Russell Blackford's article is a well-intentioned effort at achieving a workable modus vivendi in a world where atheists, Catholics, Muslims and others must all learn to get along. His solution is a familiar one: let's take what divides us - religion, defined as beliefs about otherworldly matters - and privatize it. We can then all agree in public, at least in principle, on merely worldly matters.
Blackford's argument is based on a familiar "Just So" story about European history: once upon a time Catholics and Protestants started killing each other over religion. The secular state saved the day by making religion a private matter. Locke is the hero here for conceptualizing this amicable division: the church would stay out of politics, and the state would stay out of religion. And they all lived happily ever after.
Unfortunately, this tale does not become more true simply by being repeated. It is a favourite of liberal political theorists - John Rawls, Richard Rorty and many others - but it can't be found in the work of any respected historian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
To begin with only the most obvious discrepancy, the secular state did not resolve the so-called "Wars of Religion" - the first state in which church and state were formally separated made its appearance a good century and a half after the Treaty of Westphalia. When the so-called "Wars of Religion" came to an end, the absolutist state was the victor. The way had been paved for the deification of Louis XIV.
If we look to the origins of these wars, further problems with the "Just So" tale arise. Can they really be called "Wars of Religion" if Catholics killed Catholics, Lutherans killed Lutherans, and Protestants and Catholics often collaborated?
Holy Roman Emperor Charles V spent most of the decade following Martin Luther's excommunication at war, not against Lutherans, but against the Pope. When the Lutheran princes did take up arms against the Catholic Emperor in the 1550s, they did so with the aid of Catholic France.
The French "Wars of Religion" are full of collaborations between Protestants and Catholics, and the Thirty Years' War - perhaps the most notorious of the "Wars of Religion" - saw Cardinal Richelieu throwing the full force of French might on the side of the Lutheran Swedes, who in turn attacked Lutheran Denmark. While the Calvinist Dutch were helping the French royal forces to defeat the Calvinists at La Rochelle, Catholic Spain was supporting the Protestant duke of Rohan in his battle against the French crown in Languedoc.
The Thirty Years' War was in fact primarily a contest between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons, the two great Catholic dynasties of Europe. Is this what Blackford means by "religion-tinged political struggles between great European dynasties"?
There is no doubt that Protestants and Catholics did kill each other in these wars, sometimes brutally and on a large scale. But the above examples and many more like them (I cite dozens in the third chapter of my book, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict) raise a question with which historians grapple: were these wars about religion or about political, economic and social causes?
Historians vary in their responses. Throughout much of the twentieth century, for example, historiography of the French wars of the sixteenth century tended to downplay religious factors in favour of class conflict, but since the 1970s there has been a renewed emphasis on religion. The problem with these debates is that there was no relevant distinction between "religion" and "politics" or other "secular" factors in the sixteenth century. Processions of the Eucharistic host, for example, were not purely "religious" but were part of the reinforcement of social boundaries in French society. As historian Barbara Diefendorf says about the French wars, "religious and secular motives were inseparable." As historian John Bossy points out, there was no modern concept of religion in the sixteenth century.
In the medieval period, the religious/secular distinction was a distinction between two different types of priests, those who belonged to orders like the Dominicans and those who belonged to a diocese. "Religion" as we know it was not invented as something distinct from "secular" factors like "politics" and "economics" until about 1700, or well after the so-called "Wars of Religion" are supposed to have occurred.
If "religion" cannot be separated out as the cause of these wars, then the idea that peace was made by the secular state setting religion aside into a private realm becomes suspect. This is so not simply because the blame for these wars cannot be laid at the feet of "religion," but also because the rise of the state was in fact implicated in the violence. Jose Casanova has suggested that rather than call them "Wars of Religion" they should be known as the "wars of European state-building."
The key factor in many of the conflicts was the struggle between state-making elites and the forms of local authority - especially that of the church and the lesser nobility - that stood in the way of centralization. As Michael Howard sums it up:
"The attempts by the dominant dynasties of Europe to exercise disputed rights of inheritance throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries became consolidated, in the sixteenth century, into a bid by the Habsburgs to sustain a hegemony which they had inherited over most of western Europe against all their foreign rivals and dissident subjects, usually under the leadership of France. The result was almost continuous warfare in western Europe from the early sixteenth until the mid-seventeenth centuries."
In other words, the rise of the modern state was not the solution to the "Wars of Religion" - it was the most significant cause of them.
The invention of "religion" as something inherently otherworldly and separate from mundane "secular" affairs like politics was an important part of the state-making process. If ecclesiastical authorities could be seen as presiding over an area of life that is essentially otherworldly and distinct from mundane political affairs, then the ecclesiastical court system could be shut down, church lands and their attendant revenues could be confiscated, and all kinds of ecclesiastical checks on civil rulers' power could be eliminated. This is, in historical fact, what happened.
The modern religious/secular divide was invented along with the invention of the modern state as the final act in the struggle between civil and ecclesiastical powers in Europe that had been going on at least since the Investiture Controversy in the eleventh century, and arguably since the conversion of Constantine.
