I’m trying to track the complex interconnections between Church and state over many centuries in the West, with an eye toward the twin values of personal and corporate religious liberty. These are values non-negotiable for any decent regime. They’re the basis of our country, and were affirmed by my own church at the Second Vatican Council.

But they didn’t always prevail. Not even in societies which had many otherwise worthy qualities. We’re used to accepting this when we think of ancient, pagan regimes. For all that we admire the dogged patriotism and courage of the Spartans, we know that their society rested upon a monstrous, genocidal form of slavery. Every “freedom-loving” Spartan warrior was fed by several hapless Messenian helots, whom elite Spartan warriors periodically massacred as … practice.

Likewise, the democratic Athenians enjoyed their leisure to philosophize because their grunt work got done by slaves. The Roman Republic grew massive and spread its roads and laws across the West on the backs of slaves of conquest. By the time the Empire found Christ, some one-third of its population were likely slaves.

The Sins of Christendom

It’s a little more painful to contemplate the deep moral flaws of Christian societies. (That may be why we’re so eager to overlook our own faults, such as legal abortion.) While Christianity improved the lot of slaves, it didn’t set them all free. Not for many centuries, in Europe, where serfdom (a less-harsh form of servitude) lingered into the mid-19^th century in Russia.

Worse still, when the West began its age of exploration, our intrepid adventurers such as Christopher Columbus were willing to enslave the newfound natives. When Europeans set up colonies, we were happy to purchase the victims of the thriving Arab slave trade in Africa.

Christians as Persecutors

But my focus here is religious liberty, and as I’ve noted before, our track record won’t do us proud, whatever our church tradition. From the reign of the Emperor Theodosius till the aftermath of the Thirty Years War, for a thousand years, European Christian rulers saw enforcing religious orthodoxy as part of their civic mission. That meant “suppressing” heretics. Most were imprisoned. Thousands of others would be executed, either en masse as in the “crusade” against the French Albigensians, or after elaborate trials as in the Roman and later the Spanish inquisitions.

The freedom to speak, write, worship, teach, and evangelize according to the dictates of one’s own conscience is a recent innovation, which neither Catholic, Orthodox, nor Protestant churches favored till well after 1648. That is, after a massive, continent-wide war that saw whole cities burnt, and the population of its main battleground, Germany, reduced by some 25 percent.

Tribalism Isn’t Pretty or Pious

It’s all too easy to harrumph at our ancestors, and judge ourselves superior. Or worse, to look at the sufferings of the martyrs in one’s own religious tradition, but wink at the persecution of those who belonged to another.

I’ve known Catholics who linger on the sufferings of St. Thomas More at the hands of Anglicans, for instance. But they chortle over the burning of proto-Protestant Lollards. British regime propaganda taught English Protestants to abhor the memory of Catholic queen “Bloody” Mary, but venerate her successor Queen Elizabeth. Instead of burning Protestants as heretics, Elizabeth had Catholic priests slowly and gruesomely disemboweled as traitors, and Catholic laymen crushed to death by stones.

A Zero-Sum Fight for Power

When we read that monarchs punished “heretics,” we ought to be appalled at a violation of Natural Law. But in the interests of truth, we must recognize what was happening. Lollards who arose in England, or Hussites in Bohemia, weren’t seeking the liberty to open up new, dissenting churches. It’s anachronistic and false to imagine them as like Southern Baptists founding storefront chapels, then getting arrested by FBI agents. Instead, imagine Pentecostalists trying to take over First Baptist in Dallas by force.

Medieval heretics were seeking something altogether different from religious liberty as we know it. The Lollards and Hussites claimed that they were the real representatives of the universal Christian church. They wanted to seize the buildings, institutions, financial endowments and privileges of the Catholic church — and replace it as the monopoly religious institution. Then once in that position, they’d persecute heretics too, including not just Catholics, but other brands of dissident.

Violence on All Sides

That is precisely what happened when the Reformation came: mobs of impassioned reformers expelling Catholic priests and Catholic congregations from cathedrals and chapels. Newly Protestant rulers forcibly closing abbeys and convents, expelling the monks and nuns — in some cases forcing them to violate their vows and marry. Think of the dozens of monasteries pillaged and trashed by Henry VIII, or the fact that Westminster Abbey has for centuries had no abbot, and no brothers. (I’ll confess that such thoughts kind of ruined the program Downton Abbey for me. I keep asking, “Where are the monks?”)

So we need to understand the build-up to the Reformation realistically, as those who went through this conflict themselves really viewed it. To them, the Church as much as the state must enjoy a monopoly of force, and any religious conflict was a zero-sum civil war for virtually absolute power. Who would persecute whom was the only question at issue.

It would take hundreds of years of grueling conflict for various churches and nations to grudgingly accept that religious liberty, both individual and corporate, was essential to civil peace. Only once brute reality had made such liberty necessary in practice would Christian thinkers finally admit that it was correct in principle, too … that such liberty was the proper extension of the Christian view of the person.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”