A brief review of Luther’s confessional summation of the central indisputable articles of faith for the reformed Christian religion; Luther’s practical reformation agendas are interpreted, noting the tensions regarding sacramental theology and teachings on marriage and sexuality.

This essay argues that understanding religion and the history of religion in the United States can help scholars, students, and the American public be more aware of the dynamics around war and wiser in the conclusions they reach about experiences of war and their relationship to American society. Put differently, when those who study war and society in America keep religion out of their stories, they remove from consideration not only some of the nation’s most influential institutions and voices, but also many of the ideas, stories, and symbols that help women and men find meaning and purpose in the uncertainty, the suffering, and the loss that go along with war.

In this chapter, religion’s role in conflict and violence is examined, covering the decades from c. 1603 until shortly before the outbreak of rebellion in October 1641. The chapter traces how it was increasingly religious flashpoints – sacred objects, churches and churchyards, and rituals such as the Mass among others – that generated tension, unrest and even violence in seventeenth-century Ireland. As Protestant settlers sought to implement the work of ‘converting and civilising’, Irish Catholics pushed back against what they viewed as heretical incursions. They reveal battles over ideas of possession, heritage, power and the nature of the sacred itself, and how religious symbols and language were growing ever more important in how Irish and British, Catholic and Protestant viewed and lived alongside one another. Intra-confessional conflict is also addressed, through examining the eruption of violence by Scottish settlers against the Church of Ireland in the wake of the National Covenant and ensuing unrest in Scotland. It indicates religion’s potent ability to motivate and mobilise resistance, even unto violence, as crisis Unfolded across the Three Kingdoms.

The clergy – both Catholic priests and Protestant ministers – are the subject of this chapter. They were both targets for violence and could be among its perpetrators. A core argument here is that Protestant ministers were subjected to violence in large part because of their profession, as against motives such as moneylending that were emphasised in previous scholarship. As leading Protestant figures, they were both symbols of and key actors within Protestant ‘civilising and converting’ that was so central to the decades before the rebellion, helping to explain Irish Catholic hostility towards them. Similarly, violence against Catholic priests drew from longstanding patterns that viewed priests as seditious, troublesome and violent, thus justifying their persecution and even killing. Examining the clergy as symbols as well as people, alongside the study of violence against sacred objects and spaces, reinforces the strong religious character of violence during the rebellion and its continuation in the decade of conflict that followed.

In theory, major differences separated clergy from laity by the twelfth century, especially regarding violence: clergy were subject only to church courts for violent crimes; they enjoyed special papal protection from violent assault; they were to renounce violent behaviour and even sexual relations; and were subject to a different system of law and clemency from laity regarding homicide. In practice, these differences were fading by the fifteenth century. Increasingly, fewer men charged with crimes before lay courts pleaded clergy and sought transfer before church courts for fear of long detention in episcopal gaols awaiting a church trial. English application of papal protection from anti-clerical violence increasingly stressed reconciliation between clerical victims and lay assailants rather than social division. Clergy became subject to lay violence not for being different from laity but too similar to them, especially in pursuing sex and violence and other deviance from ideal priestly standards. Finally, common law on homicide, especially self-defence, increasingly resembled canon law, which explains why clergy accepted lay justice and clemency when facing homicide charges.

The first of the three topics that occupied censors across the regimes was ‘religion’, which predominantly meant Catholicism. This chapter traces examples of self- and bureaucratic censorship under the Ancien Régime, when the king was in power through divine right, through the Revolution, where plays criticizing the Church exploded, and onto the Empire and the Restoration, both of which had an uneasy relationship with biblical and Catholic material for the theatre, especially on secondary stages like the Vaudeville. Generally, the larger the role the Catholic Church played at the time, the more difficult the representation of religious material became. However, when such material did make it to the boards, lateral censorship meant that religion could quickly act as an ersatz vehicle to discuss the ruling regime. Religion was an even tricker subject as reactions were far from homogenous: context was key, and whilst a play might be acceptable to one audience, another could boil over into violence in its quest to promote or silence specific worldviews.

This chapter explains the origins of the Estates General, in practice from the 1484 meeting, and how deputies were chosen, how the meetings of the Estate General operated, and why kings convoked them in its 1560, 1561, 1576, 1588–1589, and 1614 meetings. It also explains the differences between the Estates General and meetings of provincial estates and bailiwick assemblies.

This chapter examines the role religion played in the prosecution of the American Revolution. It explains the way that Revolutionary leaders often utilized religious language in their public appeals, translating justifications for rebellion from terms of Enlightenment reason and international law to religious terms. This chapter also demonstrates how the Continental Congress coopted hundreds of American clergymen as spokesmen for the independence. Finally, it demonstrates how religious beliefs – and religious identities – were affected by the Revolution, including conflicts over liturgy and fractures within religious communities over politicized public rituals such as days of fasting and prayer. Although Protestant Christian denominations were the most numerous in the colonies at the time of the Revolution, this chapter considers the experiences of American Catholics and Jews as well.

At an early time, the role of the laity in the Roman Church diminished as a body of clergy under the authority of a bishop became established as a separate caste. Its members resembled civil servants, as was implied by the word used for the procedure by which one joined them, “ordination,” that was familiar from Roman secular life. They manifested some of the characteristics of the members of a bureaucracy, in being prepared to pay for an office, a practice known as simony, and in being concerned for promotion. The clergy were divided into two streams with separate promotion structures, one of subdeacons, deacons, and archdeacons, and the other of acolytes, priests, and archpriests. Of these the former was more prestigious, and more likely to culminate in the office of pope, the bishop who exercised control over the other clergy. The body of clergy was by no means harmonious, and there were frequently tensions within it. While laypeople were excluded from the prominent position they had held when the church was established in Rome, the clergy continued to be connected from the families from which they came.

This chapter shows how Enlightenment theology moved beyond its academic and ecclesiastical contexts to become part of a larger campaign for reform. Advocates of a new system of educating and training clergymen turned to the public sphere and cast their project as a continuation of the Reformation. Intended as a rhetorical strategy to solidify support among a Protestant public that was open to a less stringent and dogmatic Christianity than that of Lutheran Orthodoxy or Pietism, Enlightenment theologians paved the way for a fruitful reinterpretation of the Protestant past. The chapter provides an overview of the theological innovations of Halle theologian Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791), which formed the backbone of much of Enlightenment theology (or “Neology” as it is frequently labeled). The chapter shows how public controversies about binding doctrines led to a series of public assertions that had the rhetorical effect of recasting the historical understanding of the Reformation.

Chapter 1 provides the broad context of Nicene–Homoian interactions in Africa, including those that preceded the Vandal conquest. It examines the involvement of the African church in the Trinitarian controversy of the fourth century and its intertwining with the Donatist crisis as these experiences explain the later attitude of the African clergy toward Vandal Homoianism.