Complexity, Variability and the Importance of Historical Context

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This historical essay, written for a graduate reading seminar on religion and violence, explores the intersection of religious violence and the modern state. A significant challenge in crafting this paper was the requirement to rely primarily on source materials from the seminar’s readings, encompassing around sixteen books and two dozen articles. To enrich my analysis, I also included William Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence, a book I previously reviewed and had some disagreements with, but otherwise adds a great deal to the literature on religion and violence. In my opinion, one of the best books we read was Jonathan Ebel’s Faith In the Fight, an excellent history of American soldiers and war workers religious reflections during World War I. I reviewed Ebel’s book as well.

In this paper, I aim to critically examine what I term the “Liberal State Narrative,” a concept frequently invoked but often left unexamined in discussions of religion and state power. I also confront Cavanaugh’s thesis which attributes the European Wars of Religion to the efforts of state formation. I have greatly benefited from my professor’s insights, whose constructive comments on my initial draft have refined my understanding and strengthened my arguments in this essay. While this analysis sheds some light on the complex relationship between religion and state authority, I recognize that there is much more to explore in this significant topic.

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This essay argues that a state’s relationship with religious violence is highly complex and variable—at times policing it, at other times permitting it, and occasionally even utilizing it. This thesis is supported by a review of recent historical literature by leading historians and scholars of religious violence which indicates that the role of the state in religious violence is both historically contingent and context dependent.¹  Furthermore, this essay assesses and confronts two competing explanatory frameworks: (1) the idea that the modern nation-state put an end to the mayhem of religious wars (referred to as the “Liberal State Narrative”); and (2) contrary to the Liberal State Narrative, theologian William T. Cavanaugh’s argument that state formation was the cause of religious violence in Europe (referred to as the “Religious War Myth”).² These narratives, rooted in political history and theory, fail to take account of contemporary historical methods that emphasize historically contingent and context-dependent relationship between the state and religious violence: the state is not necessarily the cure to religious violence, nor is it necessarily the cause.

As a starting point, it is essential to discuss the contemporary historical methods used in the historical literature reviewed in this essay. Although the state was not always the primary focus of this literature, issues of religious violence often revealed the outsized role of the state. By and large, this literature employed social and cultural historical methods to analyze periods of religious violence, striving toward “nonfoundational” historical knowledge to advance an understanding of these histories.³ The origin of this approach is Natalie Zemon Davis’s influential article “The Rites of Violence” on sixteenth-century religious riots in France.⁴ Generally, the historical literature reviewed in this essay attempt to describe “a middle ground that contextualizes the violence carefully within the precise historical context in which it occurred while recognizing that attention needs to be paid to the larger context of shared beliefs that justify and at least partially motivate the violence.”⁵ Contextual analyses reveals that religious violence is committed by individuals driven by complex motivations. These individuals may be responding to state actions or provoking state reactions, all taking place within specific religious, social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. Exploring the historical context around a state’s involvement with religious violence—historicizing causal factors—requires due consideration of the state’s role vis-à-vis the religious violence in question. Or, as Ussama Makdisi emphasized, scholars of religious violence are required “to constantly historicize.”⁶ Historicizing—considering the full historical context for religious violence—mitigates the risk of ahistorical reductivism that comes with analyses based on political theory or high-level political history centered on structural explanations for religious violence. 

To establish the historically contingent and context-dependent nature of the state’s relationship with religious violence, Part One of this essay analyzes recent historical literature within five major problems of religious violence and the state. Taken together, this thematic analysis of recent historical literature illustrates the historically contingent and context-dependent nature of the state’s relationship with religious violence. Part Two of this essay discusses the Liberal State Narrative and the Religious War Myth, evaluating and challenging these two competing explanatory frameworks in light of the recent historiography reviewed in Part One of this essay, and considering their significant shortcomings.

Part One: Five Major Problems of Religious Violence and the State

The following analyzes recent historical literature within five major problems of religious violence and the state: state formation, challenges to state authority (civil war), state development, religious violence as an instrumentality of the state, and continued resistance to established states.⁷ For the purposes of this essay, the histories considered as “major problems” are categorical groupings of comparable historical situations that may be compared and contrasted in order to explore essential issues of state building and religious violence. This group of major problems is not meant to be collectively exhaustive on historiographic themes concerning the state and religious violence. However, the major problems discussed in this essay are mutually exclusive in that each category represents situations where states respond to discrete challenges involving religious violence.

State Formation

Historical examples of states in formation encountering religious violence illustrate the historically contingent and context-dependent nature of the state’s relationship with religious violence. State formation is an institutional effort to establish control and governance over a certain geographic territory. The process puts the state-in-formation in competition with religious institutions, their followers, and other rival institutions (city government, nobles, etc.). Emerging states that sought control over multifaith populations could only mediate and regulate religious violence, allowing a certain level of it to take place so long as it did not compromise state interests. 

To illustrate this, consider the Crown of Aragon and the Ottoman Empire which both permitted certain levels of religious violence in their societies, but significantly differed in their efforts to maintain civil order and build frameworks to regulate and mediate such violence. The Crown of Aragon, a state in formation in the fourteenth century which was “the polity constituted by the union of countries of Catalonia with the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia.” As a nascent state, a feudal regime governed through royal courts and direct interventions from the king, the Crown attempted to regulate violence within a multi-confessional society comprised of Catholics (the majority), Jews, and Muslims. Jews and Muslims were considered the king’s royal treasure “placed under the king’s protection, since their religious status made them ‘serfs of the kings chamber.’” There was a material state interest in protecting these religious minorities as they were vital to Crown of Aragon’s political economy: Jews generated tax revenue for the Crown through moneylending, ran royal monopolies and served as tax collectors, and also “served the royal court as administrators, physicians, ambassadors, translators” among other roles; Muslims served as tenants and serfs on both the king’s land and seigneurial estates, comprising “an important part of the agricultural labor force.” Contrary to the Convivencia narrative which characterizes medieval Spain as a time of relative harmony between religions, the Crown of Aragon permitted religious violence among its people so long as it remained within certain boundaries, e.g. discipline and punishment for miscegenation or the “repeated, controlled, and meaningful rituals” against Jews during Holy Week.⁸

