There is a common narrative about the rise of modern politics that goes something like this:

Once upon a time, there was a Reformation, which gave rise to profound religious pluralism and religious dogmatism at the same time. Lutherans, Calvinists, Catholics and more duked it out through their various dukes, amassing armies to fight for their vision of confessional purity, seeking to impose Reformation or Counter-Reformation by force on neighboring polities, while aggressively policing internal dissent. This process came to its culmination in the continental bloodletting known as the Thirty Years’ War, after which the various parties, out of sheer exhaustion, decided it was time to get religion out of politics. Thereupon, a variety of enlightened philosophes from the various countries forged a new path toward modern political thought, using reason alone to construct a concept of a secular social contract focused on this-worldly concerns, and a neutral set of principles for religious tolerance, and banishing religion to the private sphere. So pervasive is this myth that it crops up regularly in US Supreme Court decisions.

But there is an alternative narrative that might go something like this:

Fed up with papal tyranny, Protestant churches and Protestant princes declared independence from an imperialistic church, seeking to carve out autonomous polities within which they could defend their ability to worship God according to their understanding of Scripture. The rulers of these various polities did not “seek to make windows into men’s souls,” but generally sought to uphold a public orthodoxy to support the work of the church and maintain civil peace. Over time, faced with the stubborn persistence of religious differences within their polities, they began to make increasing provision for Protestant dissenters that respected the governing authorities, but could not do the same for Catholic dissenters that were sworn to their overthrow. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and even well into the eighteenth, Protestant princes were forced to fight defensive conflicts against Catholic powers seeking to reimpose papal authority by force. In this fight, they were fortified by a vast outpouring of political theory and jurisprudence that drew explicitly on Christian theology as well as a constantly-developing natural law tradition, in order to distinguish very clearly the relative religious rights of rulers and subjects.

This narrative is clearly partisan, but then again, so is the other one. And the latter narrative is, so far as I can tell, substantially more correct. John Locke, for instance, rather than writing timeless treatises of secular political theory, was a polemicist during some of the most intense religious conflicts in English political history—those surrounding the Exclusion Crisis, the reign of James II, and the Glorious Revolution. His works were suffused with scriptural arguments and Protestant theology, and he firmly maintained the standard view that, as Roman Catholics were loyal to a foreign prince who claimed authority to depose the English rulers, they could not enjoy toleration.

Perhaps more interesting, though certainly less well-known, is the work of the Lutheran jurist Samuel von Pufendorf (1632-94), a towering giant of the European intellectual world during his day, and one of the most-cited jurists throughout the eighteenth-century, including during the American Founding era. Pufendorf wrote several works that touched on the proper relationship of religion and politics, but perhaps the most incisive treatment was his On the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society—which, like several of his other works, is available in a gorgeous modern edition from Liberty Fund.

This work was originally published in 1687, which, if you know anything about European history, probably tells you something about its occasion: the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau, by which Louis XIV officially revoked the nearly century-long official policy of religious toleration for Protestant Huguenots established by Henri IV in the Edict of Nantes. Following several years of unofficial persecution through the so-called dragonnades (whereby French dragoons were authorized to single out prominent Huguenot households for mistreatment and destruction), the Edict officially outlawed Protestantism, destroying Huguenot churches and schools, and hounding Huguenots out of the country if they did not convert. In January 1686, Louis XIV boasted that he had succeeded in reducing the Huguenot population of France from 900,000 to 1,500—a hyperbolic claim yet still broadly indicative.

Now, there are two ways of looking at this policy. One was to see it as an outrageous unprovoked attack on a peaceful citizenry by a religious zealot, the so-called “Most Christian King of France,” as part of his decades-long campaign to bring all of Western Europe under the domination of his crown and his church. So the English saw it, intensifying their fear and hostility of their own Catholic monarch; so William of Orange saw it; so many of the great German writers of the age, such as Pufendorf and Leibniz, saw it. The other way to look at it is as Wikipedia describes it: “The revocation of the Edict of Nantes brought France into line with virtually every other European country of the period which legally tolerated only the majority state religion. The French experiment of religious tolerance in Europe was effectively ended for the time being.” From this standpoint, the shock of Protestant intelligentsia around Europe was rank hypocrisy—if their governments did not tolerate Catholics, why should Catholic governments be expected to tolerate Protestants?

From our standpoint, indeed, any policy of religious toleration must be neutral—what’s good for the goose must be good for the gander, and anything else is just special pleading. But almost no one saw it that way in the early modern world. For one thing, they weren’t relativists: in religion as in everything else, there was a true and a false; and false religions didn’t have the same right to restrict true religions that true religions had to restrict false ones. That said, writers like Pufendorf recognized the need for a more sophisticated set of criteria besides “only true Christians have a right to persecute.” In fact, he sought to articulate a theory of civil government that could on the one hand explain why Louis XIV’s policy of enforced religious uniformity was wrong-headed and dangerous, without pretending that religion and politics could be neatly separated.

