Unholy warriors

Taming the Gods is an extended essay about the secular state, something which would until recently have been regarded as a non-issue by English-speaking readers. The separation of Church and State is taken so much for granted in the West, that one can easily forget how recent and local its origins are. Religious beliefs, wrote Edward Gibbon, are ‘considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful’.

As usual, Gibbon was fathering on the Romans the instincts of enlightened Englishmen of his own day. For the secular state was born in 18th-century England, and adopted by Revolutionary France. It marked the reaction of educated elites in both countries against the murderous religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the oppressive political power of the established Christian churches in most of the major European states. From England and France, it was spread across Europe by the Napoleonic conquests and across much of the rest of the world by European colonists.