Similarly, the Ottoman Empire’s efforts to govern and control the Lands of Rum (Anatolia) and Rumeli (the Balkans) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries included the regulation of violence within its multi-confessional society. Ottoman state practices revealed a large measure of dynamism in response to accommodating Rumeli local conditions with state goals and objectives, entailing “measures of social disciplining that came both ‘from above’ and ‘from below,’ depending on the changing political situation and the structures that made up the Ottoman state.” Generally, the Ottoman state permitted its Islamic majority to carry out acts of religious violence against Christians and other minorities, as “religious difference was accommodated but with discriminatory mechanisms designed to confirm the prerogatives of the dominant group, coexistence was predicated on periodic withdrawals of toleration and even open expressions of violence by the group in power.”⁹ Accordingly, both emerging states permitted religious violence to a certain extent—an extent determined by the state’s interests.

The Crown of Aragon and the Ottoman Empire attempted to protect their states’ interests by regulating religious violence, however, their approaches diverged. Far from implementing any design for its society, the Crown reacted to “cataclysmic violence” against religious minorities to protect state interests (i.e., its political economy), taking an ad hoc approach. Following the Sheppard’s Crusade massacre of the Jews of Montclus, the Crown issued fines to individuals who cooperated with the pastoureaux as well as men “who failed to answer the royal call to arms.” In addition, royal officials worked to ensure the destroyed records of loans made by Jews from Montclus were restored and enforced. During the “Leper’s Plot,” the Crown of Aragon took steps to close its borders to “foreign Jews” and attempted to absolve Catalan Jews as threats in the eyes of the public, circumventing extrajudicial violence against Jews in the kingdom.¹⁰ In contrast, in the Ottoman Empire civic and Sharia law evolved to ensure public order as well as strengthen the state through “simultaneous projects of religious reform, social disciplining, and state building. Ottoman narratives suggest that at this time, conversion to Sunni Islam gradually became central to Ottoman imperial ceremonial and was institutionalized in ways unseen before.” The Ottoman Empire was enacting a state building project where Muslims were stratified on top of society, while “Jews and Christians [were] the beneficiaries of the ‘pact of protection’ (dhimma) within the Ottoman imperial and Islamic legal system constantly changed depending on both domestic and international developments.”¹¹ The construction of a legal system took the step of formalizing the Ottoman state’s relationship with its religious minorities—making structural changes that would preserve civil order, in contrast to the ad hoc approach of the Crown of Aragon. Perhaps this contributed to a social environment that would see the mass slaughter of Jews in the year 1391 followed by the expulsion of large portions of the Jewish and Muslim populations from Iberia.¹²

The contrasting examples of the Crown of Aragon and the Ottoman Empire show the historically contingent and context-dependent nature of the state’s relationship with religious violence in the during state formation. Both the Crown of Aragon and the Ottoman Empire permitted certain levels of religious violence, but they differed significantly in their efforts to maintain civil order by building frameworks to regulate and mediate such violence.

Challenges to State Authority (Civil War)

Challenges to state authority illustrate that the relationship between the state and religious violence is historically contingent and context-dependent, with each civil war presenting unique aspects that require detailed analysis. Religious civil war is a direct military confrontation with a rival force aiming to supersede an incumbent state with a new regime aligned with (or permissive of) a certain religious faith. In Weberian terms, a civil war challenges the “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” claimed by a developing state, directly confronting its ambitions to mediate and/or regulate religious violence within its claimed geographic territory. Western Europe’s Wars of Religion offer noteworthy historical cases of civil wars rooted in faith-based conflicts, specifically the French Wars of Religion and the Dutch Revolt. In addition, the catastrophic Taiping Civil War offers a modern example of religious violence and the state. These examples share the commonality of religion being at the heart of the original conflict, yet the escalation to civil war was multicausal and divergent. Again, this emphasizes the importance of historical contingency and context in historical analysis, demonstrating religion’s centrality to these conflicts as well as the complexities around any intrastate war.

Both the French Wars of Religion and the Dutch Revolt entailed sixteenth century Catholic monarchs struggling to assert control over multi-confessional states and ending-up in civil wars. However, that is where the parallels end. Barbara Diefendorf’s examination of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572) reveals a religious conflict that slipped out of Charles IX’s control despite efforts to maintain a peace treaty that accommodated Huguenot nobles. This is not to say religious violence in France was monocausal. Beyond the religious tensions that started the conflict, Diefendorf acknowledges the political conflicts among nobles that are “crucial if we are the understand the meaning of the religious wars in terms of the larger process of French state-building.” Furthermore, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre could also be attributed to a variety of factors: the climate of fear in Paris, the inability of the Bureau de la ville and magistrates to keep civil order, the role of extremists in the rioting, the Catholics’ belief they were carrying out the vicarious will of the king. Nevertheless, Diefendorf emphasizes that religious faith was at the heart of the French Wars of Religion, especially in the eyes of French Catholics and Huguenots, as “the wars were not perceived by common people as abstruse scholarly debates but rather as crucial choices between truth and error, between salvation and damnation, between God’s favor and impending wrath. At the popular level, the religious wars represented a crusade against heresy, a crusade that had to be won if civil society was to be preserved and salivation to be assured.” Perhaps this explains how the conflict escalated into a civil war beyond the control of the monarchy and nobility.¹³

