Have you ever considered why separation of church and
state evolved, why we are more religiously tolerant today than in the past?
At one time, church and state intertwined and
tolerance was a minority opinion. Even prior to establishment of a
Constitutional Republic in the United States, there was quite a bit of
church-state entanglement. The results were often bloody and always nasty. Even
when only Protestant Christians had their rights respected, they frequently and
repeatedly turned on one another even to the point of killing people for being
the wrong kind of Protestant Christian. There was never a Judeo-Christian
heritage, because the colonies routinely excluded Jews and Catholics from
having legal rights and some colonies refused to allow either to settle there.
Bloody persecution of Christians, by Christians, in the colonies, was mild in
comparison to the centuries of bloodshed in Europe over which form of
Christianity should be imposed on everyone. Martin Luther explained: “In a country
there must be one preaching only allowed.” Other forms of preaching were
considered rebellion and Luther spoke of how to deal with such matters: “Let
everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly and openly, remembering that
nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel.” While the
bloody history of Catholicism is well known, mainly due to publishing efforts
of Protestants, the genocidal impulse in Protestantism has not been so duly
noted.
Luther is a good example of Protestant intolerance. In
1525 he said Catholic mass should be forcibly suppressed as blasphemy. In 1530,
he said Anabaptists should be put to death. In 1536, he said Jews should be
forced out of the country. His view was that the State should enforce Christian
teaching, more particularly Luther’s teachings, by force. “The public authority
is bound to repress blasphemy, false doctrine and heresy, and to inflict
corporal punishment on those that support such things.”
Many people today have no idea that Europe was plunged
into a series of wars, over a period of about 150 years, all between competing
sects of Christians intent on wiping out other forms of Christianity. The last
such major war was the Thirty Years’ War, from 1618-1648. Direct and indirect
casualties in the war amounted to between 15% and 30% of all Germans. In Czech
areas, population declined by about one-third as a result of the war and as a
result of diseases spread because of the conflict. It is thought that Swedish
armies destroyed as many as one-third of all towns in Germany. Estimates are
that this period of Christian conflict resulted in the deaths of 7 million
people. R.J. Rummel estimates the death toll higher, at 11.5 million. An
objective look at the history of Christian conflicts caused Prof. Perez Zagorin
to conclude: “Of all the great world religions past and present, Christianity
has been by far the most intolerant.” Even Aquinas, held up as an advocate of
reason, said that if the state executed forgers it could “with much more
justice” take heretics and “immediately upon conviction, be not only
excommunicate but also put to death.” Zagorin says: “None of the Protestant
churches—neither the Lutheran Evangelical, The Zwinglian, the Calvinist
Reformed nor the Anglican—were tolerant or acknowledged any freedom to
dissent.” [How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West,
Princeton University Press, 2003.]
