State Religion. A state religion and a national religion are two different things. A nation may, with more or less of universal concurrence, accept a certain type of religion—as the people of the United States for the most part accept Christianity—yet they may not commit to their government the task either of representing officially or of maintaining financially their religion. In that case it is a national but not a state religion. Wherever, on the other hand, we witness either establishment or endowment committed to the government—even if, as in Ireland till 1869, the religion thus favoured is very far from being national—there we have the spectacle of a state religion. Now such a spectacle almost invariably presents itself to our view on the first emergence of any people from tribal confusion into national order. The previous multiplicity of local gods and diversity of religious ideas became fused together into a conglomerate state religion, and then were compacted by time and by priestly labour into a sort of incoherent unity. As to any rights of the individual conscience to worship according to its own private judgment, such a notion had not so much as dawned upon men's imagination. It thus becomes interesting in studying this subject to watch the first emergence of the chief historical nations of the ancient world into organised states; and the earliest naturally to reach this high degree of development were the crowded populations whom abundance of food and water drew together in the great river-basins of the East. China, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt accordingly present us with the first 'states' about which anything is known; and in each case we are confronted with a state religion either patronising or patronised by the civil power. In ancient China, for instance, public worship was regulated down to its minutest details by six ministers of state, who were responsible even for the sacred music and religious dancing. The emperor alone might offer sacrifice to the supreme spirit; the nobility might do homage to the various subordinate spirits of the earth; the high officials to the spirits of house and home, and so on, in ever-descending order. Even the soothsayers, magicians, and spirit-charmers were reckoned among public functionaries of the state. Nor did the reforms effected by Confucius (500 B.C.), nor yet the uprise of two sects, the Taoists and the Buddhists, alter in any way this Erastian character of the Chinese system. It was therefore, and is still, a state religion in close combination with, and subordination to, the civil power.
A similar phenomenon appears among the crowded races which inhabited ancient Mesopotamia. There, too, the supreme head of the state religion was the king; and to such an extent was he predominant that he alone could penetrate into the innermost sanctuary, he alone could offer sacrifice for the whole people; and his palace stood pre-eminent and alone and solid, as if built for eternity, on the sacred platform whence rose towards heaven the terraced tower of Bel. It is therefore from the ruins of the palaces at Nineveh and Babylon, and not from those of the temples, that the records have been recovered which unfold to us the sacred history of this remarkable form of state religion; displaying to us the gradual amalgamation of a hundred tribal beliefs, the ultimate emergence of a Sennacherib or a Nebuchadnezzar to rule, like some incarnation of divine despotism, over all the prostrate nations, and the absolute predominance of the civil over the ecclesiastical power.
Singularly enough, both in India and in Egypt we have the exact contrary of all this. We find there two forms of state religion, in each of which a priestly caste has gained the supremacy over the regal power. In India (as is well known) a religion which began with the lay poets who composed the Vedas emerged from an obscure period at last completely organised on a caste system; and this system assigned irrevocably the first place to the priesthood and the second place to the secular authorities. In ancient Egypt the same relation between the two powers may be observed. There, too, the priesthood is predominant, and kings hold the secondary place. It is the temples which seem built for eternity. The royal palaces have disappeared; or if anything of royalty has remained it is in their tombs—those palaces of the buried kings which the state religion has consecrated with its symbols and covered thickly over with its rubrics from the 'Book of the Dead.' Here, indeed, as in ancient Mesopotamia, the local gods long held sway, and suffered at last agglomeration into the state religion. But the greater state deities were immensely more powerful. They were endowed with vast estates; they employed thousands of labourers, agents, scribes, overseers; they even maintained armies and flotillas of their own; and should any luckless sceptic too openly express his views he was dragged before the pitiless idol in some dark judgment-hall, and expiated his offence in the flames. Thus the Egyptian state religion dominated the entire life of the people, and for long centuries reigned in uncontested supremacy.