In contrast, the context and causes of the Dutch Revolt (or Eighty Years’ War) were far different than those in France. Habsburg rule of the Low Countries was tenuous prior to the Reformation. Although regarded as the Dutch war of independence, the Dutch Revolt’s origins are entangled in religious conflict. The initial years of the revolt are critical to this analysis. Peter Arnade delved into the evolution of Dutch political culture and its “rituals and symbols” in the early years of the Dutch Revolt (1563-85). Religion was at the center of the dispute: Philip II’s efforts to expand the presence of the Catholic Church alongside repression of Calvinism through heresy laws—all of which antithetical to the particularism championed by Low Country elites. This occasioned reaction from those elites (the Beggars) and iconoclastic violence in major cities like Ypres, Antwerp, and Ghent. In an effort to assert control over the Low Countries, Philip II escalated the conflict with the Army of Flanders occupation, led by the reviled Duke of Alba. This largely backfired as “Netherlanders in revolt found common cause in an otherwise calcified division between Catholics and Calvinists and other Protestants.” Thus, what began as a religious dispute scaled to a regional war, uniting large portions of the Netherlands against Philip II, shifting the war from a civil war to more of a war of independence. Ultimately, Low Country cities, regional representative bodies, and Estates insisted upon particularism, as they “did not so much deny the principle of monarchy as insist that sovereignty in the Low Countries was regionally divided according to local titles of rule.”¹⁴

The cases of the Dutch Revolt and the French Wars of Religion demonstrate the importance of historical contingency and context in analyzing religious violence and the state. In France, despite the efforts of its monarch to find political solutions, religious violence could not be contained; in the Netherlands, the monarch’s efforts to contain religious violence sparked a larger conflict with broader political objectives. Also, it is important to note there also were major differences in the clergy’s behavior during these conflicts: the Catholic clergy in France was far more militant about eliminating Protestantism compared to their peers in the Dutch clergy, where “in France the clergy called upon the laity to rescue the Church and to force the authorities into line, Netherlandish priests were reluctant to do so.”¹⁵ This highlights another interesting contingency: the behavior of clergy in religious conflicts is also highly variable.

Shifting centuries as well as continents, the Taiping Civil War blends elements of both the French and Dutch examples. This war set the Qing Dynasty against a successionist, Christian theocratic state. The Taiping state pursued a revolutionary agenda against the Qing emperor with a mixture of political and religious objectives: Han liberation from the Manchus, an overthrow of Confucianism, the implementation of a Western-style economic system, and the widespread adoption of Christianity. Led by Hong Xiuquan, a failed imperial official from Guangdong Province who claimed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, at its height the Taiping state took Nanjing as its capital, held the major cities Zhenjiang and Anqing, and controlled hundreds of miles of territory south of the Yangtze River. The Taiping started as a popular uprising (1851) that took advantage of the Qing Dynasty’s fiscal insolvency, weak military, and loose governance of Southern China (which had been further weakened by recent British and French interventions, turning Hong Kong into a crown colony and Shanghai into a Western-controlled treaty port). The Taiping version of Christianity imagined “an unequivocal theocracy, and a fundamentalist one at that” which would enforce “a harshly puritanical society, where the power of government would be used to prevent sinful practices.”¹⁶ This is an important consideration that helps explain the high level of violence in this civil war, as both sides positioned for total victory. The Taiping’s fundamentalist vision for Chinese society stood in sharp contrast to Qing China—two incompatible visions that likely precluded a peace and coexistence.

While the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch Revolt, and the Taiping Civil War all began with religion at the heart of the conflict, their causes and consequences were complex and varied. This emphasizes the importance of historical contingency and context in historical analysis, demonstrating religion’s centrality to these conflicts as well as the complexities around any intrastate war.

State Development

Problems of state development illustrate the historically contingent and context-dependent nature of the state’s relationship with religious violence, as European states took various paths toward centralization, used religion in state building, and encouraged societal practices of toleration. State development refers to efforts of state building that occur after state formation, where the state begins to exert control and governance over society enabling it to outlaw religious violence (rather than merely regulate and mediate it). Historiographies of Western European following the Wars of Religion offer valuable examples of state development. 

Indeed, the transition of the late Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era saw developing states assert political authority over their territories, economies, and people, resulting in a diverse array of governments. Revisiting Barbara Diefendorf, she writes the Wars of Religion served as “both a cause and an effect of the state-building process” as the demands of war bolstered the state, while also driving states to bring their religious institutions into alignment. To be clear, this was not a process where Catholic and Protestant churches simply submitted to the power of a monarch (although that happened in a number of instances in other places in Europe, e.g. Russia). Diefendorf cautions not to “[oversimplify] the process by ignoring both the lesser secular authorities whose power was gradually curbed or appropriated and the collaboration between European rulers and the church that facilitated this extension of state power.” Diefendorf describes an iterative, pragmatic process that varied from state to state. Thus, following the Wars of Religion, the developing nation-states of Western European ended up with highly differentiated types of central governance, as the “religious conflicts contributed to the formation of an independent state in the Netherlands, a federative empire in Germany, a constitutional monarchy in England, a colonial enterprise in Ireland, and an absolutist monarchy in France.”¹⁷ It is important to note this diverse range of outcomes points toward unique processes of development for each nation-state. 