From Pufendorf’s standpoint, Catholic persecution could arise from two equal and opposite errors: one asserted the complete dependence of religious affairs on the state, the other their complete independence. Louis XIV somehow managed to combine both errors at once: in one sense he was acting on the former claim, quashing the Huguenots in the name of ensuring the absolute supremacy of his crown, but he was doing so in the name of a religion that had for centuries proclaimed its essential independence from civil authority. He could thus have his cake and eat it too, explaining to moderates that the Huguenots had to be outlawed for the sake of the state, and explaining to devout Catholics that he was prepared to imperil the peace of his realm in order to be a better Catholic and cleanse France of the stain of heresy.

In his response to the Edict, then, Pufendorf seeks to outline a theory of civil government that on the one hand secures religion from direct state interference, while also carving out space for the validity of the established Protestant churches, supported and protected by the state. Readers may disagree over whether Pufendorf’s synthesis is ultimately persuasive, but it is worth carefully reckoning with.

Pufendorf begins with a premise that may cause many readers’ eyes to narrow in suspicion: “Religion having its relation to God, the same may be exercised without the Communion of a great many” (14). This looks like the privatization of religion that we have been told to expect from the Enlightenment, or, depending on whom you read, from Protestantism. And indeed, Pufendorf is making an essentially Protestant point here, based on Luther’s two-kingdoms theology: while it might certainly be a great blessing and benefit to be part of a large community of saints, if we are talking about the sine qua nons of religion, a small band on a desert island can worship God as truly as a great multitude: “Religious Exercises could be performed as well by a few, as by a great Number; and in a small Congregation as well as in a great one” (17). Pufendorf’s point here is to head off any idea that the Christian religion needs to be expressed at the level of a whole political society—there is no intrinsic connection between affairs of state and affairs of God, however much they might mutually benefit one another.

Moreover, he stresses that true religion is the sort of thing that simply cannot be compelled by the sword. He hypothesizes a natural religion in the state of nature, in which each, “according to the best of their Knowledge, may dispose the outward Form of their religious worship, without being accountable to any body, but God Almighty” (14). And as for the Christian religion, it “must be acquired by the assistance of Divine Grace, which is contrary to all Violence” (15). A magistrate might enforce an outward confession, but this would be of no spiritual value. Above all, Pufendorf takes it as axiomatic that in affairs of religion, no one can believe or honor God on my behalf: “every body is obliged to worship God in his own Person, Religious Duty being not to be performed by a Deputy” (13).

For all these reasons, religion, properly speaking, cannot be an affair of state. “Civil Governments were not erected for Religions sake; or that Men did not enter into Civil societies, that they might with more conveniency establish, and exercise their Religion” (17). Civil society is not a means toward a religious end, nor should religion be turned into a means to prop up civil society: “Religion in itself considered, is not made subordinate to the State; or to be deem’d a proper Instrument to serve a States Turn, and to keep the People in Obedience” (17). To be sure, it is true that religion does benefit the state, so much so that if there were no fear of God in a people, neither would there be any respect for the laws—but this must be taken as a beneficial side-effect of religion, not its purpose, and if princes seek to make use of religion for civil ends, they pervert it from its chief purpose.

All of this rings rather nicely in our disestablishmentarian ears, so that we may be a bit alarmed to find Pufendorf, just a few pages later, asserting, “have a paternal duty “to implant Piety into their Children” and also “to take care, that Publick Discipline (of which the Reverence due to God Almighty, is one main Point) to be maintained among their Subjects. And, whereas the Fear of God is the Foundation Stone of Probity, and other Moral Vertues; and it being the Interest of Sovereigns, that the same be by all means encouraged in a State; and that Religion is the strongest Knot for the maintaining a true Union betwixt Sovereigns and their Subjects” (20).

Is this rank contradiction? Well, no. In these pages, Pufendorf proceeds on the conviction that natural theology is real, and that the First Table of the Decalogue names principles of natural law that are broadly accessible to any people, and that the magistrate thus has an obligation to outwardly enforce through civil law, just as he does the Second Table. Public blasphemy or idolatry is the business of the lawmaker—but only inasmuch as it is public. The religion that chiefly matters in God’s eyes is an affair of the heart, and this is not the magistrate’s business. And in any case, it is crucial for Pufendorf that the only standard that could here justify the magistrate’s interference is a violation of the natural principles of religion, not revealed religion. We may be skeptical of this distinction in practice, but it is very important for Pufendorf’s argument, for he wants to insist that the differences between Christians, based on different interpretations of Scripture, are not, properly speaking, the magistrate’s business.