Although the ecclesiastical/civil divide goes back to Constantine, the religious/political divide does not. In the medieval period, the civil authority was "the police department of the Church," in John Neville Figgis's phrase. Church authorities did not think that their authority was purely otherworldly, nor that Christianity was essentially about otherworldly concerns. The goal of Christendom was to build a society in which the Gospel permeated every aspect of life, from law-making to barrel-making.
Princes and bishops jockeyed for power within this common vision and, increasingly after the Investiture Controversy, went their separate ways. The idea that the church's area of concern could be reduced to "religion," understood as essentially otherworldly, was a product of the final triumph of civil over ecclesiastical authority in early modern Europe.
Locke's big idea that, as Blackford puts it, "religious organisations are focused on otherworldly doctrines and are ill-adapted for the exercise of secular power" depends on the invention of religious organisations that are focused on otherworldly doctrines, which simply did not exist before the era in question. The idea that Locke was simply sorting out what had gotten muddled by making a proper distinction between worldly and otherworldly - "between the proper aims of secular government and those of spiritual teaching" as Blackford puts it - is wrong. To be fair to Blackford, Locke himself did not think that he was inventing something new either. He wrote:
"the church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immovable. He jumbles heaven and earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these two societies, which are in their original, end, business, and in everything perfectly distinct and infinitely different from each other."
In fact, though, the advent of the modern state was proving that the boundaries were anything but "fixed and immovable."
The problem with Locke's and Blackford's scheme is not that it is new - there is no point to any nostalgia for the Middle Ages. The problem is that the scheme is presented as an historical solution that made peace by recognizing the true nature of "religions" like Christianity and Islam, when in fact it came about through a violent process of state-making that distorts Christianity, Islam and other traditions that are run through its worldly/otherworldly dichotomy.
Once the game is rigged along the lines of the worldly/otherworldly distinction, the price of admission for traditions like Christianity and Islam is steep. Locke excluded Catholics and Muslims from his plan for religious toleration because he thought their civil allegiances were divided by their allegiance to foreign powers.
Blackford thinks Locke was being consistent in giving worldly reasons for excluding Catholics and Muslims, though Blackford does not think those reasons apply today. What Blackford does not see is that Catholicism and Islam did not fit into Locke's scheme for religious toleration precisely because they had as yet refused to define themselves as religions.
Catholics did not accept the ideas that what they were about was essentially otherworldly and that therefore their temporal loyalty should lie with the king who had swallowed whole the church in his realm. As for Muslims, it is often commented today that they make no distinction between religion and politics. In the West, this is seen as evidence of their perversity. As John Esposito comments, to call Islam a "religion" is already to mark it as an abnormal religion, precisely because it does not "properly" separate religion from politics and otherworldly from worldly concerns.
But to regard Islam as an abnormal "religion" is to regard as a neutral descriptive term what is in fact a term laden with Western ideological baggage. Islam is not abnormal for refusing to separate the worldly from the otherworldly; as Robert Shedinger comments, the true historical oddity is not the "politicization of Islam" but the "religionization of Christianity."
Blackford seems to think that it is simply obvious that Christianity and Islam are about otherworldly doctrines, and we can all come to agreement in principle on merely mundane matters like public policy about sex if we treat them as questions of hygiene and public health. But Christians and Muslims and many others do not think that sex is merely about hygiene. Fine, says Blackford, just don't try to impose that view on others. But beliefs about the telos of the human body and the ends of human sexuality - and therefore the ends of human society - are not neatly cordoned off into spiritual, and therefore private, concerns.
In Blackford's world such lofty talk can be set aside in favour of "appropriate secular standards concerning the relevant things of this world." But for many people, sex education that is merely about plumbing is not sex education at all. Blackford does not seem to grasp the possibility that for many people the "spiritual" aspect of sex is not just something that is added on top of the "physical" aspect of sex, such that one could profitably set aside the former and just talk about the latter.
None of this is to say that Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu views about human sexuality or any other issue should necessarily prevail in a pluralistic society. It is rather to say that in a truly pluralistic society people should be free to be themselves, to talk about what they see as the true ends of ordinary life without cordoning off their deepest convictions.
We have bought into the idea that we cannot disagree about fundamental matters without violence. I see no reason, historical or otherwise, why this should be so. In a democratic and pluralistic society, people should be free to give any reasons for their positions that they see as significant, even if such reasons are theological.
Society would be much freer if secularists dropped the idea that their reasons alone are "worldly" and therefore fit for public consumption. It would be much more refreshing if atheists like Blackford just abandoned the pretence of neutrality and said that they find many Christian ideas batty. Then we could perhaps have an interesting conversation about the ends of human life and best political ways to attain them.
Christians and Muslims and Jews and others could put forth thoroughly "worldly" visions of a flourishing human life with a transcendent dimension. And it could become apparent that atheists and other secularists also have their own visions that are not merely "worldly" and mundane, but offer a comprehensive worldview that is not essentially distinct from the worldviews they would exclude from public discourse.
William Cavanaugh is Research Professor at the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University, Chicago. He is the author of Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict and most recently Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church.