Summary
William T. Cavanaugh joins the dots between the wars of religion, the Reformation, and the rise of the modern nation-state.
Far from being the saviour that solves the problem of the wars of religion, the state actually I think is at the source, is one of the causes of the wars of religion – the rise of the modern nation-state. And in fact, José Casanova has said that these should not be called the wars of religion, they should be called the wars of the rise of the modern nation-state, something like that.
So what you have is the attempts of the Habsburgs to centralise their authority in the Holy Roman Empire – which has always been kind of loose, you have a lot of autonomy of the princes at the local level. He’s trying to kind of centralise this power, and the local princes are resisting that. And one of the tools they used to resist that is the Reformation. And so one of the interesting things that you see is where the church has already been absorbed by the state, the Reformation fails, but where the state has something to gain by the absorption of the church, that’s where the Reformation succeeds.
And so, not saying that the Swedish king is insincere in his beliefs in Lutheranism, but when he decides to take on Lutheranism in 1524, it brings him the advantages of taking on all of the revenues of the church into the state. And so these are the kinds of factors that have already been going on long before the Reformation, that get accelerated after the Reformation, and the Reformation gets kind of caught up into these movements of state-making.
