Shamus explains the structure of religions and governments, and how western civil religion separated from ecclesiastical religion at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

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Transcript

I'm thinking a lot of people are not
familiar with religion's - like the
way that they are run, the way that they
have regional conference centers,
treasurer, secretary, all the trappings that you get
in any sort of political system.
but you've got people in charge
of different services you've got people
in charge of helping the needy
all sorts of things. They take their payment the same
way as a proportion of your income. you start to see
once you know from inside out how a
religion works you look around and
instead of imagining there's two types
of organizations that work that way,
turns out there might only be one.
you've got
companies you've got restaurants, taxi services and
domestic servants and all sorts of
services and products, that are sold and
they're just making an offer and
that's well understood you know even a
charity can just like present you the
opportunity to give them your money or
whatever, but the religions of old
would use a threat of God's
disapproval if not hell, or
excommunication. And the state does
the same. Any service
or good that you buy has a price and
that price is the same for everybody.
Whereas with the state and the
church they proportion their prices
according to your income. And this
goes all the way back to the
Hebrews where you'd bring a portion of
your yields. If you had
pressed a lot of oil you'd bring some of
the oil or you'd had a
prize flock you'd bring some of the
flock as your payment to the temple.
So that whole like pricing structure as
well is the same. As soon as a
religion doesn't have a state ordering
it not to enforce its own in code, its
own laws, if you have a religion that is
equal to or superior to the state they
will enforce their tithe and they'll
they'll associate pains with not paying.
That's just as
compulsory as taxation in that case. It's
the same.

The position religions find themselves in today,
ecclesiastical religions - the Catholic Church, the Baptist, the Methodist
and so on, they find themselves in
this in the same sort of situation
like a charity or a wannabe state would
find itself in, if it doesn't
have a monopoly on law, because they
wouldn't be able to force people to
comply with their code. They wouldn't be
able to force people to fund them. But
the main difference that we see now
between religion and state - the main
differences are on account of [the church]
not being in a position to enforce their
code for their funding and so
forth. More than there being a material
difference in how they operate.

Right, so when it comes to say separation of
church and state that was
kind of like a split between between two
factions, or it's like a power
grab from this state religion from the church.

That is kind of how I see
it. So this went down at the Council of
Westphalia in the 1650s and a lot of
people myself included didn't realize
or don't realize how new the concept
of a nation state really is.
It's in its infancy. So in the 1650s
the papal states were kind of standing
down. They had what was called the
Peace of Westphalia - this get-together of
the leaders of Europe and basically, the priestly robes that were
left like lying limp on the floor at
that meeting when they got
together and said right no more
ecclesiastical religions can enforce
themselves on people - only civil religions
can.
The priestly robes that were left lying on the floor at the Peace of
Westphalia are what we know of as
religion today - the Catholic
Church, the Protestants, that came out of
that. They don't have the force
of law behind them, they don't have
compulsion behind them any more.
Not because it went away.
Compulsion is the heart of
the beast. The compulsion is
what made Catholicism, as a compulsory
religion, bad. Compelling
people to pay their tithes, compelling
people to recant, compelling people to at
least keep up appearances of being
Catholic - that is the heart of the Beast.
The heart of the beast is binding people
to compulsory law. And it just changed
its God. It took off its
priestly robes and wrapped itself in a
flag and carried on its merry way.
So I don't see the separation of
church and state that happened at the
Peace of Westphalia as much more than a linguistics game.

If you want to google
this model, what you'll be looking for
is "civil religion"
There's especially one sociologist
[Robert Bellah], and
he's written an essay called the
American civil religion. There's one
video on YouTube based on based on his
model and that's pretty much the most
thorough clear-headed interpretation of
this model that I've seen. Basically
the idea is that, is there a civil
religion that's operating alongside and
above what we think of as religions.

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