Citizenship through the Ages: From Church Influence to Workers’ Rights

Citizenship is something most people today take for granted – the right to vote, to work under fair conditions, to access healthcare and education. But none of these rights arrived automatically. They were contested, negotiated, and won over centuries of political and social struggle. Understanding how citizenship evolved means tracing three major fault lines in history: the overwhelming power of the Church over civic life, the long battle to integrate workers into political and economic rights, and the gradual push toward equitable distribution of national income. Each of these shifts reshaped who counted as a full member of society – and who did not.

What citizenship meant in the ancient world 🔗

In ancient Greece and Rome, citizenship was a privileged status reserved for a select group of individuals. In Greece, it was limited to free-born males belonging to a specific city-state. In Rome, it initially applied only to the patrician class before gradually expanding. Roman citizenship came with concrete benefits – the right to vote, hold public office, and receive legal protection. An ancient citizen was distinct from a mere inhabitant or subject, enjoying privileged membership in the polity along with all the duties such membership entailed. These duties included military service, participation in governance, and financial contribution to the city.

A further departure from the Greek model was that the Roman government pitted upper-class patrician interests against lower-order working groups known as the plebeian class – a dynamic sometimes described as a tug-of-war between elite power and popular liberty. Through sustained pressure, the plebs eventually won the right to have their interests represented in government by officers known as tribunes around 494 BCE. This was an early, imperfect signal that citizenship could, over time, be pushed to include more people.

The church and the shaping of medieval civic identity 🔗

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the structured civic world of antiquity gave way to something quite different. The ancient model of citizenship gave way to entirely new forms of social and political organization, shaped by feudal and ecclesiastical authority across the continent. In this environment, the Catholic Church became the dominant force not just in spiritual life, but in the very definition of who belonged to a community.

The Church dominated the culture and society of medieval Europe so powerfully that its people thought of themselves as living in “Christendom” – the realm of the Christians. All key life moments – birth, marriage, and death – were under the Church’s control. Education was dominated by churchmen, and most medieval scholars were members of the clergy. The upper levels of the Catholic Church, such as the Pope, were often more powerful than Europe’s monarchs, meaning kings and lords frequently deferred to the Church on matters of governance and law.

The church as the gatekeeper of belonging 🔗

The Church taught that God appointed the pope and kings through the doctrine of divine right, meaning each person was born into their divinely determined position in society. This theology effectively froze social mobility. Belonging to a community – what we might today call civic membership – was inseparable from participation in the religious community. Those who fell outside the Church’s approval risked not only spiritual consequences but tangible civil ones: exclusion from trade, denial of legal protection, and social ostracism.

Almost every nation had an “established church,” and people who did not join were denied rights and often banished, jailed, tortured, or murdered. Religious minorities were routinely excluded from civic life, either by law or by violence. This was not merely a matter of spiritual preference – it had direct, material consequences for one’s legal standing as a member of society.

The slow separation of church and civic life 🔗

The Renaissance began to chip away at this. A philosophy later called humanism emerged with an emphasis away from the Church and towards secularism, with thinkers reflecting on the study of ancient Rome and ancient Greece, including ideas of citizenship and politics. In cities like Florence, civic education was seen as crucial to the protection of the republic. Politics, previously considered unspiritual, came to be viewed as a worthy and honorable vocation, and it was expected that citizens across different classes should participate in public life.

The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century deepened this fracture. The English Reformation ushered in political, constitutional, social, and cultural change, defining a national identity for England and slowly but profoundly changing people’s religious beliefs. By challenging the monopoly of the Catholic Church, reformers inadvertently opened space for a more pluralistic understanding of civic belonging – one that was no longer wholly dependent on adherence to a single religious institution.

The French Revolution and the break from hierarchy 🔗

The French Revolution marked major changes and has been widely seen as a watershed event in modern politics. Before it, the main social ties under the Ancien Régime were hierarchical – serfs loyal to local vassals, vassals to nobles, nobles to the king. Clergy and aristocracy had special privileges, including exemption from taxes, which placed the financial burden of national expenses on the peasantry. The Revolution dismantled this structure and introduced the idea that civic rights were universal, not inherited by birth or granted by religious authority.

This shift was fundamental. Citizenship stopped being a privilege passed down through social rank or church membership. It became, at least in theory, a status that applied to all members of the political community – a framework of rights and duties independent of religious affiliation or noble title. The challenge that followed was making that theory real, especially for the working class.

Integrating workers into citizenship 🔗

Even as political rights expanded after the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, workers remained largely excluded from meaningful citizenship. They had formal legal standing, but economic and political participation were still tightly restricted. Property qualifications for voting meant that most working-class men had no say in governance. Active participation in governance became a hallmark of citizenship, challenging previous notions centered on elite privilege, but this challenge took generations to resolve.

The labor movement and economic citizenship 🔗

The industrial revolution sharpened the contradiction between formal legal equality and economic exclusion. Workers who labored long hours in dangerous conditions for subsistence wages were nominally citizens but practically powerless. The labor movement that rose in response was not simply about wages – it was a claim to full citizenship. Workers demanded that their contributions to national wealth be recognized through political representation, fair pay, and social protections.

The fight for fair wages, reasonable working hours, and safe conditions drove the rise of labor unions. Over time, their pressure produced results: recognition of workers’ rights, protection of collective bargaining, and the development of early social policies such as health insurance, pensions, and unemployment benefits. Workers were being gradually woven into the political and economic fabric of citizenship – not as subjects to be managed, but as rights-bearing members of society.