Clearly, religion was an important factor in state building, another institution that could be harnessed to serve the state’s goals and objectives, which helps to explain the diverse range of outcomes described by Diefendorf. How did this take place? Following the Peace of Westphalia, the principle of cuius regio provided “Europe’s rulers unprecedented opportunities to expand their power” according to Benjamin Kaplan. Religious orthodoxy served a vital role in state development, using religious fervor to buttress political alignment with the state. While the rulers of developing states could not do away with the “particularism” (i.e., the unique customs and practices in towns and villages) which often contributed to local religious strife, the imposition of absolutism provided a template for the modern, established state. Although “[p]articularism did not disappear, either as a set of power relationships or as a mentality. Increasingly, though, Europe’s rulers asserted an impersonal authority that can be called sovereignty, rather than (or, perhaps better, in addition to) the personal suzerainty of the feudal Middle Ages.” Interstate and intrastate wars now settled, rulers were able to engage in robust state development and exerting tighter governance, as “they codified laws, issued regulations, raised taxes, formalized institutions, and mobilized networks of officials, casting in this way a tighter net of control over society.” However, the central state’s control was often tenuous, as its “authority depended on the consent of the governed. Nevertheless, by the late seventeenth century some princes had achieved what at the time was called “absolute” authority: they could wage war, issue laws, and impose taxes without the approval of representative institutions, or with sure knowledge of their rubber stamp.” While many states had weak monarchies, the overall direction moved toward centralized power in the state. Additionally, both state development and toleration served as the bedrock for the modern, established state (which would ultimately outlaw religious violence). “The development took as many forms as there were forms of polity, but across Europe it was clear: the state grew stronger as an institution and more cohesive as a political community.”¹⁸

Furthermore, the state development processes described by Diefendorf and Kaplan fostered practices of toleration which bolstered civil order, offering a kind of self-regulation. Prior to the Enlightenment, the concept of toleration grew as an aspect of society and culture in Western Europe–social processes that complemented state development in curbing religious violence. As central governments formed and established policies regarding religion and made efforts to maintained civic order, the social practice of toleration began to emerge, “not just a concept or policy but a form of behavior: peaceful coexistence with others who adhered to a different religion. Let us call this form of behavior ‘toleration.’ It was a social practice, a pattern of interaction among people of different faiths. It operated, or failed to, on the local level, and had a complex relationship to both ideals and official policies.” However, Kaplan acknowledges toleration was by no means a contemporary form of “tolerance” as religious tensions still existed, with outbreaks of violence. Toleration was merely “a pragmatic arrangement for the limited accommodation of irreconcilable differences which would sometimes breakdown.”¹⁹ Despite the growth of toleration, a developing state’s power was still the essential consideration in controlling religious violence. 

This development of European states following the Wars of Religion demonstrates the historically contingent and context-dependent nature of the state’s relationship with religious violence. The array of outcomes of state building, the use of religion as a means of societal organization, and societal movement towards toleration all underscore the unique pathways toward centralization and governance. 

Religious Violence as an Instrumentality of the State 

An established state that controls civic order and is empowered by the rule of law to outlaw religious violence may also use religious violence as an instrument to achieve its goals, further demonstrating that the relationship between the state and religious violence is historically contingent and context dependent. State formation enabled European nation-states to mobilize resources for expansionary efforts, including imperial projects in the New World, which employed religion as a means of governance. Additionally, Christian identity and sense of religious mission in the U.S. military during World War I provides a modern example of religious violence used by the state.

State-directed religious violence was instrumental in the imperial projects of Spain, Portugal, and Britain, which involved the projection of power overseas, taking hold of territory, and asserting governance over non-Christian populations. The apparatuses of the Catholic Church and Puritan congregations in the New World supported these imperial projects. In addition to extending churches and clergy to the New World, Christian cultural production reinforced colonization efforts. For example, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has pointed to the similarities between British Atlantic and the Spanish Atlantic, arguing both Protestants and Catholics “deployed similar religious discourses to explain and justify conquest in colonization: a biblically sanctioned interpretation of expansion, part of a long-standing Christian tradition of holy violence aimed at demonic enemies within and without.” To bolster their imperial projects, both Puritans and Catholics employed ideas and images of fighting evil in North America (demonologies, “Satanic Epics,” and portraying indigenous people being under the devil’s influence) revealing “the common religious world informing all European colonial discourses, particularly Spanish and English ones.” In this sense, imperial projects de-emphasized confessional differences by distinguishing European Christendom from the indigenous people of the New World, reminding them that “[d]espite the undeniable impact of the Reformation and the new dynastic early modern states in creating emerging national differences, early modern Europeans enjoyed a long history of shared cultural values, harkening back a millennia.” While Cañizares-Esguerra’s observation makes intuitive sense, it is important to note that Europeans still had considerable geopolitical reasons for conflict. Clearly, Europe would never return to the era of a single Christian faith (whether pre-Reformation or pre-Great Schism); however, imperial projects, ironically, suggested that confessional differences may not prove as acute in the long run.²⁰

