Religious War or State Bloodshed?

By Kevin Flatt

April 25, 2016

Modern secularism attributed to Europe’s infamous Wars of Religion really rests on 19th century myths that ignored the State’s provocation of bloodshed, writes historian Kevin Flatt.

In what kind of Christian society could auto-da-fé, meaning “act of In our secular age, a more common reading of the Wars of Religion runs something like this: After the Reformation, religious passions ran amok and led to great bloodshed, until finally political authorities banished religious disputes from the public realm, and established the religiously neutral, secular State as a bulwark against irrational extremism The largest of these wars included the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), a period of civil strife primarily pitting Catholics against Huguenots; the massive Thirty Years’ War (1618- 1648), which expanded from a war between rivals within the Holy Roman Empire to draw in France, Sweden and other combatants; and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639-1651) in the British Isles, which were in part provoked by the religious policies of James I and Charles I We can rightly conclude from the Wars of Religion and their antecedents that the Christian political order of the medieval and Reformation eras failed, catastrophically, to peacefully accommodate confessional diversity The image of a bloody era of religious wars ended by the rise of the peace-loving State quickly turns to nonsense when we think of the wars of Louis XIV, or the French Revolution, or the 19th century apogees of imperialism and nationalism, or the bloodbaths of the first half of the 20th century perpetrated by fascist, communist and liberal states

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