By Rudy
Barnes, Jr.
This
year marks the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. It’s a good time to reflect on how that watershed
event shaped our religion, politics and culture. The Reformation did not liberate Christians
from religious oppression in Europe. In
fact, it exacerbated religious oppression with sectarian wars that did not end
until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
It
was then that Europeans, exhausted with religious war, accepted the concept of secular
sovereignty. It was the precursor of the
Enlightenment, with its democracy, human rights and the secular rule of
law. They were political concepts that
originated in natural law and reason, not in religion, and they superseded the political
sovereignty of God with the sovereignty of man.
The
real transforming power of the Reformation was not in the Protestant theology
of Luther or Calvin, but in the power of the printing press. It made the Bible available to the public and
freed people from the dictates of the Church, and it allowed them to question
the divine right to rule. But it did not prevent religious war from
ravaging Europe for almost 130 years. It
would be the end of the 18th century before democracy became a
political reality.
Thomas
Jefferson was a child of the Enlightenment who drafted the Declaration of
Independence and promoted the religious freedom enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Jefferson was inspired by John Locke
(1632-1704), who assisted the Lord’s Proprietors of Carolina to draft a
Fundamental Constitution in 1669 that provided, “neither pagan nor Mohometan
nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because
of his religion.”
But
Jefferson was a slaveholder, and the political freedoms of the Enlightenment were
initially limited to white men in America.
It would take a Civil War that cost more American lives than all its wars
since, and then two Constitutional Amendments (the Thirteenth in 1865 and the
Nineteenth in 1920) before political liberty was extended to blacks and women.
The
Enlightenment marked the end of religious war and the dominance of religion in
politics in Europe, but it did not bring peace to America. Religion was a dominant factor in the Civil
War, especially in the South where it defended slavery; and since then religion
has been a major factor in American culture, politics and military crusades—often
at the expense of reason.
Religion,
reason and political freedom have a symbiotic relationship. Freedom allows immorality, and laws cannot
eliminate immorality without curtailing freedom. Moral decadence and radical religion in
America have challenged both reason and the purpose and power of
Christianity. The test of any religion
is whether its followers choose to obey the moral dictates of their faith when
they are free to disobey them. And Christianity
has failed that test.
For
Jews, Christians and Muslims the greatest
commandment to love God and to love our neighbors as we love
ourselves—including our neighbors of other races and religions—is a common word of faith. That moral imperative of faith cannot be
enforced by law, and it did not prevent Christian Americans from going to war
against each other; and since that Civil War it hasn’t prevented other misguided
military crusades or reduced moral decadence in America.
Unlike
Europe, America never experienced a religious reformation, but America is a
religious nation that needs to restore reason to its religion, politics and
culture. Radical religion and politics
threaten the demise of democracy. On the
500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, new innovations in
communicating ideas, like the printing press over 500 years ago, could and
should stimulate a new and needed reformation of our religion and our politics.
Notes:
Alan Wolfe has predicted the
merger of Christianity and other religions in Western democracies with the
secular libertarian values of the Enlightenment, and projected that Islam will
follow suit. In And the Winner Is…the Coming Religious Peace (The Atlantic,
March 2008), Wolfe noted that The
Protestant Reformation of 1517 quickly engulfed half of Europe, migrated to the
New World, and…by 1618, the Thirty Years’ War had begun, resulting in the
devastation of large swaths of western Europe and the death of some 30 percent
of Germany’s population. Every new outburst of religious passion, while
producing ecstasy and revelation for some, had disrupted established loyalties,
fueled intolerance, and led to violence between the chosen and the damned.
Looking to the future, Wolfe referred
to a recent cover story in The Economist, titled “The New Wars of
Religion,” that proclaimed, “Faith will unsettle politics everywhere
this century.”
Things have changed since Wolfe’s
article in 2008. While religion has indeed
unsettled politics everywhere this
century, it has not been in the way that Wolfe envisioned it. In predicting a coming religious peace, Wolfe opined that …breathless warnings about rising religious fervor and conflicts to
come ignore two basic facts. First, many areas of the world are experiencing a
decline in religious belief and practice. Second, where religions are flourishing,
they are also generally evolving—very often in ways that allow them to fit more
easily into secular societies, and that weaken them as politically disruptive
forces.…The most important phenomenon
in the United States. is…the creation and spread of a free religious
marketplace which …revives religious devotion wherever it reaches, but also
tends to moderate the religions offered within it. Wolfe went on to say that American evangelicalism is becoming less
hostile to liberal ideas such as tolerance and pluralism. Political events since 2008 have proved Wolfe
wrong in predicting that religious revivals will lead the United States to a coming religious peace, unless the
elections of Donald Trump and Roy Moore are considered moving in the direction
of peace. See https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/and-the-winner-is/306654/.
Kurt Andersen has a presented a
more dire—and fantastical—picture of religion in Fantasyland: How America
Went Haywire, a 500-Year History (Random House, 2017). Andersen sees the Reformation as allowing
Protestants to reject the Vatican and start their own religion, then reject
that religion and “start their own new religions again and again.” Then “The Enlightenment liberated people to
believe anything whatsoever…and in
the marketplace of ideas, [it was assumed that] reason would win.” Andersen contradicts Wolfe in noting that
reason never did win in this religious and political free-for-all in the
marketplace of ideas, and he cites Emanuel Kant’s explanation that religion is
burdened by questions “it is not able to ignore, but which…it is also unable to
answer.” Today the fantastical mystical
doctrines of religion continue to trump more practical moral doctrines (pages
52, 53). It should be noted that
Andersen’s book emphasizes the fantastical (mystical) side of religion and does
not address its moral imperatives.