By the twentieth century, there were well-worn traditions, norms, and customs of harnessing organized religion for national projects. The industrial warfare of the First World War was another developmental milestone for the state. Randolph Bourne’s assertion that “War is the health of the state” underscores the idea that the American state reached the height of its power as it mobilized for the war in Europe. National mobilization, including a draft of over four million men, brought ordinary Americans into a war effort of unprecedented scale and monumental importance. Nationalist sentiments and expressions of patriotism ran high in the build-up to war (stimulated in part by government propaganda efforts). However, prior to the war, Americans had been grappling with societal and cultural changes of the early twentieth century (urbanism, new technology, immigration, etc.). These struggles were reflected in American Christianity: Protestant Fundamentalist and Pentecostal movements grew substantially; new “muscular” Christian organizations were formed to solve the “crisis of manhood.” These cultural currents were reflected in soldiers’ thoughts about the spiritual, the transcendent, and the sacred. Many of these appear in the U.S. government’s The Stars and Stripes newspaper which contained poems, essays, letters, and visual art reflecting soldiers’ spirituality and expressions of devotion to the war effort. The Stars and Stripes provides a valuable social historical source, reflecting the opinions and beliefs of historical actors, i.e. the American soldiers and war workers deployed on the Western Front. Considering the experience of American soldiers and war workers, Jonathan Ebel argues American soldiers “believed in the righteousness of the cause, believed in the communal and personal value of their errand, believed that in answering the call to arms they were answering the call of their faith.” In this sense, Ebel connects the beliefs of soldiers to the pre-war trends in American Christianity, expressing convictions perhaps influenced by Protestant Fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, or muscular Christianity. Despite the death and destruction on the Western Front, Ebel concludes that the Great War “altered but did not undermine [the] faith” of American troops and war workers, leading many to an “affirmation and strengthening of pre-war faiths.” This demonstrates that from the point of view of the American state, religious veal harnessed for war was an effective policy. In fact, the experience of the war showed how American religious faith was integrated in notions of citizenship and nationalism, as the “American experiences of the war were suffused with religion to the extent that we must at least consider the notion that without the prevalence of masculinized Christianity and the many subtler ways that Christian or Judeo-Christian ideas informed Americans’ attachments to one another, the nation, and the cause, American involvement in the war would not have been possible.” The ultimate expression of the state’s relationship with religious violence is its use as an instrumentality of the state. Despite the tragedies of the Great War, a faith-inspired militancy continued among veterans after the war in the American Legion, suggesting the experience of the Great War made a lasting impression on American political culture.²¹

Finally, the tradition of faith-inspired militancy continues to play a role in contemporary America. Ebel observes the Great War has been largely forgotten while the American experience in the Second World War provided “a narrative of military triumph without an adequate cautionary tale to leaven it” which “shaped understandings of the power of war to accomplish good and, more to the point, the specific goods willed by war’s authors.”²² This brought to mind Mark Juergensmeyer’s observation that the Bush Administration’s “war on terror” (2001) put the U.S. on “cosmic war” footing with Al-Qaeda and its ilk. A military-led response to the 9/11 attacks–as opposed to a multi-national effort using law enforcement agencies–only increased the risk of U.S. leaders violating the rule of law and/or abandoning American moral principles, thereby “inadvertently validate the religious activists’ most devastating critique of them: that secular politics are devoid of morality.”²³ This was somewhat born out after the “war on terror” policy was retrofitted in the “Bush Doctrine” (2003), a foreign policy that “emphasizes the quintessential American values of freedom and democracy” used to justify the Iraq War. In response to the policy, Melvyn P. Leffler commented that “a balance of power [policy] favoring freedom is a confused, even meaningless concept. It is a concept that favors unilateralist thinking and military solutions. It is also contrary to American traditions and incongruent with the challenges that lie ahead.”²⁴

Resistance to Established States

The final problem in historicizing the relationship between the state and religious violence is the ongoing religious-inspired resistance to established states, particularly in the forms religious rebellion and terrorism, which further illustrates the historically contingent and context-dependent nature of this relationship. Unsanctioned religious violence is extra-ordinary, defies the state’s laws, and therefore constitutes resistance to the state; however, the historiographic cases considered in this section demonstrate the many complexities around these issues. From the standpoint of the state, religion-centered rebellions and religious terrorism are illegal acts of religious violence performed at scale (though not rising to a level where the established state is threatened) and provide a permission structure for the state to employ violence in response. However, in historicizing something labeled an “illegal act” it is essential to deconstruct statist narratives and to contextualize all of the factors around religious violence, the cultural and social influences that drove participants, and the role played by elites, government officials, the military, etc. To demonstrate these points, this essay considers recent historiographies on the Ghost Dance in America in the 1890s as well as the communal violence among Muslims and Christians in Indonesia in 1999 and 2000. It will also consider work by sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer on religious terrorism. 

The Ghost Dance–a popular religious movement among American Indian tribes like the Paiute, Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Lakota Sioux–was viewed as a religious-inspired rebellion by the United States and therefore met with state-sanctioned violence. The Ghost Dance religion and movement was a response by American Indians to adapt to westward expansion, the end of armed resistance, reservations, and new assimilationist policies. Far from militant, the religion “promised believers a means to persist as Indians while surviving conquest and the reservation era” and helped “believers to resolve seemingly irresolvable contradictions” of facing assimilationist policies while still remaining Indian. As the religion spread among tribes across the west, including the Lakota, there was a “growing alarm in the press and among officials about a potential Indian ‘outbreak’ [which] eventually inflamed opinion.” As a result, President Harrison ordered to the U.S. Army to “suppress the religion” which led to the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890). Unexamined, the suppression of the Ghost Dance religion was a re-assertion of the state enforcing civic order: the Ghost Dance movement was perceived as a rebellion—an act of resistance against the U.S. government. Considering historical work on the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee, the continuous activism of American Indians, and the Lakota peoples’ efforts to commemorate and memorialize the site of the massacre, this episode of religious violence was one perpetrated by the state, an overaction that undermined its rule of law and moral suasion.²⁵

Moreover, a state may also fail to respond to a religious rebellion and even have its officials and military participate in unsanctioned religious violence. A compelling illustration is the 1999-2000 communal violence among Muslims and Christians in Indonesia which killed several thousand people and displaced over 220,000. The carnage from this series of religion-centered rebellions was exacerbated by the Indonesian government’s underreaction. Prior to the communal violence, the final years of the Suharto regime saw incidents of widespread violence that “demonstrated that the armed forces had lost their ability to maintain control and, subsequently, their ability to inspire fear in local communities.” While the Indonesian army eventually restored public order, there were numerous examples of members of the Indonesian military abandoning their posts and even participating in communal violence. The legitimacy of the Indonesian government was further undermined by “[s]tories of military involvement were also common and played a role in these narratives of victimization. These often focused on the failure of the police or the army to protect people, but a number also detailed the involvement of individual soldiers or in some cases entire units.” There was also a failure to enforce the rule of law following the riots as the Indonesian authorities made no arrests in North Maluku.²⁶ The religious rioting in Indonesia is reminiscent of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre: a weak central state unable to prevent the militant faithful from taking license in a breakdown of civic order.

