State-Run Reformation

Brad Gregory argues in his Unintended Reformation that it is a historical prejudice to treat “magisterial” Protestantism, which relied on the support of state power as “normative” Protestantism. Even now, when confessional historiography has given way to new paradigms of Reformation scholarship, most attention is paid to the magisterial Reformers. 

There is a reason for this: Magisterial Reformers had long-term success, precisely because they were magisterial. More cynically, magisterial Reformers were successful because state authorities protected and promoted cooperative Reformers, those that played ball. As Gregory puts it, “throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, only a carefully controlled and domesticated Reformation would be permitted to exert a widespread influence” (150).

Understandable as the focus is, Gregory rightly notes that “there is no intrinsic, necessary, or logical connection between enjoying political support and rightly interpreting God’s word” (151).

Not only did the magisterial Reformation wield influence beyond that of state-independent movements, but the magisterial Reformation set a pattern of state support and control of religion that, Gregory says, has persisted in various forms throughout the modern era: “Western states’ control of religion in the early twenty-first century is a latter-day extension of the sixteenth-century control of churches by states. Secular authorities have exercised this control in many different ways in the interim, with divergent historical trajectories in individual countries and regions. But every one of these trajectories derives from sixteenth-century states’ control of the churches” (154).

One model was confessional enforcement, where deviation from the confessional norm was suppressed by civil power. Christian rulers, Gregory says, “flubbed” the delicate task of “exercising power in service of caritas,” and flubbed disastrously (161). The Netherlands permitted diverse confessions to flourish, but that too was a form of control. The Dutch model was “institutionalized in the United States,” where it had the effect of privatizing religion and setting the stage to undermine the very virtues on which the American experiment depended:

“With supreme irony and as a result of understandable pragmatic decisions, [privatization] repudiated Jesus’s uncompromising, anti-subjectivist, anti-individualist commands precisely because disagreements about them had proven so costly in the Reformation era and in the enduring confessional antagonisms it left in its wake. Doubly ironically, however, by pointing the way to the emancipation of politics from any and all religious institutions, the American founders unwittingly laid the groundwork for the potential erosion of the church-nurtured, virtuous behaviors of the nation’s citizens, and so for the eventual endangerment of the nation’s own public, political well-being that depended on citizens who exhibited certain behaviors rather than others.” Disestablishment left the public culture “dependent on the individual behaviors that informed them, whatever those behaviors happened to be.” What if individuals chose to be un-virtuous? It was their constitutional right so to choose (172-3).

Privatization also eroded the very nature of Christianity, and makes it difficult for Christianity to exist at all: “in some measure a concrete human community  . . . was not only the social product but also the social producer of embodied Christian faith. It always had been., Without it, beyond the micro-social context of one’s family, it is unclear how one might learn to live as a Christian, as opposed simply to learning what to believe and how one should spend an hour or two each Sunday” (173).