ABSTRACT
When I teach my course on theology and politics, my students and I begin by reading two texts side by side: the creation and fall story in Genesis, and selections from omas Hobbes’s Leviathan. ough it might seem as though these texts are up to two completely dierent tasks – one religious, the other political – it seems to me that they are aer the same basic goal: a story of overcoming primordial chaos that explains the way things are in the present. e story of the Wars of Religion serves a similar purpose for us in the West today. What I call the creation myth of the Wars of Religion goes like this: once upon a time, dierent theological ideas split Christendom into Protestant and Catholic camps. Both sides were initially unable to envision a society in which religious dierence was tolerated, and so Protestants and Catholics began killing one another. Only aer a century or so of unremitting bloodshed did an exhausted Europe decide that peace depended upon subordinating religious dierences to loyalty to the state. Catholics and Protestants could enjoy peace only as fellow citizens whose public loyalty to the state trumped theological divisions. From the chaos of the Wars of Religion emerged the peaceful and secular post-Westphalian order.