Finally, Mark Juergensmeyer studied the Sikh separatist bombing in Chandigarh that assassinated the chief minister of state Beant Singh in 1995, an example of religious terrorism and resistance to the state. Juergensmeyer brings out the motives for the attack and the political, cultural and Sikh religious factors surrounding it. The bombing was carried out to both avenge Indian state repression of the Sikh religion and to establish an independent Kashmir state, with the clear intent to undermine the Hindu-majority Indian state. How is this achieved? “By demonstrating the vulnerability of governmental power, to some degree it weakens that power. Because power is largely a matter of perception, symbolic statements can lead to real results.” Thus, religious terrorism is a strategic performance of violence aimed at having “a direct impact on public policy.” The public is the intended “audience” which underscore the importance of media in religious terrorism—even more important than the carnage wrought in an attack—as “[m]ore significant is the impression—in most cases it is simply an illusion—that the movements perpetrating the acts have enormous power and that the ideologies behind them have cosmic importance. In the war between religious and secular authority, the loss of a secular government’s ability to control and secure public spaces, even for a terrible moment, is ground gained for religion’s side.”²⁷ Of course, Juergensmeyer’s insights on religious terrorism seem to apply equally to political terrorism (for example, the Red Army Faction had similar tactics and its members certainly believed in the “cosmic importance” of its ideology). Juergensmeyer grants that most religious terrorists also have political objectives, which seems to raise inevitable questions: Could there be political terrorists with religious objectives (e.g., Timothy McVeigh)? Beyond maintaining academic fiefdoms, what is the utility of classifying an act of violence as “religious terrorism” versus “terrorism”?  

Episodes of religious-inspired resistance to established states, manifesting as rebellion and terrorism, underscore the historically contingent and context-dependent relationship between the state and religious violence. Historical cases such as the Ghost Dance movement, communal violence in Indonesia, and Sikh separatist terrorism, illustrate that historicizing acts of religious-motivated violence requires due consideration of the people involved, the religious issues in play, the goals of the violence, as well as the unique political, cultural, and social contexts surrounding the issue. 

Part Two: Confronting Alternative Narratives of Religious Violence and the State

Part Two of this essay evaluates and challenges two competing explanatory frameworks regarding religious violence and the state: the Liberal State Narrative and the Religious War Myth. These narratives, rooted in political history and theory, fail to take account of contemporary historical methods that emphasize historically contingent and context-dependent relationship between the state and religious violence, as reviewed in Part One.                 

The Liberal State Narrative

The Liberal State Narrative reflects much of the received wisdom about the state’s role in preventing wars of religion espoused in public discourse. Contemporary popular opinion reifies the historical-political idea that the modern nation-state was the solution for the senseless mayhem of sectarian wars. The Western world exalts the liberal democratic idealism that established both secularism in government and legal regimes protecting religious freedom. Public intellectuals and journalists perpetuate the story of liberal triumphalism, celebrating the peaceful tolerance wrought by the modern state (e.g., “Religious differences had torn Europe apart, in good measure because the combatants assumed that if one religion is true, then others must be false.”²⁸) Violent rifts in society were cured by the Lockean notion of state-enforced toleration, a regime where “the state’s business is not to save souls but to protect rights.”²⁹ Certainly, prevailing beliefs in the West elevate the liberal state’s brand of secular humanism over theism of any kind. The basic argument is systems of theism are morally inferior to humanism, for humanism is an intellectual product of “[t]he thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment [who] saw an urgent need for a secular foundation for morality, because they were haunted by a historical memory of centuries of religious carnage: the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, the European wars of religion” because, after all, “if religion were a source of morality, the number of religious wars and atrocities ought to be zero.”³⁰ Moreover, far from outlawing religiosity, the liberal state improved organized religion by removing its penchant for violence: “Political liberalism in England ended religious wars between Protestant and Catholic that had nearly destroyed the country in the seventeenth century: with its advent, religion was defanged by being more tolerant.”³¹ On the other hand, legitimate applications of violence would forever remain “a means specific to the state.” As Max Weber described it:

[A] state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence. Hence, ‘politics’ for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.³²

Weber expresses the totalizing relationship the state has relative to other institutions, including religious organizations. In summary, the Liberal State Narrative offers a teleology that attempts to both explain the origins of the liberal state as well as justify it.

Assessing the Liberal State Narrative in light of the findings from Part One of this essay reveals two major criticisms: first, it is largely ahistorical; and second, it does not account for religious violence as an instrumentality of the state.

The Liberal State Narrative is ahistorical in that the regulation of religious violence by the state far preceded liberalism. In the discussion of State Development in this essay, both Diefendorf and Kaplan demonstrate that state regulation of religious violence was taking place prior to the seventeenth century: the collaboration between monarchies and churches to further develop the state (Diefendorf) and the centralization brought about by absolutism (Kaplan). Furthermore, William Cavanaugh also makes this point in The Myth of Religious Violence (a book discussed in the following section). In arguing state formation was the cause of religious war, Cavanaugh also points out that the notion of the liberal nation-state putting an end to religious conflict is an anachronism: “The idea that the liberal state solved the wars of religion is even more implausible than the absolutist version of the myth because in historical fact the liberal state does not appear until much later. If ‘liberalism’ in this case is taken to mean the secularization of government, then the very opposite is found in Europe as the so-called wars of religion drew to a close.”³³ Diefendorf, Kaplan, and Cavanaugh all point to developing European states in the form of centralizing monarchy coopting and harnessing churches for the purposes of state building, thereby regulating religious violence.  

