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This feels ahistorical to me. See: Iconoclasm, the 30 Years War, etc... Revisionists might claim that these disputes weren't "really" about religion. But that's just cope. Before modern times, people deeply cared about religion, even the little nitpicky things, and were often willing to fight and die for it, or even spend their whole lives in a monastery praying.
Does that mean that everyone was rules adherent all the time? Of course not. But it does mean that people thought the rules mattered. Pre or extramarital sex was taboo in nearly all Christian cultures until modern times. If you were caught doing it, it could have dire consequences.
Even today, Catholics can't get remarried if they get a divorce.
And let's not get started on Judaism, which is just nitpicky rules all the way down.
Even if we accept that the thirty years’ war and all other similar conflicts back to Martin Luther were about religious doctrine, this was a time in which the great majority of lay people could not read and in which the majority of the peasantry barely even practiced (whether Protestant or Catholic) what we would today consider those forms of Christianity - until the late 18th century Christianity as practiced in rural Europe was a weird syncretic blend of Christianity and ancient folklore / paganism.
Sure, I can believe the average peasant soldier in the thirty years war believed they were fighting for God / Christ and that the enemy were infidels, but that they were well versed in the specifics of the philosophical debate? Nah, I doubt it.
Literacy was actually really high in some of these times and places. I remember seeing something—maybe a Scottpost?—about how 1600s America was remarkably literate, sometimes in Latin. Side effect of the massive Puritan influence. It’s why political philosophy was so popular. Paine et al. would get so much mileage out of pamphlets because they were part of a long tradition.
The opening shots of the Reformation largely took place through pamphlet wars. Sure, the main audience was religious or academic. But that got diffused very efficiently to congregations.
You probably read that in Scott's review of Albion's Seed. The thing is that that phenomenon was a uniquely Puritan anomaly and not shared with the other English colonies, and certainly not with continental Europe until much later.
While dependent on the printing press, It was more the fact that religous arguments were being made in the vernacular languages at all that caused the Reformation and subsequent Wars of Religion. Translations of the works of men like Luther did in the 16th century what the internet did in the 21st, bringing people face to face with value systems and beliefs sometimes fundamentally alien to their own, and causing some to embark on a century-long bloody crusade to rid Europe of all the newly-revealed heretics.
Yep, that’s it. Thanks!
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I think this assumption might be wrong. I am not a historian of the Middle Ages, but my understanding is that common people of the time were interested in doctrinal disputes to a surprising degree.
A good analogy would be how a person today, though scientifically illiterate, still has an opinion on the correctness of the Big Bang, evolution, climate change, etc...
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Not a secular divorce at least. The completely legitimate and not abused annulment process however...
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