Religious freedom emerged gradually in Europe in the period after 1600. Before the seventeenth century, these things were seen as either impossible or undesirable by all but the most radical and marginalized thinkers. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, a commitment to liberalism became the default position of elites across Western Europe. The question we now turn to is: “What made this transformation possible?”

In modern societies national identity came to replace religion as a source of political legitimacy. Nationalism today has a bad reputation, and we are all familiar with its various pathologies. But the breadth and widespread appeal of nationalism should not be dismissed. In the nineteenth century, for example, nationalism helped pave the way for the emergence of both stronger and more liberal states. We discuss the coevolution of arguments for religious liberty with stronger states and provide detailed evidence from late eighteenth-century France for how state capacity played a role in generating support for national identity and for general rules over identity rules. Lastly, we consider the relationship between the breakdown of the conditional toleration equilibrium and the onset of sustained economic growth.

As we saw in Chapter 7, isolated voices argued for religious identity to be voluntary rather than compulsory throughout the period we study. These included Anabaptists such as Michael Sattler and Menno Simons, and a small group of more intellectually oriented reformers whom historians label evangelical rationalists, most notably Michael Sevetus. Their arguments, however, had little impact on their societies.

For most, the idea of religious freedom was inconceivable because the link between political and religious authority underpinned the entire social order. In his survey of the Reformation, Carlos Eire observes that the Anabaptists were seen by their persecutors as “inherently evil.” They were perceived as a mortal threat to the social order because of, and not despite, their impeccable personal morality. They were dangerous precisely because they were seemingly so good. And it was their belief in a voluntary church that made them especially subversive and in need of eradication: “How could one hope to hold society together without magistrates, executioners, and soldiers, or the oaths that bound people to one another, not just as Christians, but as Citizens?” (Eire, 2016, 262).