A. The Claims of Religion Were Universal and Exclusive
At the most basic level, religion was political because Europeans had only two categories for it: ultimately, a religion was either be true or false, and there could only be one “true” religion.

• Each “true” religion was set against the “false” religions—Islam, Judaism, the “pagan” religions—and against “heresies,” i.e., systems of belief that purported to be Christian but had deviated from the “true” path.

After Luther’s teachings were condemned as heretical in 1520, polemicists on each side of the controversy began characterizing their counterparts as “heretics,” even the Antichrist. Luther himself was a particularly eager slinger of dirt: in 1521, he published a little book entitled the Passional Christi und Antichristi [The Passion of the Christ and the Antichrist], which deliberately contrasted the life and actions of Jesus with the behavior of the popes—most particularly Leo X, who had declared his teachings heretical.

• As the sixteenth century wore on, polemicists on each side of the controversy over religion began using terminology for their opponents that had once been reserved for non-Christian religions.

There were, to be sure, limits to this: for example all the mainstream Christian churches, with few exceptions, continued to recognize the validity of each other’s baptisms, right through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To put the point another way, the “truth claims” of each variety of Christianity were universal and exclusive.

B. Churches Were Still “Proprietary”
Another reason why religion was political has to do with the relationship between spiritual and secular authority: right across the spectrum, kings and princes thought of themselves as divinely ordained rulers, with a duty and obligation toward the spiritual wellbeing of their subjects. Increasingly, this included a duty to ensure that subjects were “orthodox”—i.e., that they adhered to the teachings of the “true” faith.

When kings and princes justified their rule, they often invoked divine blessing, and relied heavily on the church to convey that authority to the population at large. Increasingly throughout the sixteenth century, European monarchs presented themselves to their subject populations as the “Vicars of Christ” on earth.

• It sometimes extended to the brink of idolatry: The Lutheran bishop of Zealand praised Danish king Christian IV (1577-1648) as “a reflection of God on earth.”

The church was still “proprietary” in more practical sense as well: throughout Europe, princes (kings, dukes, counts) and city councils shared in the control of church institutions. Princes often owned the right to appoint church officials, or confirm them in office; very often, church property was held from secular rulers under feudal law. Princes often owned the right to appoint church officials, or confirm them in office; in France, for example, the King had since 1438 reserved the right to appoint all high ecclesiastical offices.

• Very often, individuals held church offices and church property from secular rulers under feudal law. Typically, a parish church was subject to the “patronage” of a local noble, a privileged town, or an ecclesiastical corporation, such as a monastery; this patronage, in turn, effectively gave patrons the right to appoint whomever they pleased as parish priests, provided that person met certain basic qualifications.
  
• You can see how reform would impinge on these relationships: to take a Catholic territory and make it Protestant, you had to replace the clergy somehow; often it was not possible to depose a sitting priest without violating rights of patronage; therefore any permanent reform of the church almost automatically involved changing the manner in which appointments were made.
• Priests who found themselves subject to reforming princes confronted the alternatives of exile or conversion.

C. Church Wealth Attracted Predators
To complicate matters, the church was wealthy, and Renaissance princes were chronically short of cash: to many of them, Reformation was attractive because it offered them the opportunity to confiscate a great deal of property, and re-sell it; not only that, the church was prestigious—and many a prince saw the advantage of placing themselves at the head of the church within their territories.

• Here, of course, the classic example is that of Henry VIII of England (r. 1509-1547): frustrated with the inability of his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, to produce a male heir, Henry VIII sought in vain to obtain an annulment of the marriage;
• When his campaign to gain papal approval failed in 1533, Henry secretly married his mistress Anne Boleyn—and in the same year abolished the pope’s authority over the English church.
• In 1534, he decreed the “Act of Supremacy,” by which the Kings of England became “Supreme Head” of the Anglican Church.

The list of similar “predators” is long:

• Between 1534 and 1536, Duke Ulrich of Württemberg appropriated the lands and riches of every monastery within his domain—doubling his treasury in the process; eventually, Duke Ulrich would confiscate two-thirds of all church property as well.
• King Christian II of Denmark (1513-1523) was another active confiscator;
• So was King Gustav I Vasa of Sweden (1496-1560), who got himself proclaimed “Supreme Defender of the Church” in Sweden in 1540. Sweden went Lutheran for good in 1544—when the Diet of Västerås passed reform acts in 1544.

• But it should be emphasized also that this was not limited to monarchs who “went Protestant,” so to speak; all of them presented themselves as instruments of God: thus El Greco portrayed Philip II of Spain as the intermediary between terrestrial existence and eternity—both heaven and hell.

D. Only the Secular Authorities Possessed Enough Power and Resources for Reform
It was one thing to announce reform, quite another to implement it—and only the state had the power to implement reform with any consistency. Say you are a prince, and you want to introduce Reformation to your territory. You can require all your priests and bishops to convert—but what do you do if they refuse and leave instead?

• You need universities to teach a new supply of clerics; you need faculty members to teach the teachers, you need officials to staff the church administration, and so on and so forth….
• What do you do if your subjects refuse to convert? What if they fail to understand their conversion?

Dear God, help us! What misery I have seen [as a visitor]! The common man, especially in the villages, knows absolutely nothing about Christian doctrine, and unfortunately, many pastors are practically unfit and incompetent to teach [it]. Nevertheless, they are all Christians, have been baptized, and enjoy the holy sacraments even though they can recite neither the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed, nor the Ten Commandments. They live just like animals and unreasoning sows…