In a debunking paper on "secularization" and the "secular," Ian Hunter argues that "nobody in early modernity spoke of secularization in terms of a transition from divine reverencing to rational autonomy, but also that there is no evidence of such a transition taking place there and, further, that there is significant evidence to the contrary." If secularization in the sociological sense was happening, it's odd that nobody noticed. In fact, what Hunter calls the "most relevant body of scholarship" tells an almost opposite story - about the confessionalization rather than the secularization of Europe. This literature "points to the conclusion that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were characterized not by a diminution in divine worship but by its radical expansion and intensification." Far from secularizing life, the institutions and practices of confessionalization "were designed to bring whole populations within the circumference of spiritual guidance and pious lifestyles." In the post-Reformation situation of religious pluralism, rival churches used various institutions - "parochial schools for the catechizing of the people, an explosion of new universities for the training of priests and theologians" -, all "designed to make formerly elite spiritual practices available to whole religious communities." Legal systems were confessionalized: "adherence to specific articles of faith was policed by heresy prosecutions and transformed into a condition of office-holding in the confessional state." In short, sixteenth-century Europe "was characterized not by the removal religion from public life but by its political and juridical consolidation, in the form of the confessional state." Within this matrix, however, Hunter identifies a new use of the term "secular." During the sixteenth century, the word became identified with "political" and "civil," and formed a "contrast-class" to terms like "spiritual" and "religious." Even here, though, the term didn't arise among philosophers or theorists, or mark a sea-change in European mentality. Rather, "the context for this new usage was in fact the rise of the mutually opposed confessional communities just discussed, and the ensuing period of protracted religious civil war in the German empire and elsewhere in Europe." "Secular" came into usage where "juridical and political discourses focused on the problems of pacifying warring confessional states and governing multiconfessional societies." With the Augsburg settlement (1555), law and government were rearranged "to admit parity of legal and political treatment for the two confessional blocs." Pursuing civil peace as the aim of the settlement, leaders established "a purely political or civil modus vivendi at the centre." This peace was "understood as secular or worldly in the sense of political or civil." Jurists, statesmen, and diplomats deployed the term "secular" did so in "piecemeal . . . improvisations . . . not to advance a secular rationalism but to defend the confessional estate to which they belonged and ensure the survival of their own particular religion." The result was an unstable and "bifurcated " system: "a secular and relativistic juridical framework supporting a plurality of revealed public confessions." Hunter doesn't minimize the innovative character of Augsburg: "The Peace of Augsburg was a momentous development. It represented the first emergence of a religious constitution that was 'secular'' in the sense of constituting a juridical framework in which the two confessions were viewed neutrally and relativistically." Ecclesial organizations were treated as "civil bodies independently of their theological truthclaims — as the condition of ensuring their political coexistence and thence the survival of the empire." Rather than pacify religious rivalries, however, "the initial effect of the Augsburg arrangements was to intensify confessionalization and religious division within the empire. . . . in the century from 1550 to 1650, Augsburg materially helped the formation of an array of religiously disciplined, internally intolerant, and mutually hostile confessional states within the empire, all operating under the umbrella of the biconfessional political (secular) imperial constitution." When the settlement collapsed into chaos in the Thirty Years War, the Westphalian treaties backtracked from the bifurcated secular/religious order of the previous century. Westphalia "signaled the beginning of the protracted dissolution of the cuius regio principle and the quasi-theocratic order of confessional states. They did so by installing the double-sided religious constitution — the secular juridical framework containing a plurality of confessional religions — inside the territorial states, although this too was a protracted and uneven business." Christian Thomasius described the result by distinguishing different forms of authority: "the religious authority of the churches that was geistlich or spiritual in the sense of being exercised for man’s eternal salvation without any access to coercive civil power. On the other hand, there was the civil sovereignty of the state that was secular (weltlich), civil (zivil), or political (politisch) — Thomasius used these terms as synonyms and as antonyms to geistlich — in the sense of exercising an undivided and supreme authority over a territory for the sole purpose of maintaining civil peace and flourishing." Thomasius wasn't presenting a universal rational secularity. Rather, "he grounded a delimited conception of the secular in the specific conception of the political that had emerged within the discourse and institutions of German public." "Secular" thus emerged to describe a "form of government whose political character was distinguished from spiritual authority only as the result of a specific historical grounding: namely, its grounding in a religious settlement that required the state to supervise a plurality of religious confessions, purely to maintain the political peace between them, hence without endorsing any of their truths or attempting to impose a secular truth on them." I plan to summarize more of Hunter's essay later, but for now just this: Hunter's critique hits home most forcefully against idealist accounts of secularization, accounts in which the history of ideas takes center stage. It doesn't hit as strongly against, for instance, Milbank's claim that social theory is theorizes about a world already established or Rosenstock-Huessy's insistence that the indicative of theorizing comes last. (Hunter, "Secularization: Birth of a Modern Combat Concept," Modern Intellectual History 12: [2015] 1-32. I am quoting a working paper found here.)