Of course today there is much greater religious diversity across Europe, including being able to practise “foreign” religions or none at all (either of those also got you nicked a few centuries ago!) but there are some parallels here with tolerance of some hedonistic lifestyles and drug use/testing, showing it can be tolerated without “the sky falling down”
The 1648 Treaty of Osnabruck, part of the Peace of Westphalia, specified three types of worship: “domestic devotion”, public religious services (“exercitium religionis publicum“), and private religious services (“exercitium religionis privatum“). It is into this last category that clandestine churches fall. These churches were characterized by group religious services carried out by clergy “in their own houses or in other houses designated for the purpose,” and not “in churches at set hours.”[1] Kaplan writes that the pretense of clandestinity “enabled Europeans to accommodate dissent without confronting it directly, to tolerate knowingly what they could not bring themselves to accept fully.”[1]
EN : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clandestine_church
NL : https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuilkerk
DE : https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuilkerk
