Abstrakt
The article aims to examine which role Protestantism plays both for the development as well as for the subsistence of the modern European secular state in the political philosophy of G. W.
F. Hegel.
Despite of the significance which Protestantism had to the development of modern understanding of subjective freedom and the rise of the modern European culture that sets freedom as the goal of all human activity, its attitude to the authority of modern secular state stays for Hegel ambiguous. It is claimed that the tension, which thus arises between the state and religion, need not to be understood only as endangering freedom and the secular state, but as productive for freedom, provided that the notion of shared human rationality is respected.