Religion and the State

Europe and North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Joshua B. Stein, Sargon George Donabed

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2012
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780739171578
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Early American History

The historiography of church-state relations in America and Europe remains a live cultural, religious, and political issue on both sides of the Atlantic. Even more, current political invocations of history illuminate the need for a thoroughly trans-Atlantic approach to the history of church-state relations in the modern West. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the formative period for modern church-states relations we see vividly the complex interrelationship of developments from England, France, and America. Ever since, historians and political figures have compared the European and American efforts to discern the proper role of religion in government and government in religion. This work is an effort to illuminate that role or at the very least to bring to light the innumerable ways in which such roles were formed.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction:Establishing and Disestablishing Religion in the Atlantic World
• Chapter One: Church and State inEarly Modern Europe
• Chapter Two: The Reformed Theologian—The Forgotten Political Theorist? Change and Contest in Theology and Ecclesiology in Late-Sixteenth and Early-Seventeenth-Century Reformed EnglandThis essay contains portions of several chapters of the author’s active dissertation in early modern history written for the degree of doctor of philosophy at the University of St. Andrews, UK.
• Chapter Three: “The Leviathan Is Not Safely to Be Angered”: The Convocation Controversy, Country Ideology, and Anglican High Churchmanship, 1689–1702
• Chapter Four: The French Revolution and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy: The Unintentional Turning Point
• Chapter Five: The Spanish Legal Solution to the Presence of Religious Symbols in the Public Sphere: A Cautious Evolution from a Catholic Denominational Past to an Effective Secularism
• Chapter Six: Church, State, and Capital Punishment in Seventeenth-Century Connecticut
• Chapter Seven: Roger Williams, English Law and Religious Tolerance: The Jewish Experience in the Southern New England Colonies, 1677–1798
• Chapter Eight: Oaths and Christian Belief in theNew Nation: 1776–1789
• Chapter Nine: Education, Religion, and the State in Postrevolutionary America
• Chapter Ten: Fighting over the Founders:Reflections on the Historiographyof the Founders’ Faiths
• About the Contributors