When we cross the sea, however, and disembark in imagination among the bright and mobile populations of southern Europe, we soon find that these vast sullen state religions of the eastern river-basins have been left behind. The gods of ancient Greece were as Bohemian and passionate as their worshippers, and no crushing priestly tyranny could find a footing among its small and quarrelsome communities. Yet even there, as childish fancies about Olympus and its happy denizens hardened into dogma, and nursery legends became endeared to the people and fixed in beautiful forms of epic, dramatic, and statuary art, then here, too, a state religion came into being. To ridicule the gods became perilous, even to an Aristophanes; to mutilate their images became an unpardonable crime; and to replace them by other and worthier conceptions of divine things was a treason which even a Socrates must expiate by his death. In more grim and serious Italy the mingled native and Greek theology became characteristically transmuted into downright law. Offences against the state religion were supposed to bring down on army and navy, on agriculture and commerce, the anger of a justly indignant heaven. And as for any such unheard-of novelty as a catholic or world-wide religion, unacknowledged as its own even by any subject state—still more, for any preposterous claim to worship according to each man's private conscience—away with people possessed of such ideas 'to the lions!' For Christians, therefore, and all state heretics of that sort there was but one answer to be made, non licet esse vos, you have no right to exist, you have placed yourselves outside the protection of the Roman empire.
With the conversion of Constantine (313 A.D.), of course, all this was entirely changed; but it was only changed by the parts being reversed. The state religion had now become Christian; and paganism was ere long held to have no right to exist. It is true that with Christianity a new and gentler spirit had found entrance, and that a day might certainly be foreseen when men would cease to persecute and to be persecuted for religion; but that day did not, in fact, come for more than a thousand years. Under the imperial legislation of Justinian the orthodox alone possessed the full privileges of citizenship. And even when the Roman empire was broken up at all points by the irruption of the barbarians, and everything else became changed, still the old-world system of state religions remained unchanged. The Mohammedans, who broke in from the south-east, have always regarded intolerance as a sacred duty; and the Teutonic tribes, who broke in from the north-east, accepted as a matter of course, along with Christianity, its traditional outward forms. Thus, Clovis (500) established the new religion in his Frankish kingdom; Charlemagne (800) even drove the Saxons to conversion at the point of the sword, and with his 'missi,' or royal commissioners, inspected and managed church affairs throughout his wide dominions; and the English Heptarchy, gradually blended into unity, combined in intimate connection the authorities of church and state, without any suspicion that they might one day turn against each other.
But the dangers of such a feeble patchwork of state religions, covering the face of Europe, were obvious and manifold. There was first the insidious danger of 'Simony'—i.e. of a corrupt use of patronage by the laity. Then there was the danger of violent destruction of small state-churches in detail by the fierce and greedy barons of the neighbourhood; and lastly, there was the yet larger peril looming in the future, that each kingdom might finally set up a state religion for itself, and thus hopelessly break up the unity of Christendom. To meet and cope with all these dangers some powerful churchman of large ideas was urgently required, and such a man providentially appeared (1050) in Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII.). Under his vigorous rule all the existing state religions of Europe were crushed and cramped together into a sort of imperial religion; and for two centuries (till 1300) it seemed as though one all-embracing empire religion were destined to swallow up and destroy all the minor state religions of the world. But when the vast war waged by the papacy in the Crusades had ended in ignominious failure, and when the insensate ambition of men like Innocent III. and Boniface VIII. had roused both France and England to resistance, that great movement of return to state religions (in the proper sense) began which culminated at last in the Reformation. And then the effect of prolonged and obstinate resistance to all change, and of desperate recourse to fire and sword and fraud and treachery, in maintenance of a despotic system in the church which the free strong nations of the north would not endure, was seen in a general break-up of Christendom.
The first thought naturally was to revert to the previous long-tried system of state religion. But when that seemed reduced to an absurdity in the Augsburg settlement (1555) of cujus regio ejus religio—making the church an aristocracy instead of a despotism, and every petty duke and count a pope in his own dominions—the tormented nations had recourse to the sword. Germany was torn to pieces and ruined for two hundred years, France was steeped to the lips in blood, Spain and Austria were silenced, the Netherlands thrown into revolt, and England plunged into her great rebellion, till out of the seething strife between papal religion and state religion there gradually emerged a third form—democratic religion. It began, naturally enough, in Switzerland—at Zurich and Geneva. It permeated and honeycombed, to their ultimate downfall, the despotisms in church and state which 'concordats' had conspired to establish; till at last the various acts of toleration in England, the secular 'Constitution' of the United States, and the French revolutionary enactments of 1789 and 1830 completed the transformation of every state religion throughout Europe into a congeries of virtually free churches—sometimes with, sometimes without, a survival from the past in the shape of a central establishment fully tolerating all its neighbours. Thus, at the present moment, England and Scotland retain, along with absolute toleration for every other form of religion, modified state churches; while Ireland—like the United States—has none. France accepts, as a religion recognised and maintained by the state, every communion which numbers 100,000 adherents—those at present receiving state-payment being Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and (in Algeria) Mohammedans. In Belgium the state does not interfere with the internal affairs of any religious body, but it subsidises the Roman Catholics, the Protestants, and the Jews. In the German empire there is universal toleration, but the various states subsidise their religious communities in various ways. In Denmark there is full toleration for all, but the state religion is Lutheranism; and the same arrangement prevails in Sweden and Norway.
