The Mutual Shaping of Faith, State-Building, and Scientific Revolution with Religious Change in Baroque Europe

Abstract

This paper investigates the deep transformation of religious ideas and the process of secularization in Europe during the Baroque era. While many current historical perspectives view secularization as a linear and mono-directional process driven by numerous factors that caused the decline of religious authority, they frequently overlook the dynamic reciprocity between historical catalysts and religious change. To address this problem, this study argues that religious change wasn't simply a passive effect of broader historical changes, but rather a process of mutual shaping and reciprocal influence shaped by numerous factors. This paper not only upholds the original perspective that factors such as the Protestant Reformation, early modern state-building, and the Scientific Revolution shaped the shifting nature of faith, but also examines how religious change promoted these three factors. Specifically, it explores how these political, institutional, and scientific forces privatized faith into an individual pursuit of salvation, and conversely, how this continuously evolving religious ideology expedited the Reformation, national centralization, and early capitalism, and the birth of a rationalist "modernity framework." Ultimately, this intricate web of mutual cause and effect would converge and forge the unique modern secular and spiritual identity of European civilization.