Furthermore, the Liberal State Narrative also fails to account for religious violence as an instrumentality of the state. Imperial projects in the New World which used religion as a means of governance and the use of Christian identity in America’s mobilizing and fighting World War I provide stark examples of religious violence employed by the state. These examples reflect Weber’s description of the state as arbiter of violence: “the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it.” Granted, a defender of the Liberal State Narrative would point to the state’s prevention of internecine violence like that witnessed in the Wars of Religion. Nevertheless, the few examples of states harnessing religious violence for state objectives offer important rebuttals to the narrative.

An assessment of the Liberal State Narrative in light of the findings from Part One of this essay reveals it is largely ahistorical and does not account for religious violence as an instrumentality of the state. To be clear, this essay is not critiquing liberalism, liberal democracy, secularism, or humanism; rather, the criticisms leveled against the Liberal State Narrative challenge the defenders of these traditions to better account for the historical complexities of religious violence and the state.

The Religious War Myth

William T. Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflictdraws on an abundance of academic literature to argue modern state formation in Europe—contrary to the Liberal State Narrative—was a leading cause of the Wars of Religion. In fact, he argues, the Wars of Religion serve as “the creation myth for the modern state.”³⁴ This argument is part and parcel of Cavanaugh’s broader contention that religious violence is largely a myth because it is not possible to isolate religious motive as a sole causal factor; in fact, the histories of religious war reveal complex cultural, societal, economic and political circumstances. To demonstrate the Religious War Myth, Cavanaugh analyzes the work of numerous scholars on European state formation and the Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (here is relies on the work of Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Johannes Wolfart, Heinz Schilling, Charles Tilly, Gabriel Ardant, Michael Howard, Richard Dunn, Donna Bohanan, Robert Descimon, Elie Barnavi, J.H.M. Salmon, Quentin Skinner, William Maltby, Luther Peterson, Karlheinz Blaschke, R. Po-Chia Hsia, Ann Hughes, John Bossy, Ernst Kantorowicz, John Wolf, and others). To summarize Cavanaugh’s analysis, at the end of the Middle Ages the monarchies consolidated control over their geographic domains undermining the authority of the Catholic Church as well as its Protestant competitors. State building efforts involved “the absorption of the church by the state, which exacerbated and enforced ecclesial differences and therefore contributed to warfare between Catholics and Protestants. In the process, the state did not rein in and tame religion but became itself sacralized.” Furthermore, “sacralization” was a consequence of absolutist states consolidating power, as “the transfer of power from the church to the state was clearly a cause, not the solution, of the violence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries…The state was increasingly sacralized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This process is what [John] Bossy calls the “migration of the holy” from the church to the state.”³⁵

Ultimately, argues Cavanaugh, absolutist states drove an “absorption of the church by the state, which exacerbated and enforced ecclesial differences and therefore contributed to warfare between Catholics and Protestants.” Therefore, “the state did not rein in and tame religion but became itself sacralized. The transfer of power from the church to the state was accompanied by a migration of the holy from church to state.”³⁶

Assessing the Religious War Myth in light of the findings from Part One of this essay reveals several difficulties in Cavanaugh’s argument. First, Cavanaugh’s argument over emphasizes the Wars of Religion as “the founding myth” for the modern state, ignoring both preceding and subsequent histories. The examples of the Crown of Aragon and Ottoman Empire show newly formed states attempting to regulate religious violence. Moreover, Kaplan’s study of the practices of toleration bolstering civil order offers added nuance to European state building. Finally, the examples cited on the state’s harnessing of religion suggests religion remained a powerful cultural force (colonizing the Americas; the U.S. in World War I). Indeed, the examples of civil war (Taiping Rebellion) and continued resistance to established states (Ghost Dance, communal violence in Indonesia, and Sikh separatist terrorism) suggest religion was never “sacralized” by the state and, in fact, remains a force that may occasionally challenge state authority.

Second, Cavanaugh’s Religious War Myth is overly reliant on theoretical abstraction. The idea that European states were “sacralized” in that “the holy” transferred from churches to developing, centralized monarchies may be a defensible in the context of political theory; however, the assertion lacks sufficient historical evidence. In responding to The Myth of Religious Violence, Barbara Diefendorf points to a far more complicated history where the church often served as an instrumentality of the state, a “negotiation of new terms of collaboration” which provided “both income and respect for its spiritual authority.” This was not a story of church submission to the state, which “oversimplifies the process by ignoring both the lesser secular authorities whose power was gradually curbed or appropriated and the collaboration between European rulers and the church that facilitated this extension of state power.” Thus, she concludes, the notions of a “migration of the holy” to a “sacralized” state “go too far and risk substituting a new myth for the one Cavanaugh aims to deconstruct.”³⁷

In summary, Cavanaugh’s Religious War Myth fails to consider the highly complicated and contingent nature of the state and religious violence. However, despite these criticisms Cavanaugh should be commended for his contribution, particularly in refuting the Liberal State Narrative. This is especially important given that the merits of the Western secular model are often used as a cudgel in contentious foreign policy situations.

Conclusion

This state’s relationship with religious violence is highly complex and variable—at times policing it, at other times permitting it, and sometimes even utilizing it. This essay argued the contemporary approach to historizing religious violence offers historians the opportunity to produce historical knowledge and, at the very least, avoid the pitfalls of replicating narratives about religion and the state based upon political theory and high-level political history. The contemporary approach emphasizes the importance of contextual analysis in historicizing religious violence, demonstrated in the review of recent historical literature which highlights the religious, social, cultural, political, and economic contexts within five major problems of religious violence and the state. Exploring historical literature in those problem areas shows the historically contingent and context-dependent relationship between the state and religious violence: the state is not necessarily the cure to religious violence, nor is it necessarily the cause.

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Bibliography

Arnade, Peter. Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.

