1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [52]
Instead, they favored separate established churches in each province. With some exceptions—the only really important one being the State of Thuringia-Franconia, and those people could be counted on to be obstreperous no matter what—the provinces were relatively uniform, in religious terms. Where an established church for the entire USE would be an endless source of conflict, established churches for each separate province should be stable enough.
Within that broad agreement, however, another division existed: One camp, led by Hesse-Kassel, argued that the issue of an established church should be settled entirely on a provincial level. That would allow some of the more free-thinking provinces, like the SoTF and Magdeburg, to opt for separation of church and state.
But most of the Crown Loyalists, pigheaded as usual, would not accept that compromise. They wanted an established church to be mandatory for every province, whether that province wanted one or not. In effect, they insisted on picking a fight with the Committees of Correspondence in their own strongholds, which the ruling couple of Hesse-Kassel thought was about as smart as picking a fight with a bear in its own den.
Still, despite the heat that had been generated over the question of an established church during the campaign, almost nobody thought it was really a critical matter. The reason was simple. With the exception of a very small number of reactionary diehards, who were considered blockheads even by most Crown Loyalists, every prominent figure in the political life of the USE agreed that religious persecution was dead and buried. No one would be required to join the established church, nor would any member of any other denomination be penalized for not belonging—except, of course, that some of the taxes they paid would be used to support a church they didn't belong to.
In private discussions, Mike Stearns had told Amalie Elizabeth and her husband that he would be willing to accept an established church as a compromise solution, if need be. He'd even accept a nation-wide established Lutheran church, provided it was set up the way established churches had been set up in some of the nations from the universe he'd come from, like England and Denmark.
The real heat—the real fury, calling things by their right name—was centered on the other major issue before the nation.
Who was to be considered a citizen of the USE in the first place?
Again, there were basically four positions:
The citizenship program of Mike Stearns and his Fourth of July Party was simple. They lifted it word-for-word, in fact, from the constitution of the United States in the universe they'd left behind, as modified by what the up-timers called the Fourteenth Amendment:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Substitute "Province" for "State" and there you had, in two sentences, the position of the Fourth of July Party. Which, needless to say, was vociferously and belligerently supported by the Committees of Correspondence.
The opposing positions fell into three camps.
The far opposite position, as with the matter of an established church, was subscribed to by few people—in this case, intellectuals rather than reactionaries. These were people so addicted to regularity and precision that they insisted