T.H. Marshall’s framework: three stages of citizenship 🔗

The most influential theoretical account of this transformation came from British sociologist T.H. Marshall. Marshall argued that the development of the Western welfare state in the 20th century introduced a novel form of citizenship – social citizenship – that encompassed the rights to material resources and social services. His landmark 1949 essay Citizenship and Social Class laid out a three-stage framework for how citizenship had evolved in England.

In the first instance, Marshall said, the 18th century saw the gradual acceptance of equal civil rights, including the right to freedom of speech, the right to own property and to conclude contracts, and the right to justice. The 19th century then brought the expansion of political rights, including the right to elect representatives to Parliament. Finally, the 20th century saw the emergence of social citizenship – the right to material resources and social services as an integral component of what every citizen was owed.

Marshall spoke of the development of civil, political, and social citizenship as an evolutionary sequence, where the rights embodied in the first pointed to those of the second, and the second to the third. Each stage was not automatic – it was the result of struggle, pressure, and social conflict. Marshall was clear that this was not a smooth or inevitable process, but one shaped by difficult historical forces over centuries.

The equitable distribution of national income as a citizenship issue 🔗

Marshall’s third stage – social citizenship – directly addressed one of the most persistent tensions in modern societies: the gap between formal political equality and deep economic inequality. Marshall defined social rights as spanning from the right to a basic level of economic welfare and security, to the right to share in the social heritage and live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in society. In other words, citizenship was not complete if people lacked the material conditions necessary to exercise their other rights meaningfully.

Social rights were to be awarded not on the basis of class or need, but on the status of citizenship itself – a fundamentally different logic from charity or poor relief. This was a direct challenge to the idea that economic inequality was natural or acceptable within a society of equal citizens. The welfare state – with its universal access to healthcare, education, housing, and social insurance – became the institutional expression of this principle.

The tension between markets and social rights 🔗

Marshall noted the contradiction between social rights and the requirements of a market economy within the dynamic context of welfare capitalism, where citizenship functioned to contain conflicts between social classes. He did not believe that social rights eliminated class inequality – he acknowledged they coexisted with it. But he saw them as essential to reducing the tension between civil equality and economic inequality. Without decent education and living standards, the formal right to vote or speak freely becomes hollow.

This insight remains central to contemporary debates about citizenship. Questions about tax policy, public healthcare, housing access, and minimum wage are not simply economic disputes – they are arguments about what full citizenship requires. Social rights mitigate inequalities generated by market economies without abolishing markets, and debates about where to draw that line continue today in every democratic society.

From exclusive privilege to universal suffrage 🔗

The arc from ancient citizenship – limited to free-born males of a particular city – to modern universal suffrage is long, uneven, and incomplete. The exclusion of women from the vote persisted in most Western democracies well into the 20th century. Racial exclusions, as seen most starkly in the United States, required constitutional amendments and sustained civil rights movements to dismantle. Following the American Civil War, three Reconstruction Amendments abolished slavery and granted citizenship to all African Americans, the majority of whom had recently been enslaved – yet formal citizenship did not translate into equal civic participation for decades more.

Each expansion of the suffrage was, in effect, an argument that citizenship had been drawn too narrowly. Workers, women, racial minorities, the propertyless – each group made the case that the existing definition of citizen was arbitrary and unjust. And each time the boundary shifted, it was because political pressure, collective action, and social movements forced the question. Modern citizenship is now characterized by universal suffrage, civil, political, social, and economic rights, and civic participation – though the degree to which these are fully realized varies significantly across nations and communities.

Why this history still matters 🔗

The history of citizenship is not a story of steady, linear progress. It is a history of exclusion, contestation, and gradual – sometimes painful – expansion. The church once determined who belonged to a community; the state eventually took over that function but kept many of the same exclusions. Workers fought for generations to be recognized as full economic and political citizens. The principle that national wealth should be shared broadly enough for all citizens to live with dignity was hard-won and remains contested.

Understanding the historical perspectives on citizenship reveals the evolution of rights, responsibilities, and identities across cultures and epochs, offering insights into how citizenship has influenced legal frameworks and societal structures throughout history. The struggles of the past were not abstract – they determined who could vote, who could work without exploitation, and who could access education or healthcare. Those same questions are still being answered today.

What do you think? Given that T.H. Marshall saw social rights – like access to healthcare and education – as essential to full citizenship, do you think modern welfare states are doing enough to fulfill that promise? And as the role of religious institutions in public life continues to shift globally, how should societies navigate the relationship between religious identity and civic belonging?

References

1. https://www.numberanalytics.com/blog/citizenship-evolution-historical-perspective
2. https://www.city-journal.org/article/ancient-modern-birthright-citizenship
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_citizenship
4. https://timemaps.com/encyclopedia/medieval-europe-church-history/
5. https://www.studentsofhistory.com/the-role-of-the-roman-catholic-church
6. https://www.graceeluth.org/the-churchs-role-in-feudalism/
7. https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao-mn/legacy/2011/09/16/MN%20Civil%20Rights%20FINAL.pdf
8. https://lawsandsuch.com/historical-perspectives-on-citizenship/
9. https://www.britannica.com/biography/T-H-Marshall
10. https://dissentmagazine.org/article/t-h-marshalls-citizenship-and-social-class/
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.H._Marshall's_Social_Citizenship
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._H._Marshall
13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement