Oh, So That's What That Was All About

I don't know if I really buy this or not, but it certainly fits my "somewhat suspicious of the modern secular state that wants to control everything" patterns of thought.

William Cavanaugh maintains that the standard accounts concerning modern tolerance are wrongheaded. We have been taught that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century "wars of religion" required the state to intervene among the fighting Christians, and thus to take matters of religious doctrine and practice out of the public realm lest all of Europe be bathed in blood. Cavanaugh shows, on the contrary, that the alleged religious wars were the birthpangs of the sovereign modern state, the centralizing power that has "a monopoly on violence within a defined territory." Public discourse was secularized during the Enlightenment, Cavanaugh argues, in order the save the state from the threat it feared from the church: "Christianity produces divisions within the state body precisely because it pretends to be a body which transcends state boundaries." Even law itself becomes a thing to be "'made' or legislated by the state rather than 'disclosed' from its divine source through the workings of custom and tradition."

--Chapter 7, page 233