Religion and the State: Lessons from History

The idea that religion and government should be separate is often presented as a modern Western invention. In fact, it was learned slowly and painfully, through centuries of persecution and war. The history of how societies came to separate religion and state is a history of people discovering, at great cost, what happens when they do not.

Europe’s Wars of Religion

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe was torn apart by conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. Rulers claimed the right to decide the religion of their subjects, and dissenters were imprisoned, exiled or burned. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), fought largely along religious lines, devastated central Europe; some regions lost a large share of their population to fighting, famine and disease.

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 did not create modern secularism, but it marked a turning point: exhausted states began to accept that religious uniformity could not be achieved by force. Over the following centuries, Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke argued that the state had no business controlling souls, and that toleration was both wiser and more just than persecution.

The Gradual Separation

Different countries took different paths. The United States, in its First Amendment (1791), forbade Congress from establishing a religion. France passed its law separating churches and state in 1905. India, a country of many faiths, built secular principles into its constitution after independence. In each case, the lesson was similar: a state that belongs to one religion cannot belong equally to all its citizens.

History shows that when rulers claim to speak for God, it is citizens — and especially minorities and women — who pay the price.

Afghanistan: Amanullah Khan’s Unfinished Reforms

Afghanistan has its own history in this story. After independence in 1919, King Amanullah Khan launched ambitious reforms. He introduced Afghanistan’s first constitution in 1923, opened schools — including schools for girls — sent students abroad, and challenged the compulsory veiling of women. Queen Soraya appeared in public unveiled and became a symbol of a modernising Afghanistan.

The reforms provoked fierce opposition from conservative religious and tribal leaders, who presented them as attacks on Islam. Rebellion spread, and in 1929 Amanullah was forced to abdicate. Many of his reforms were reversed. Their fate shows how religious authority can be mobilised against change — and how the struggle for education and women’s rights in Afghanistan is not new, but nearly a century old.

Lessons for Today

• Religious rule tends toward conflict, because there is always a dispute about whose religion and whose interpretation should govern.
• Separation protects faith as well as freedom, keeping religion from being corrupted by political power.
• Reform requires more than decrees. Amanullah’s experience shows that lasting change needs education, public understanding and broad support.
• Progress can be reversed, which is why each generation must defend the freedoms won by the last.

Afghanistan today lives under one of the most extreme forms of religious rule in the modern world. History does not tell us exactly how this will end. But it does tell us that no society has found lasting peace and freedom by joining the power of the state to the authority of religion — and that many have found it by separating them.

Further reading

On this site:

• What Secularism Is — and What It Is Not
• Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan

Sources and further study:

• Peace of Westphalia (Wikipedia)
• Amanullah Khan (Wikipedia)