Rick Garnett and Thomas Berg are having a great debate at Mirror of Justice about the political consequences of the Reformation. First Garnett speculates, "Contrary to widely held belief, the Reformation was, on balance, a bad thing for political freedom." Berg responds with the widely held view, "that the Reformation emphasized the importance of individual conscience, which certainly plays an important role in arguments for political freedom."
Then Garnett makes an important point which could support the argument for an anarchocapitalist framework in symbiosis with the Catholic Church, "It seems to me that our understanding of political freedom depended largely on the medieval struggle (described by John Courtney Murray, and also wonderfully by Harold Berman) for the 'Freedom of the Church,' that is, for the principle that the political authority is not the sole authority. It seems to me that meaningful political freedom depends largely, if not entirely, on a thick civil society, on competing norm-generating communities, and on ideas of limited government. We owe these latter ideas, in particular, to the Church's rejection of secular authority's claims over the Church. The Reformation, in a nutshell, not only eradicated the 'middle man' between the individual and (speaking anachronistically, I know) the state, but also undermined the primary check on the state's ambitions."
Berg rightly retorts, reminding us, "there remains an undeniable, irreducible sense in which the Church was formally negative for a long time about freedom for institutions other than itself, and sought arrangements in which (to oversimplify) there were not multiple sources of authority, meaning, and power in society, but two sources, civil authorities and the Church."