The most prominent example of a surviving state religion, with intolerance for all other forms of faith, is to be found in Russia, where the orthodox Greek Church reigns supreme and dissent is severely persecuted. In Austria-Hungary there is liberty for all, but the recognised religions are those of the Roman Catholics (the dominant church), the Greeks, the Protestants, the Armenians, and the Jews. Even in Greece there is full toleration, though the state religion is that of the Greek Church. In Italy, 'by the fundamental law of the kingdom' in 1870, the state religion is Roman Catholic, but there is now complete toleration for other forms of faith. In Spain and Portugal the state religion is also Roman Catholic, and toleration is very limited. In Holland Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Jews are subsidised by the state, but there is toleration for all. In Turkey the state religion is Mohammedanism. In Switzerland there is absolute freedom for every form of faith. On the whole it would seem that the system of state religion is, by the advancing tide of democracy, threatened with extinction; but that some countries retain it, as an axis round which other communions may crystallise, or at least as a security against Atheism, Ultramontanism, and other dangers which the future may have in store for democratic states.
The special relation of the church and state in the Jewish theocracy will be gathered from the articles BIBLE (Vol. II. p. 118), JEWS. The growth of non-conformity in England led to keen controversy between the defenders and the opponents of church establishments; and, especially since the foundation of the 'Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control' in 1844, there has been an increasingly outspoken demand for the disestablishment, with or without the disendowment of the Church of England, especially in Wales. For the 'Erastian Controversy,' see ERASTUS; for the 'Bangorian Controversy,' see HOADLY; for the rivalry between the church and dissent in the schools, see EDUCATION. The great Scottish 'Voluntary Controversy' (see UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH) between the defenders of the church and dissenters was at its height in 1829-34; the Free Church (q.v.) long insisted on the establishment doctrine in a modified form. The disestablishment of the Irish Church (1869) rendered the controversies as to the established churches in the other parts of the United Kingdom more acute. For other controversies bearing more or less directly on the question, see CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION, JEWS (for the removal of Jewish disabilities), CHURCHYARDS, HOOKER, NEWMAN, OATH, PERSECUTION, TEST ACTS, TITHES, TOLERATION; and the articles on Independents, Friends, and other Nonconformists, as well as that on the Church of England. Of the British colonies, it may be generally said that those which have representative government have no state church, though provision has long been guaranteed for Catholic education in Quebec province. And in most of the Crown colonies also the disestablishment of the Church of England, and the withdrawal of state aid where there was concurrent endowment, has been carried out, especially since 1868. In India there is a small Anglican establishment for the army and other English residents. In the articles on the several countries notes will usually be found as to whether there is an established church or not. And for the view that the church should finally be merged in the regenerated state, see ROTHE (RICHARD). Of the copious literature, see, of works favourable to establishments, Selden, On Tithes (1618); Coleridge, Church and State (1830); Stanley, Church and State (1870); the present writer's Dissent in relation to the Church of England (1871); Warburton, Alliance of Church and State; Maitland, The Voluntary System (1837); Moore, Englishman's Brief for his National Church (1880); Selborne, Defence against Disestablishment (1886); Hughes, The Old Church and the New (1891); Story, The Church of Scotland, Past and Present (1891). Unfavourable: Locke, Letters on Toleration (1689); Wardlaw, National Establishments (1839); Baptist Noel, Church and State (1849); Vaughan, English Nonconformity (1862); Miall, The Voluntary Principle (2d ed. 1850); Skeats, Free Churches (1869); Religious Republics (1869); The Case for Disestablishment (1884). Of books on the general subject of church and state, the following may be consulted: De Marca, De Concordantia Sacerdotii et Imperii (fol. 1641); Franck, Philosophie du Droit Ecclesiastique (1864); Zeller, Staat und Kirche (1873); Geffcken, Church and State (Eng. trans. 2 vols. 1877); A. Taylor Innes, Church and State (1890). On details: Tiele, History of Ancient Religions (Eng. trans. 1877); Speir, Life in Ancient India (1856); Reville, Religions des Peuples non-civilisés (1883); Sayce, Ancient Babylonian Religion (1887); Maspero, Life in Ancient Egypt (trans. 1892).