Autor: Gregory, Brad S.

Buch: The Unintended Reformation

Titel: The Unintended Reformation

Stichwort: Antwort d. Moderne auf Krise; Holland als Vorbild (Universität Leiden); Trennung zw. öffentlichem u. privatem Leben; Privatisierung von Religion, Ethik;

Kurzinhalt: A politically protected individual right to freedom of religious belief and practice within the state’s laws solved the European problem of confessional coercion, in part because of widely shared agreement about what “religion” was.

Textausschnitt: 373b Western modernity was forged in the context of the unintended persistence of Christian pluralism and the failures of confessional rulers to achieve their goals. Its central problem at the outset was different from that of medieval Christendom, the Reformation, or confessional Europe: how might human life be structured such that human beings could coexist in peaceful stability and security even though they disagreed about God’s truth and were frequently hostile toward one another? The answer would apparently have to include some (at least implicit) definition of “religion” and a stipulation of this new thing’s relationship to the rest of human life. In the first half of the seventeenth century that strange neo-medieval polity, the Dutch Republic, was to a significant extent practicing what would become the modern answer before it was theorized. Especially in the maritime and mercantile province of Holland, a distinction was in effect being drawn between public and private life, and “religion”—understood largely as a matter of belief, worship, and devotion—was being individualized, privatized, and separated from political and economic life. So long as one obeyed the laws that provided for common security and stability, one could believe whatever one wished and worship in private however one pleased. Attracted by prospects of peace and a better life that contrasted so starkly with persecution for their faith, religious refugees poured into the Dutch Republic and contributed to its economic prosperity. In circumstances of relative religious toleration, the consequences of the Reformation’s failed foundational principle grew clearer: without political authorities seeking to enforce specifically Reformed Protestant or Lutheran interpretations of scripture, the open-ended arbitrariness generated by sola scriptura and its supplements became more apparent, just as it was in England in the 1640s and had been in Germany and Switzerland in the 1520s. The same relatively tolerant Dutch attitude and latitude extended into higher education. Keeping its other faculties from being dominated by theology, the Dutch Republic’s new institution in Leiden dispensed with confessional oaths, attracted star scholars, and within a generation of its founding in 1575 had become one of Europe’s leading universities. Across confessional lines, most Dutch Christians understandably preferred the prospect of greater material prosperity to religio-political hostilities and their disruptions of human life, even if the pursuit of the goods life as though it were the good life was antithetical to the Gospel. Nevertheless, here was something about which, it seemed, nearly all people could agree notwithstanding their theological differences. (Fs)

374a What the Dutch adumbrated was first institutionalized in the United States near the end of the eighteenth century among men and women more thoroughly inculturated to regard material acquisitiveness not as sinful avarice, but as benign self-interest and the providentially sanctioned path to individual happiness, societal prosperity, and national strength. By then the Dutch innovations had been well theorized. Self-consciously and institutionally, the American federal government would neither support nor permit an established church, but rather begin to undo the magisterial Reformation altogether. Provided they were politically quiescent and compliant, citizens could believe and proselytize for anything, at least within the limits that were in effect prescribed by the new nation’s Protestant “moral establishment.”1 A politically protected individual right to freedom of religious belief and practice within the state’s laws solved the European problem of confessional coercion, in part because of widely shared agreement about what “religion” was. It also provided a template for the articulation of other individual rights, which, when enforced, similarly protected specified human beings from abusive mistreatment. But only since the 1970s, nearly two centuries after the American and French Revolutions and more than two decades after the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has the self-conscious protection of human beings via human rights against oppressive states spread around the world on the ruins of failed socialist revolutions, the demise of territorially imperialist Western colonialism, and the decolonization that followed the Second World War.2 Nevertheless, considered as such and despite its restrictive intertwining with nationalist states for most of its history since the late eighteenth century, this spread of protective individual rights is perhaps the greatest outcome of modern Western liberalism, notwithstanding the still incomplete extension of human rights to women, children, ethnic minorities, and post-colonial peoples. Other impressive modern Western triumphs include the extraordinary progress of the natural sciences and their applications in medicine and manufacturing technologies that have made possible the flourishing of literally billions of human beings. These are great achievements, particularly when compared to Western modernity’s fascist and communist regimes of the brutal twentieth century and the many millions of human lives that they destroyed. (Fs)