About ten years ago reading The English Civil War: A People’s History, I came to the realization that I was ‘against’ radical Protestantism, whatever that meant. Raised as a child in upstate New York there are certain Truths which are imparted by the educational system which you take for granted. For example, in the American Civil War you knew very well who the good guys and bad guys were. Though less stark and explicit, it was also rather obvious that the American revolutionaries were on the side of right and the British were wrong. Finally, though more subtextual, it was clear that Protestants and Puritans were on the right side of history, while the Roman Catholic church was a somewhat antiquated institution which had had to adapt to modernity.
By the values which I hold to at this age I think that my childhood views, shaped by teachers, curriculum, and frankly the milieu of upstate New York, I think I learned the sides which were right and wrong correctly, even if there are shades of gray to reality. When it comes to the American revolution I am more ambivalent, and honestly have a difficult time saying that the British were wrong by the values which I hold to today. Internally it’s still a process and I can see both sides.
But when it comes to Protestantism I have no doubts now; in the age of the Reformation my head tells me that I hope that I’d have the courage to stand with Erasmus. I qualify that it my head thinks this because for some reason my heart still sides with the Protestants, whether it be joy when reading about Elizabeth’s fleet defeating that of Phillip or the sadness over the travails of the Winter King.
When I say I am against the Reformation does that mean that I’m in favor the corruption that was the Church of the early 16th century? Clearly not. And when I say I’m against the Reformation, does that mean that I accept the metaphysical claims of a particular religion? Not at all. My concerns are both material and ideological in relation to the chaos that the Reformation wrought.
As most of us know Erasmus of Rotterdman was a catalyst for many of the ideas and impulses of the Reformation, even if he was neither necessary nor sufficient. His accomplishments are well known enough that I won’t rehash them here, while his criticism of the Church of his period are also rather famous. Erasmus clearly favored a reform of the practice of the religion of the Western Christian church, but at the end he never left the Church.
Though agreeing, even anticipating, many of the critiques of Protestants, ultimately he did not wish to see a rupture in Western Christianity. But there was also the scandalous cultural barbarism unleashed. One could critique priests for their corruption, but should the response be to beat them? One could suggest that relics were false, and that excessive attention to artistry within churches were a burden to the community, but should one burden the churches down? Perhaps the frivolity of feasts days were a bit much, but should peasants be denied their joy because they should tremble in the hands of an angry God?
Arguably the Reformation was critical in allowing for the space to develop so that the scientific rationalism which we appreciate today, though I don’t think it was necessary. And curiously, in Reformations, the author points out that John Calvin’s conception of false religion is rather like that of atheists in relation to all religion. But it also unleashed savage antinomian energies, most evident in what happened at Munster. When Erasmus critiqued the Church of his period he did not wish as a response barbaric iconoclasm which enforced its truth at the point of the sword. But that is what the Reformation became by and large (the later Anabaptist sectarians had a quite different view, but it is notable that they emerge in the failures of the violent Anabaptists).
Of course in the real world people like Erasmus were caught between fanatics in both campus. As a realist one might have to choose a side, even if one preferred that the conflict not occur. So when I say I’m against the Reformation, I’m pointing to the reality that often you create more problems by attempting to fix things too quickly and radically. Some parts of the Church, such as in Spain, had already reformed, and so were surprisingly immune to the emergence of dissent (what did emerge in Spain and Italy were often theological innovators of a Unitarian stripe). In our age the same impulse of the early Reformers exists: banish injustice and corruption. But that’s easier said than done, and sometimes the medicine of justice is worse than the disease of injustice.
Slightly OT, but have you seen the Wicker Man (1973)? What I found remarkable about that film was the way that the (Protestant) Christianity of the sergeant was portrayed as the religion not only of conventional bourgeois values, but also of reason and science, while the paganism of the islanders was portrayed as free-spirited but superstitious and backwards. An interesting relic of a period when the progressive elements of Western culture were reacting against science and material progress, which had become associated with moral traditionalists.
The only justification for Protestantism and its radical ruptures is its focus on literacy. Protestantism may not have been necessary for the scientific revolution in and of itself, but I don’t see how the SR could have happened without the flood of printing and mass literacy that the Reformation opened up.
This effect was most pronounced in the Protestant vs. Catholic colonies in the New World. The difference between the British colonies in the north and south was stark enough–New England being the most literate society on earth; Berkeley refusing to allow any printing or education of Virginia’s commoners. But the Catholic colonies acted like Virginia taken to an extreme–illiteracy rates were still enormously high in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This has greatly affected the degree to which Latin America could influence the rest of Western civilization as compared to British North America.
