Economist: Religion in Europe - The discovery of tolerance - the Ottomans were far more hospitable than the rest of Europe to religious minorities
Religion in Europe - The discovery of tolerance
From the book by Benjamin Kaplan - A typical Protestant view of European religious history might go like this. In medieval times, the Roman Catholic church grew increasingly corrupt and impervious to criticism. Then came the Reformation, with its new breath of freedom and tolerance. After a brief fightback that culminated in the ghastly Thirty Years War in 1618-48, Europe moved smoothly towards the Enlightenment and today's ideal of secular tolerance. It was all quite unlike, for example, Islam and the horrors of the Ottoman empire. Most of this conventional picture is entirely wrong, as this splendid book by Benjamin Kaplan shows. Certainly, the medieval Catholic church continued to stamp heavily on heresy, but Enlightenment Protestants were often also deeply intolerant, not only of Catholics but also of each other (Mr Kaplan's book opens with the burning of Servetus, a noted Spanish Protestant, in Calvin's Geneva). It took more than 150 years after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 for most Europeans even to grasp the concept of religious tolerance. Well into the 19th century, the Ottomans were far more hospitable than the rest of Europe to religious minorities.
One striking discovery is that there was more religious freedom in the 16th century than after the wars of religion ended a century later. The author tells of the widespread use of Auslauf, whereby Protestants were able to worship outside a Catholic city's walls; of the clandestine yet accepted Catholic churches in the Netherlands known as Schuilkerken; and of the practice of Simultaneum, the sharing of churches between Protestants and Catholics in such places as Biberach and, later, Augsburg. That sensible arrangement would be hard to imagine today.
