24. The State, Toleration, and Religious Freedom

The political philosopher Chandran Kukathas provides a statement that can stand in lieu of a definition: ‘Liberalism does not care who has power; nor does it care how it is acquired. All that matters is that the members of society are free to pursue their various ends, and that the polity is able to accommodate all peacefully’ (Kukathas 2003, 253). See Tomasi (2012) for a similar view.

Shariff and Norenzayan (2007); Shariff et al. (2009); Atran and Henrich (2010); Laurin et al. (2012); Slingerland et al. (2013); Norenzayan (2013); Purzycki et al. (2016); Norenzayan et al. (2016).

Religious organizations excel at the provision of many public goods because they have evolved institutional practices such as strict rituals and rules that enable them weed out free-riders and resolve moral hazard and adverse selection problems. See for a discussion Berman (2009). The canonical model is, of course, Iannaccone (1992).

See Hanawalt (1984); Richardson (2001, 2005); Stabel (2004).

Craft guilds were often based on the worship of a particular patron saint. As Richardson and McBride (2009) document, after the Black Death, guilds came to play an important religious role in establishing chantries that would pray for the soul of a member to speed their soul through purgatory. An important example of an religiously enforced identity rule was the prohibition on usury as discussed in Koyama (2010) and Johnson and Koyama (2019).

As Kuran (2004, 2010) has argued, this choice of legal system gave Christian and Jewish minorities and economic advantage once trade with western Europe opened up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

See Richardson and McBride (2009).

Traditional historical accounts emphasize that the Cathars believed that the devil had created the material world and that Christ could not therefore have been born in human flesh and have suffered on the cross. Following the writings of contemporary Cistercians chroniclers, historians saw the Cathars as developing a church-like organization in opposition to the Catholic Church. See, for example, Oldenbourg (1961, 28–81), Lambert (1998), Hamilton (1999), and Barber (2000). This view sees the Cathars as decisively influenced by the Bogomil heresy which arose in Macedonia in the tenth century. More recent historical scholarship casts doubt on the existence of Catharism as a distinctive set of beliefs prior to the crusade and the introduction of the Inquisitorial method (e.g. Pegg 2001).

The medieval inquisition was a personal office and not a permanent institution, unlike the later Spanish and Roman Inquisitions (see Kelly 1989; Kieckhefer 1995). The inquisitors did not employ torture until 1256.

See Nexon (2009). It is largely a misnomer to call these wars “wars of religion” as their cause was typically not solely or predominantly religious (see Cavanaugh 2009).

See Monter (1994); Roth (1995); Ruiz (2007). For a study of the economic impact of the expulsion of the Moriscos, see Chaney and Hornbeck (2016).

For a survey, see Becker et al. (2016). Recent synoptic treatments include MacCulloch (2003) and Eire (2016).

During the seventeenth century, Catholics comprised 35% of the population.

Jews were granted partial but not full civic rights in Frankfurt in 1824 (Adler 1960). The majority of German Jews were effectively emancipated by the 1850s, but in Bavaria emancipation was only granted in 1871.

Of course other aspects of modern societal and economic organization such as the rapid dissemination of information, greater social fluidity, and sophisticated division of labor also played a crucial role.