In reviewing Jared Rubin’s Rulers,
Religion and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not,
Christopher Kissane of The Guardian considered Rubin’s view of the
Reformation (and the printing press) in Europe, and how it related to Islamic
culture:
The
driving motivation of most rulers is not ideology or to do good, but to
maintain and strengthen their hold on power: “to propagate their rule”. This
requires “coercion” – the ability to enforce power – and, crucially, some form
of “legitimacy”. In the medieval world, both Islamic and Christian rulers
claimed part of their legitimacy from religious authorities, but after the
Reformation, Rubin thinks that European governments had to turn away from
religion as a source of political legitimacy.
…Islamic
rulers, by contrast, continued to rely on religious legitimation and economic
interests were mostly excluded from politics, leading to governance that
focused on the narrow interests of sultans, and the conservative religious and
military elites who backed them.
…The
source of Europe’s success, then, lies in the Reformation, a revolution in
ideas and authority spread by what Martin Luther called “God’s highest and
ultimate gift of grace”: the printing press.
…Europe’s
long reformations were more a maze than a path. As Rubin notes, “getting
religion (mostly) out of politics took centuries” – centuries of radical social
upheaval and destructive warfare. He argues persuasively for the importance of
both religion and secularization in economic history, but religious change
affected not just politics but culture and ideas.
On Thomas Jefferson’s role in
drafting the Declaration of Independence and promoting the Freedom of Religion
in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, see Jon Meacham, Thomas
Jefferson: The Art of Power, (2012, Random House), Part III.
On a Fundamental Constitution
drafted for the colony of Carolina by John Locke in 1669 that provided a
measure of religious freedom, see James Lowell Underwood, The Dawn of
Religious Freedom in South Carolina (2006, University of South Carolina
Press), at pages 2-4.
On how social media and the
internet have transformed American politics (much like the printing press), and
how Steve Jobs gave us Donald Trump,
see https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/steve-jobs-gave-us-president-trump/2017/09/05/f4f487e4-9260-11e7-aace-04b862b2b3f3_story.html?undefined=&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1.
On how social media and cheap
speech are promoting demagogues and transforming politics, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/our-dangerous-idiotic-national-conversation/2017/09/20/9e18309e-9d58-11e7-9083-fbfddf6804c2_story.html?undefined=&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1.
Related
Commentary:
(12/8/14): Religion and Reason
(12/15/14): Faith and Freedom
(1/11/15): The Greatest Commandment: A Common Word of Faith
(1/18/15): Love over Law: A Principle at the Heart of Legitimacy
(3/29/15): God and Country: Resolving Conflicting Concepts of Sovereignty
(4/12/15): Faith as a Source of Morality and Law: The Heart of Legitimacy
(1/23/16): Who Is My Neighbor?
(1/30/16): The Politics of Loving Our Neighbors as Ourselves
(2/27/16): Conflicting Concepts of Legitimacy in Faith, Freedom and Politics
(6/18/16): A Politics of Reconciliation with Liberty and Justice for All
(8/2/15): Freedom and Fundamentalism
http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2015/08/freedom-and-fundamentalism.html (8/9/15): Balancing Individual Rights with Collective
Responsibilities
(4/23/16): Standards of Legitimacy in Morality, Manners and Political Correctness
(7/9/16): Back to the Future: Race, Religion, Rights and a Politics of
Reconciliation
(7/19/15): Religion, Heritage and the Confederate Flag
(1/23/16): Who Is My Neighbor?
(1/30/16): The Politics of Loving Our Neighbors as Ourselves
(4/30/16): The Relevance of Religion to Politics
(5/7/16): Religion and a Politics of Reconciliation
(8/5/16): How Religion Can Bridge Our Political and Cultural Divide
(9/10/16): Liberty in Law: A Matter of Man’s Law, not God’s Law
(9/17/16): A Moral Revival to Restore Legitimacy to Our Politics
(11/19/16): Religion and a Politics of Reconciliation Based on Shared Values
http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2016/11/religion-and-politics-of-reconciliation_19.html
(11/26/16): Irreconcilable Differences and the Demise of Democracy
(1/21/17): Religion and Reason Redux: Religion Is Ridiculous
(2/25/17): The Need for a Revolution in Religion and Politics
(3/4/17): Ignorance and Reason in Religion and Politics
(3/18/17): Moral Ambiguity in Religion and Politics
(4/22/17): The Relevance of Jesus and the Irrelevance of the Church in Today’s
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(6/24/17): The Evolution of Religion, Politics and Law: Back to the Future? http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2017/06/the-evolution-of-religion-politics-and.html.
(7/1/17): Religion, Moral Authority and Conflicting Concepts of Legitimacy
(7/15/17) Religion and Progressive Politics
(8/5/17): Does Religion Seek to Reconcile and Redeem or to Divide and Conquer?
(8/19/17) Hate, History and the Need for a Politics of Reconciliation
(9/2/17): The Evolution of the American Civil Religion and Habits of the Heart
http://www.religionlegitimacyandpolitics.com/2017/09/the-evolution-of-american-civil.html.
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