I do not believe that the Protestant Reformation should be understood as an intellectual or theological movement. The ideas of the reformation were in circulation for centuries before the events of the early 16th century in Germany and Switzerland, where they first found stable and continuing institutional form. Consider the following:
Peter Waldo (c. 1140 – c. 1205) founded the Waldensians. Waldensian churches survived in the mountain valleys of Savoy and Lombardy for hundreds of years, and eventually joined the Calvinist movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Waldo
John Wycliffe (c. mid-1320s – 1384) was an English theologian and professor at Oxford, who was the first to translate the Bible into English. His followers were the Lollards. Their movement was suppressed in the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV, but they may have gone underground and reappeared in the reign of Henry VIII as protestants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lollardy
Jan Hus (1369 – 1415), a Czech priest, studied and translated Wycliffe’s writtings. After Hus was executed in 1415, his followers rebelled against their Roman Catholic rulers and defeated five consecutive papal crusades between 1420 and 1431, in what became known as the Hussite Wars. A century later, as many as 90% of inhabitants of the Czech lands were Hussites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hus
Girolamo Savonarola (1452 – 1498) ) was an Italian Dominican friar and preacher active in Renaissance Florence. His doctrines were much like those of later Protestants. He made some spectacular political miscalculations that resulted in his hanging by the Florentines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girolamo_Savonarola
The ideas became useful in the hands of revolutionaries who wanted to establish new forms of political organization that would not be subject to the control of Rome or the Holy Roman Empire. The side effect of their revolution was to create space for locally (congregationaly) governed churches and for other forms of poltical organization.
The flip side of the Protestant rebellion was the use of the Roman church as an instrument of repression by the Hapsburg monarchs of Spain and Austria and the Bourbons in France. It worked, but the long term effects were dire. Spain became an intellectual backwater. France replaced protestant revolutionaries with atheists and got the Terror.
Revolutionaries are never nice people, and they are very seldom kind or cultured, but sometimes we get them.
“When it comes to the American revolution I am more ambivalent, and honestly have a difficult time saying that the British were wrong by the values which I hold to today.”
I presume (if I may) that one of these values is liberty, the subject of my comment.
It appears to me that, often, historically, individuals & movements insisting on liberty are really demanding 2 things:
a) the same liberty to exploit or oppress others that is permitted to their superiors
b) liberty/freedom from being exploited or oppressed by those superiors.
A good starting point for my potted history in support of this assertion is Runnymede & the Magna Carta, which by and large imposed new restrictions on the King’s treatment of the nobles but not similar restrictions on the nobles regarding there social/political inferiors. The next bit of evidence, about 400 years later, is the Puritans and their zeal for denying others religious liberty whenever they were able to do so. 150 years later we come to the American Revolution, and Samuel Johnson’s observations, e.g., “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”.
Most recently in US experience, those most insistent on states rights, a peculiarly American notion of liberty, insist on using it to prevent the federal government from defending voting & other civil rights, including the freedom from being lynched; this typically left those politically and economically less powerful at the mercy of those more powerful. In the words of William Buckley (natl review, 11/19/55), “The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”
So, while we are allowed to judge the past by “values we hold today” (and probably cannot avoid doing so), we should be careful about matching these values to those actually expressed in the past (as the quotation beginning this comment seems to be) and not take it for granted that the same words, now and then, express the same values.
(Off topic: while you are tweeking the site, consider adding a preview option to comments).
“A century later, as many as 90% of inhabitants of the Czech lands were Hussites.”
The first great battle of the 30 Years War was the battle of White Mountain between the Czech* protestants (many of whom were Lutheran or Calvinist by then) and the Hapsburg Catholics. The Hapsburgs won and proceeded to destroy protestantism in the Czech lands. The Hapsburgs carpet bombed Prague with Baroque churches.
The wheel never stops. In the 20th Century, the Hapsburg rule of Czech lands collapsed in the wake of WWI.
After WWII, the Slavic Czechs, with an assist from the Russian Army expelled every German speaker from Czechoslovakia, even Jews who had managed to survive the Nazis. The Russians made Marxist Atheism the official religion of the country, and the Czech people, who viewed the Roman Church as German method of social control, took to the new religion like ducks to water.
Compare this to Poland which viewed the Roman Church as a cultural resistance to the Orthodox Russians.
*I should say Bohemian, but nobody knows where or what Bohemia was these days. If you say Bohemian, most people think you are talking about dirty hippies. Further Czech is Slavic ethnic group, but a substantial portion of the population of Bohemia was German.
The link between print literacy and Protestantism is a source of longstanding debate. Some evidence fits nicely, some doesn’t. The estimates on book/manuscript circulation in this excellent article are very useful. It does appear that Italy lost its place as the premier book creator by the advent of the early modern period, as Protestant England and Germany rose to prominence. However, France never falters and remains pre-eminent right up to the 1800s. And Spain was always a slouch, so hard to tell there. . . .
“France replaced protestant revolutionaries with atheists and got the Terror.”
The french revolutionaries were predominantly deists and frowned on outright atheism.
You are confusing the French and American Revolutions.