In his exploration of the roots of the early modern state in Europe, Philip Gorski has pointed to the importance of Calvinism. He suggests that this was one of several elements in the production of the modern bureaucratic state. In so doing, he raises some doubts about a very famous historical thesis: that of the relationship between the rise of Protestantism and that of capitalism proposed by the German social theorist Max Weber. We will return to this important thesis later, but what is significant about Gorski's work is his focus on the importance of practice as well as belief. Much of the debate about the putative impact of Protestantism, that is, has been cast in terms of the inferred impact on psychological states of doctrines such as that of predestination, that is, the idea that only a small elect has been selected by God for salvation and that earthly actions can have no impact on this election. Such effects are notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to evidence. What we can examine, however, argues Gorski, are the effects of such beliefs, in the forms of practices that might be adopted to translate the consequences of the beliefs for the faithful. In this way Reformed Protestantism was the laboratory for devising new forms of governance practice. This means that we need to explore the connections between bodies of belief and the practices that were needed to put them into effect. Over time, it will be argued in this book, such practices became taken for granted and relatively detached from (although always given their meaning by) bodies of formal beliefs. In the process they could become available for transfer to other domains. In Gorski's case this was for state formation; this book will pay particular attention to the economic domain. This chapter looks in a little more detail at the literature on the nature of practice in order to give us some orienting concepts. We then examine the existing historical literature on Scottish church governance with a view to drawing together the hints about such practices, before considering how to expand such hints using the evidence available to us in the archives.

The Protestant Ethic and practice

First published in 1905, Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has spawned an enormous body of work.