The violence and fury of religious warfare dislocated millions of ordinary citizens by destroying their lands and homes and disrupting their lives. With high enough unrest, your state would be looking into the abyss of full-scale religious war. “Surely it was better to concede authority to the monarchical state in return for the security of persons and property than to see order and justice drowned in civil strife.” What this means for EU4 is that converting your subjects to the one true faith should have much more traumatic consequences: not only triggering an armed resistance, but also polarizing foreign opinion. This “all-destructive fury” of religious violence, according to the historian Christopher Clark, became a compelling argument in favor of enlightened absolutism, embodied by the Leviathan state and the social contract. The result was not just unprecedented levels of violence and brutality, but also a complete collapse of law and the habits of daily life in the state. Religious persecution could not necessarily spread civilization, but it could spread chaos, anarchy, lawlessness, and disorder. This set into motion forces that thrived on oppression and warfare, which even the state was sometimes powerless to restrain. The state’s religious authority essentially relied on the threat of violence. However, religious conversion was not a decision to be taken lightly. The introduction of religious demographics would allow new doctrines and ideas to spread in a much more organic way conversions would no longer instantly flip a province, but instead shift the religious demography away from the old religion and toward new adherents. The minorities are visible to the player as a modifier in the province window screen (although Paradox could probably create a more elaborate system). How might religion in Europa Universalis 4 change to represent this? There is already a mod called Dei Gratia which models the existence of religious minorities within a province through a very simple demographic system. “But it was real, and it survived into living memory.” This was tolerance only in a very narrow sense, of course, and it was occasionally marred by violence and hatred. Many of its cities - particularly the smaller ones at the intersection of old and new imperial boundaries - were truly multi-cultural societies, where Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Jews and others lived in “familiar juxtaposition,” according to the historian Tony Judt. Its greatest cultural and religious differences existed as much within states as between them. As one writer put it, Europe was a “melting pot” of different peoples and nationalities. Most people identified with their local church or estate, giving the continent quite a bit of cultural diversity. For most of European history, the idea of the “nation state,” whose citizens professed only a single allegiance and national identity, did not exist.
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