He spells all this out at some length in a fascinating passage toward the end of the treatise. Those who would give civil authorities power to enforce the articles of Christian faith by law, he says,

act quite contrary to the true Genius of the Christian Religion, and to the Method made use of by Christ and his Apostles, for the propagating of this Doctrine; They destroy the very Essential part of our Faith, which being a Gift of the Holy Ghost, and a Belief founded in our Hearts, is transmuted into an outward Confession, where the Tongue, to avoid Temporal Punishment, is forced to speak those things which are in no wise agreeable to the Heart. This however admits again of a Limitation; For herein are not comprehended these Points, which proceeding from Natural Religion, are also contained in the Christian Doctrine, and all of them imply a profound Reverence to be paid to the Supream BEING. For, it is beyond all question, that those that act against the very Dictates of Reason, ought to be subject to Civil Punishments, since they strike at the very Foundation of Civil Societies: Such are Idolatry, Blasphemy, Profanation of the Sabbath; where nevertheless great care is to be taken, that a due difference be made betwixt the Moral part of that Precept concerning the Sabbath, which is unalterable, and the Ceremonial part of it (102-3).

Based on these arguments, Pufendorf believes he has invalidated the primary basis for the Edict of Fontainebleau: that the king had a duty before God, as part of his civil authority, to enforce the right exercise of the Christian faith. Not only was he wrong as a matter of fact about which was the true Christian faith, but even if he were right, that would not justify the compulsion of the Huguenots. This is not to say that he could not act to defend, protect, and promote the form of the Christian church that he considers best—Pufendorf sees no contradiction between affirming religious liberty and affirming religious establishment. But the primary religious duty of the magistrate is the promotion of religious education. After all, “The Kingdom of Christ … is a Kingdom of Truth, where he, by the force of Truth, brings over our Souls to his Obedience; and this Truth has such powerful Charms, that the Kingdom of Christ needs not to be maintained by the same forcible means and Rules, by which Subjects must be kept in Obedience to the Civil Powers” (35).

But why then is Pufendorf OK with Protestant polities restricting Roman Catholicism? Again, this looks like rank hypocrisy to us, but from his vantage point, Roman Catholicism did not make purely religious claims—rather, it made political claims. Specifically, it saw the church as an essentially political organization enjoying a kind of autonomy from civil authority. He finds it particularly alarming that the Catholic clergy insist on having independent courts of jurisdiction that can only be appealed to Rome, not to the temporal authority—the concern that was also at the top of Henry VIII’s mind in 1533. Accordingly, Pufendorf spends by far the largest part of the treatise in a sustained examination of the nature of the church, the power of the keys, and the kind of authority that Christ gave to the Apostles, to demonstrate that this authority in no way altered or challenged the essential prerogatives of civil authority or implied that the church constituted some kind of alternative polis.

We may rightly wonder whether Pufendorf’s two-kingdoms doctrine is not just a bit too dichotomous here—is it really the case, for instance, that when Christ “plainly told and enjoyned his Disciples, that they should not strive for Pre-eminency over one another, as Temporal Princes do” (32), that he meant this to apply only to the private lives of Christians, and did not mean to challenge in any way the norms and prerogatives of princes? There seems little room in this exposition for the idea of the spiritual kingdom having a leavening effect upon the temporal. That said, Pufendorf’s treatment of the power of the keys and of excommunication is really quite masterful, providing a really classic statement of the mainstream (i.e., non-Calvinistic) Protestant understanding of church disciplinary power. This subject, however, would demand an essay of its own to do it justice—or, even better, you should just take up and read the volume for yourself.

While it is certainly true that political theory underwent a process of secularization in the early modern era, texts like Pufendorf’s are proof that we must modify the standard timeline. It is certainly not the case that the Peace of Westphalia represented a watershed moment, before which we had political theology on behalf of warring confessional camps, and after which we had a neutral science of politics that appealed to reason to defuse the threat of religiously-inflected politics. Rather, throughout the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth, we witness writers such as Pufendorf who were deeply learned in Scripture and their confessional theological traditions, as well as deeply conversant in the philosophy of natural law, synthesizing faith and reason to argue for a distinctive political vision. This vision was certainly not liberal pluralism, but neither was it medieval Christendom. It was something very much sui generis. Readers may differ over whether it represents a coherent third way of its own, or a messy way-station in the midst of a transition to secularized politics and privatized religion. But whatever one’s final assessment of Pufendorf’s achievement, On the Nature and Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society is a work of remarkable intellectual power and clarity, that deserves to be high on any reading list on the history of church and state.

Brad Littlejohn is a Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Previously, he founded and served for ten years as the President of the Davenant Institute.

*Image Credit: “Épisode des Dragonnades” by Jules Girardet, Wikimedia Commons