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The Shift from Church and State to Religions as Public Life in Modern Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

C. T. McIntire
C. T. McIntire
Affiliation:
Professor in the departments of Religion and History at the University of Toronto.
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Extract

The theme of church and state in modern Europe lay well-situated within the positivist genre of historical study, which served as the dominant model in the profession for generations and in some sense still does. The keystone of the positivist edifice was the commitment to the universality of reason and the efficacy of reason in achieving definitive histories written by professional historians. The functioning of rationality in historical study was exemplified in the stream of history books about male elite subjects—politics, war, diplomacy, the institutions of the state and the church, and the ideas of canonical thinkers—which flowed from the pens of male European and North American academic historians since the late nineteenth century.

Type
Perspectives
Information
Church History , Volume 71 , Issue 1 , March 2002 , pp. 152 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2002

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References

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30. For example, Everett, William Johnson, Religion, Federalism, and the Struggle for Public Life: Cases from Germany, India, and America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholarand Marty, Martin E., The One and the Many: America's Struggle for the Common Good (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

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33. See Boyle, Kevin and Sheen, Juliet, Freedom of Religion and Belief (London: Routledge, 1997).CrossRefGoogle ScholarSeveral American web sites maintain information on the involvements of the religions with the states of the world, including Europe. The contents are selected and structured in accordance with American notions of the separation of church and state, and from that perspective European public life is made to seem a little odd, if not threatening to freedom. See the United States Government survey, “Europe and the New Independent States,” in Annual Report on International Religious Freedom for 1999, Department of State, United States of America, pursuant to the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, released by the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Washington, D.C., 9 Sept. 1999 and posted at http://www.state.gov/www/global/human-rights. A site at the University of Virginia provides links to many sites, including access to the texts of the constitutions of each state: http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/nationprofiles. See also http://www.religious-freedom.orgGoogle Scholar

34. Roof, Wade Clark, Carroll, Jackson W., and Roozen, David A., eds., The Post-War Generation and Establishment Religion: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Boulder: Westview, 1995).Google Scholar