Abstract
This chapter will focus on Enlightenment Europe as the most immediate background and point of reference for the early development of American ideas and practices. It will provide an analytical survey of what might be considered, from the early modern perspective, ‘live options’ in church-state relations. Despite the title’s use of singulars, therefore, the plurality of such options will be emphasized. While Enlightenment theorists might speak, for example, of an ideal relationship between ‘church’ and ‘state,’ the empirical reality was of course that of multiple European ‘states,’ in most of which were present multiple ‘churches.’ Not only did the laws of each nation differently address the relationship between the state and its church(es), but even within individual states this relationship was far from static through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Similarly, as much recent historiography acknowledges, problems also attend references to the Enlightenment as a unitary phenomenon. Even if one focuses only on those most commonly identified as representative thinkers, for instance, one cannot deduce a singular ‘Enlightenment theory’ of church-state relations. This chapter will therefore emphasize the rich diversity of both theory and practice on which subsequent thinkers were able to reflect in addressing this vexed question.