@Thorvald
El Thorvaldo Moderator

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.

The Secret Religiosity of Secularism by @Thorvald (El Thorvaldo)

This op-ed, first published as a DeviantArt journal March 2014, was the Eureka Moment produced by a convergence of the Nagging Question with a binge of Reformation Europe historiography and various articles on modern Middle Eastern political theory earlier that year. The salient insight concerned the difference between secularity as an attribute, and secularism as a circumscriptive ideology: the former is value-neutral, the latter, by definition, is a value judgment. Despite touting "liberal secularity" as a core component of modern democracy, all one need do is scratch the surface of the immigration debate in the West to see how "secularism" is wielded as an intolerant cudgel against non-Christian cultures.

RIP whatever description I'd written for Buzzly.

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Comments & Critiques (4)

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Posted: Sunday, 03 September, 2023 @ 05:31 PM

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.

Posted: Sunday, 03 September, 2023 @ 07:06 PM

@The-Wizard-of-Zaar: I've yet to reconcile the tension between the "New World" as a haven for religious exiles and the subsequent devastation of native society that followed from European evangelism. As Atwood explained in the appendix to The Handmaid's Tale, the Mayflower pilgrims become a lot less fun when you realize Gilead was designed as the logical endpoint of their Puritan ideology.

All these clash-of-civilizations types that tout "Christianity" as a unified bloc sure like to overlook how often they've slaughtered their brothers in Christ over the most trivial differences.

Posted: Sunday, 03 September, 2023 @ 09:20 PM

@Thorvald:

Absolutely.

Especially in the first hundred years of the Protestant movement, unless you lived in the right fiefdom/state within the HRE and Britain, to be a Protestant was to live life wearing a target as you know.

Many take for granted the cost of Protestant safety and integration within the HRE and Britain. Many Protestants thought themselves finally safe and established, only for the 30 years war to spark...

And I'm not gonna get into what went on between Orthodoxy and the Vatican, because I know a lot less about that side of history.

But I'm to understand there was plenty of animosity and atrocities there too.

History is far more nuanced.

Posted: Monday, 04 September, 2023 @ 06:12 PM

@The-Wizard-of-Zaar: In a funny coincidence, this post occurred right as I was watching a video debunking a Falangist Templarper. To quote a top comment: 'The "F—k It, Let's Just Sack Constantinople" Crusade is my favorite.' B^)

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