英语论文网

side claimed to be fighting on behalf of God; each side assumed that an empire, a nation, or a smaller polity should be unified in its religious belief and practice. Only a small minority of Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries believed in religious freedom for each individual according to the person’s own conscience. Because religious convictions were so strong, and because religion was embedded in manifold political, social, and economic relations, the conflicts were relentless and merciless. The Thirty Years’ War in Germany, which raged from 1618 to 1648, began as a religious conflict among Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists. By the end the war was more political than religious, with Catholic France intervening on the side of the Protestants to weaken the Holy Roman Emperor; but the damage had been done. There were atrocities against civilian populations on all sides. This was the bloodiest war on the continent of Europe prior to World War I. Meanwhile, about the same time, England went through an extremely vicious, bloody civil war, which killed a higher percentage of the population of England than did World War I.
In the wake of these wars of religion, thinking people increasingly began to question whether religion could or should be trusted with the task of legitimating any form of government. Enlightenment thinkers began to reflect on the virtue of religious tolerance, of respecting the liberty of conscience of others in matters religious. They also began to reflect on the possibility of separating church from state.
About this same time, in the British colonies in North America, some began to question the wisdom of government regulation of religion. In New England Roger Williams surveyed the bitter history of religious conflicts in Europe since the time of Constantine and concluded that imposing religious loyalties was a violation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Williams interpreted Jesus’s parable of the wheat and the weeds as forbidding Christians to attack those with whom they disagreed. Williams daringly judged the Emperor Constantine, who legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, to have been more of a danger than Nero, who had persecuted Christians. Under Nero, Christians had heroically suffered and died; with Constantine, Christians took power, became corrupted, and began to impose Christianity by governmental authority. Williams also argued that it was unjust for the King of England to pretend to have the right to give away lands where Native Americans had lived for centuries. For Williams, the fact that Native Americans had different religious practices did not deprive them of their right to their homeland.
In 1635 Williams was banished from Massachusetts as a dissenter. The following year he moved south, where he purchased land from Native American Indians and established a new community, Rhode Island, as a “haven for the cause of conscience,” founded on the principle of religious liberty for all. His ideal of religious freedom or, in his phrase, “soul liberty” was fiercely opposed by the Puritans in Massachusetts but would stand as a model for later generations.
About the same time, Lord Baltimore founded Maryland as a refuge for Catholics fleeing persecution in England. Purchasing land from Native American Indians, he intended the colony to be a home for followers of all Christian paths, and the charter founding the colony offered equal rights in religious freedom to all. In 1649