State-defined religious tolerance replaced princely religion in early modern Europe

Evidence

In the sixteenth-century wars of religion, European Christian states adopted the principle that the religion of the ruler is the religion of the state. What is significant here is that a political principle replaced a religious one and ‘transcendent power and authority were now given to the state to decide not only on who was deserving of religious tolerance but on what precisely religious tolerance was.’ In Europe we then see French Protestants getting the right to practise their religion in Catholic France at the same time that Spain is expelling its Muslim converts. By the time of the French revolution, when religion comes largely to mean personal belief and the church simply appears as a rival for political power, there is bitter conflict between church and state, a conflict that the state wins in the name of the revolution’s ideals of humanity and progress. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 370

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s article ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — both trace how early-modern European state power reconfigured religion and dress.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the immodesty article’s thesis: sumptuary and tolerance regimes were both instruments of state power over religious populations.