Description: The Christian state church emerged from the religion of pagan Rome. A declining western empire gave the church political power, but provoked conflict between church and state. In the Scottish post-Reformation Stewart monarchy, the king claimed to control the church by divine right. Covenanters exchanged state control for a theocracy built on the idea that Scotland, like Israel, had a God-given destiny. As ""the purest kirk in Christendom,"" nation and kirk were the political and religious faces of one body. Like pre-Christian Israel, Scotland was one of the only two nations ever...