Confessionalism and State-building

Luther Peterson writes, “The confessionalization thesis is a fruitful instrument in explaining the transformation of medieval feudal monarchies into modern states, in particular how the new states changed their inhabitants into disciplined, obedience and united subjects.  According to the thesis, a key factor in that change is the establishment of religious uniformity in the state: the populate was taught a religious identity – Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist – through doctrinal statements (confessions and catechisms) and liturgical practices.  This distinguished ‘us’ as a religious and political community from ‘other,’ often neighboring, religious-political societies.  The rule was sacralized as the defending and – in Protestant lands – leader of the church, rightfully overseeing the church of his land.  These state-led churches also aided state development by imposing moral discipline on the communities.”

R. Po-Chia Hsia agrees:

“The process of political centralization, discernible in the fifteenth century – the adoption of Roman Law, the rise of an academic jurist class, the growth of bureaucracies, and the reduction of local, particularist privileges – received a tremendous boost after 1550.  Conformity required coercion.  Church and state formed an inextricable matrix of power for enforcing discipline and confessionalism.  The history of confessionalization in early modern Germany is, in many ways,the history of the territorial state.”  Confessionalization was largely sponsored by the state, which “usually played a more crucial role than the clergy in determining the course of confessionalization . . . . Having become the head of their territorial churches, princes understood the imposition of confessional conformity both as an extension of their secular authority and as the implementation of God’s work.”

Necessarily, this enforcement of uniform confession meant that “local and particular privileges had to be swept aside; estates, towns, cloisters, and nobility resisted confessionalization behind the bulwark of corporate privileges.”  The resistance worked for a longer while than we think.  Even in 1624, in the region around Osnabruck, most of the clergy could not be easily categorized as Lutheran or Catholic.