ABSTRACT
The process of legal evolution in relation to religious and secular power has left behind something far more nuanced than an establishment pattern of Church/state relations. The momentous events of the era of European Reformations forged in England, Wales and Scotland formed ties between national Churches and the state, as a variety of primary legislative instruments attest. Yet, the story by no means ended at that point, and both legal and political history continued to unfold. The consequences of being a self-consciously Christian state, with explicit national understandings of Christianity, diffused their way through the legal system as a whole, and the effects of establishment were not confined to constitutional law. The juridical system shifted from treating the practice of established religions as a positive phenomenon to regarding the practice of other Christian denominations, and later all faiths, as positive.
