Preface: While tracing the history of U.S. wars, I inevitably ran into the connection between political systems and religion, so I decided to look at them together. Let’s start with sixteenth-century England. This article was written in collaboration with ChatGPT.

First, let’s rewind to early sixteenth-century England to understand the context. Around the year 1500, England belonged, in institutional religious terms, to the Latin Christendom. Latin Christendom refers to the Western European Christian civilizational community, from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, dominated by the Roman Church. It was not merely a circle of belief, but an overlapping system of religion, law, culture, and politics. “Latin” does not denote ethnicity, but an institutional language: official religious language, biblical texts, church documents, courts, and theological debates were all conducted in Latin. Linguistic unity meant unity of authority—whoever controlled the Latin system controlled interpretation.

This system did not encompass all of Christianity. The core of Latin Christendom was Rome, and its authorities were the pope, the Latin language, and canon law. The Greek Christian world, by contrast, was centered on Constantinople—today’s Istanbul—and was defined by Eastern Orthodoxy, the Greek language, and the emperor. Rome dominated Western Europe; Constantinople dominated the eastern Mediterranean and Eastern Europe. After the formal schism between the Eastern and Western churches in 1054, England, France, the German lands, and Spain all belonged to the Latin branch.

The pope was the supreme religious authority of Latin Christendom. He ruled on doctrine, defined heresy, and determined the legitimacy of marriage—functions that combined elements of courts, homeland security agencies, and municipal administrations. England was merely one local church within this system. Canon law was a transnational legal system: ecclesiastical courts were independent of royal courts, and clergy were subject first to church jurisdiction. In other words, national sovereignty was not complete; it was overlaid and constrained by a transnational religious authority.

Before the sixteenth century, England, France, and Spain all operated with two parallel court systems. Royal courts handled secular cases, while ecclesiastical courts handled matters “of the soul.” This was not a simple division of labor. Royal authority could not interfere with church jurisdiction: royal courts could not overturn ecclesiastical verdicts, kings could not freely summon clergy, and church courts could appeal beyond the kingdom directly to Rome. Though abstract at first glance, the reality was simple—the Church carved out a substantial portion of state judicial power.

The Church also possessed vast amounts of land, property, and tithe income. These funds could move across borders and ultimately flowed toward Rome. The tithe was a mandatory levy in the medieval Christian world, requiring one-tenth of income or production to be paid to the Church. Its origin lay in Old Testament tradition—one-tenth of the harvest was offered to God, collected by the Church. By the Middle Ages, it was fully institutionalized: failure to pay was illegal and punishable in ecclesiastical courts. Those required to pay included peasants, artisans, merchants, and some landlords—covering nearly all ordinary households. What was collected included agricultural produce such as grain and grapes, livestock products such as sheep, cattle, and milk, and later money as well. Tithes typically flowed to local parishes, dioceses, monasteries, and other parts of the papal system. This money bypassed royal treasuries entirely, forming an independent economic network.

From the perspective of royal power, the problem was obvious. People paid taxes to the king and were also required to pay religious taxes. This revenue could not be audited, could not be requisitioned, and could flow out of the country to Rome. It directly weakened state finances, military mobilization, and administrative capacity. Ordinary people were deeply conflicted: not paying risked damnation, but paying increased their material burden. In times of famine, war, or poor harvests, the strain became unbearable. Anti-church sentiment therefore existed for a long time, but had no legitimate outlet.

At the same time, a king’s legitimacy came not only from bloodline but also from church recognition. The pope could recognize a ruler, delegitimize a ruler, and even paralyze a regime through excommunication. Excommunication was the highest level of religious-political sanction the medieval Church could impose on an individual or ruler. Issued by the pope or senior ecclesiastical courts under canon law, it applied to everyone—commoners, nobles, bishops, and kings alike.

To be excommunicated meant exclusion from the sacraments and church rituals, and being regarded as a soul in mortal danger—effectively a public declaration that one might go to hell. Legally, all oaths to the excommunicated person were automatically void: subjects were no longer obliged to obey, contracts were dissolved, and bonds of loyalty were severed—fatal consequences for a king. Socially, people could legally refuse contact; commercial, marital, and judicial relations were suspended, creating a form of total social exclusion. Historically, King John of England in the thirteenth century was excommunicated after clashing with the pope, and England as a whole was placed under an interdict. Churches shut down, marriages and funerals could not be performed, panic spread, and nobles defected. In the end, the king was forced to submit to Rome. The highest authority of the state depended on the judgment of a foreign religious center.

For an early modern state, this was intolerable. A country should not be declared illegitimate by an external authority; a king should not lose his right to rule through religious law; law and loyalty had to be grounded within the domestic system. Yet England’s position in the sixteenth century was precisely this: religiously obedient to Rome, legally divided between canon law and royal law, fiscally drained by resources outside royal control, and politically dependent on papal decisions for key matters. Latin Christendom was a medieval system confronting the rise of the modern state. Once monarchs sought to unify law, taxation, and military power, the papal system became a structural obstacle. The Reformation was not accidental; it was the reckoning of the modern state with a medieval supranational order. The English Reformation, in essence, was England’s withdrawal from Latin Christendom.

Thus, in the sixteenth century, England broke with Roman Catholicism and established the Church of England. The Puritans’ core position was straightforward: the Church had to be thoroughly purified. They opposed the episcopal system, elaborate rituals, religious images, and hierarchical clergy, and emphasized the supremacy of Scripture, the individual’s direct relationship with God, and extreme moral discipline. The Puritans soon split into moderates and radicals. Moderates sought reform from within the Church of England and continued to recognize the legitimacy of the national church. Radicals, by contrast, concluded that the national church was beyond salvation and advocated complete separation from it. In 1620, these separatists boarded the Mayflower and sailed to North America.