The Reformation and the Power of the State

The reformers (and Luther in particular) had preached of emancipation from the discipline of the Church and a gospel of release from what was plausibly represented as a religion of law, obedience, and priestly authority. Their converts were taight to enjoy 'the liberty of the Christian man', saved by faith (fiducia, not merely assensus) alone and absolved from having to work their passage by good deeds and penitential sufferings. The outcome was a vast moral and religious anarchy upon which the Reformers themselves had little disposition to impose a new creed or a new ecclesiastical order. And it fell to the 'godly prince' (like the Emperor Constantine on an earlier occasion) to curtail the seemingly endless theological disputes, to define a 'confession' for his subjects, to create and endow from the spoils of ecclesiastical depredations the 'reformed' church of his state, to insist upon uncompromising uniformity, and this to place his state under the aegis of the new and powerful God of the reformers. And in so doing he acquired a command over his subjects which no Catholic king ever enjoyed. From the converts of the reformers released from disciples and subject to the pulls of a hundred novel fanaticisms, and from the desire of princes and municipal governments to protect their confiscations and to enhance their independence, there emerged the new territorial 'reformed' churches, each 'a wheel in the great machine of the state': a clergy without priestly authority whose fortunes (now that they had confirmed their defection by marrying) were irrevocably bound up with those of the regime, and their often bewildered congregations tied to the religion of the regio they inhabited.

- Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) p. 285.