Benedict, Philip, Nora Berend, Stephen Ellis, Jeffrey Kaplan, Ussama Makdisi, and Jack Miles. “AHR Conversation: Religious Identities and Violence.” American Historical Review 112 (December 2007): 1433-1481.

Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. 

Cavanaugh, William T. The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Davis, Natalie Zemon. “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France.” Past and Present 59 (May 1973): 51-91.

Diefendorf, Barbara. Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Diefendorf, Barbara. “Were the Wars of Religion about Religion?” Political Theology 15, no. 6, (2014): 552–563.

Duncan, Christopher R. Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and Its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.

Ebel, Jonathan H. Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.

Juergensmeyer, Mark. Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence. 4^th ed. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017.

Kaplan, Benjamin. Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007. 

Krstic, Tijana. Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011.

Leffler, Melvyn P. “9/11 and the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy.” International Affairs 79, No. 5 (October 2003):1045-1063.

Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Pesantubbee, Michelene E. “Wounded Knee: Site of Resistance and Recovery.” In Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place, edited by Oren Baruch Stier and J. Shawn Landres, 75-88. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006.

Pinker, Steven. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. New York: Viking, 2018.

Platt, Stephen R. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

Pollmann, Judith. “Countering the Reformation in France and the Netherlands: Clerical Leadership and Catholic Violence 1560-1585.” Past and Present 190 (February 2006): 83-120.

Rauch, Jonathan. The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021.

Warren, Louis S. God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Weber, Max. Essays in Sociology. Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group, 1991. ProQuest Ebook Central.

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1. Definitionally, this essay’s use of the term “religious violence” is shorthand for the phenomena of violence involving the followers of a religious tradition and/or related to religiously motivated reasons. However, the term “religious violence” is not meant to imply that religion is necessarily the cause of violence. See Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts, and Michael Jerryson eds. Violence and the World’s Religious Traditions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3. Furthermore, use of the term “the state” refers to the generally accepted academic concept of a centralized institution that claims sovereignty and governance over a specific geographic area. ↩︎
2. William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). ↩︎
3.  Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 796–797. ↩︎
4.  Davis’s social historical methods departed from Marxist-influenced historians like Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson who deemphasized religion in favor of class analysis, viewing intrastate violence as an outcome of the economic structure of European society and ignoring the motives of the historical actors involved in perpetrating the violence. Granting those historical actors agency, Davis argued the violence committed by Catholic and Protestant crowds “had a connection in time, place and form with the life of worship, and the violent actions themselves were drawn from a store of punitive or purificatory traditions current in sixteenth-century France.” See Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 59 (May 1973): 53, 90. ↩︎
5. Philip Benedict, Nora Berend, Stephen Ellis, Jeffrey Kaplan, Ussama Makdisi, and Jack Miles, “AHR Conversation: Religious Identities and Violence,” American Historical Review 112 (December 2007): 1458. ↩︎
6. Benedict, “AHR Conversation,” 1467. ↩︎
7. For the purposes of this essay, state formation refers to a centralizing body or institution with a military force that vies for control and governance over a certain geographic territory. State development or a developing state refers to the state building that occurs after state formation. An established state refers to a central government with the ability to exercise power within a geographic territory that is superior relative to potential competitors such as rival governments, nobles, and religious intuitions. ↩︎
8.  David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 19 (FN5), 28-32, 140-141, 173-179, and 228-229. ↩︎
9. Tijana Krstic, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 100, 147. ↩︎
10. Nirenberg, 52, 83-92, 113-118. ↩︎
11. Krstic, 19-20, 98-99, 165-174. ↩︎
12. Nirenberg, 245-246. ↩︎
13. Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 168-180. ↩︎
14. Peter Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 1, 6-11, 328-333. ↩︎
15. Judith Pollmann, “Countering the Reformation in France and the Netherlands: Clerical Leadership and Catholic Violence 1560-1585,” Past and Present 190 (February 2006): 118-120. ↩︎
16. Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 18, 62-63, 123. ↩︎
17. Barbara Diefendorf, “Were the Wars of Religion about Religion?” Political Theology: The Journal of Christian Socialism 15, no. 6, (2014), 552-556. ↩︎
18. Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 99-124. ↩︎
19. Kaplan, 1-11, 52-53, 143, 336-343. ↩︎
20. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 9-29. ↩︎
21. Jonathan H. Ebel, Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1-20, 194. ↩︎
22. Ebel, 193. ↩︎
23. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, 4^th ed. (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 295-297. ↩︎
24. Melvyn P. Leffler, “9/11 and the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy,” International Affairs 79, No. 5 (October 2003): 1046, 1057. ↩︎
25. Louis S. Warren, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America, (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 2-3, 8-10, 368. Michelene E. Pesantubbee, “Wounded Knee: Site of Resistance and Recovery,” in Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place, ed. Oren Baruch Stier and J. Shawn Landres, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006),79-86. ↩︎
26. Christopher R. Duncan, Violence and Vengeance: Religious Conflict and Its Aftermath in Eastern Indonesia, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 45, 102-103, 122, 140-143. ↩︎
27. Juergensmeyer, xiv, 109-117, 153. ↩︎
28. Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021), 51. ↩︎
29. Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge, 51. ↩︎
30. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018) 10, 430. ↩︎
31. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), 260. ↩︎
32. Max Weber, Essays in Sociology (Oxford: Taylor & Francis Group, 1991), 78, accessed April 19, 2024, ProQuest Ebook Central. ↩︎
33. Cavanaugh, 174. ↩︎
34. Cavanaugh, 10. ↩︎
35. Cavanaugh, 160-180. Cavanaugh quotes John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 154-155. ↩︎
36. Cavanaugh, 176. ↩︎
37. Diefendorf, “Wars of Religion,” 554-556. ↩︎

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