RIPPLES OF THE REFORMATION

I promised in the comments on this post that I would eventually get around to writing the article I originally intended to write about the church and gay marriage.

I have a thesis: The separation of civil and religious understandings of marriage was a necessary consequence of the Reformation.

One of the most profound effects of the Protestant Reformation was the severing of the tie between secular and religious authority. When Frederick elected to give the Lutherans safe harbor, he in effect told the Pope that Rome had no right to sovereignty in his region. This profound challenge to Roman authority had far-reaching effects, if only because the Vatican was not in a position to wage wars–even ideological ones–on all the fronts where such wars were breaking out.
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