The Reformation era ended with the Thirty Years ́War, a civil struggle that devastated most of Germany and much of central Europe. That catastrophe, with a parallel civil war in Britain, demonstrated the impossibility of forcing religious belief on human beings. The idea now slowly developed of religious tolerance under a secular state. That strange concept ̜central to the new era known as the Enlightenment would find its first and in many ways finest form in a new nation, born in rebellion and experimentation, across the seas: the United States of America.