secularity that is at
stake, but old European Christian self-conceptions shrouded under a
secularist lens. Non-European societies that attempted political
modernization through the European model often failed to understand this
fact, with the result that many erroneously assumed that modernity and
public religion were inherently opposed—as exemplified by the Kemalists,
whose secularist agenda antagonized its own cultural tradition, giving
rise to Turkey's current Islamist opposition. The original ideal of
secularity, which neither promotes one faith above the others
nor denies a society the validity of its cultural
tradition, is still the optimal principle for which to strive.
Secularism, by contrast, is merely dogma in a different
dress.
Hitchens would turn over in his grave.
And through that targeting and aggression, Ana Baptists fled to the new world.
Not the same thing, but I think also the Huguenots immigrating from France to Britain also did a lot for the development of Protestant Christianity in Britain. A lot of Huguenots were Calvinists yeh?
Which I think was a big sect in Scotland too.