Church and State, relationship between the organized church and the government of a country, especially with regard to the
extent of their powers within each other's sphere of activity.
The problem of church and state has come into relatively sharp focus in the tradition of Western Christianity, although the phrase designates a basic issue potentially present in many societies and religious traditions. At root is the tension between different authorities, one representing claims made in the name of
political regimes, the other representing claims made by religious
institutions. Thereafter, the church, which had suffered at the hands of the state, was united with it. At this point the relationship between church and state developed differently in the chief branches of the empire.
At the same time, however, the church supported the emperor, who also claimed to represent divine authority. By accepting these claims, the church in turn endorsed Caesaropapism, that is, subordination of the church to the religious claims of the dominant political order.
A significantly different pattern emerged in Western Christianity. In the development of Western Christianity, high theoretical claims made by either church or state did not necessarily reflect actual power relationships.
The decline of centralized imperial authority in Western European society was related to the emergence of new nation-states, which asserted political independence within and finally from, the Holy Roman Empire. In this process, repeated struggles pitted centrifugal national interests against the centralized claims of the Roman church led by the pope. In general, Protestant religious groups particularly the Lutherans and Calvinists, aligned themselves with local and national political authorities in northern Europe, thus encouraging the emergence of modern national communities. The temporary solution to religious conflict was the Peace of Augsburg (1555), which stipulated that each political entity should establish either Lutheranism or Roman Catholicism as a "religious monopoly." The other extreme entails subordination of the religious institutions to the political regime, as in Caesaropapism. On the one hand, religious bodies have lost the power to assert exclusivity over religious belief and practice. In sum, the phrase "church and state" represents a framework for understanding how religion and government are related when these different institutions make formal claims within the same society.
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