The) Protestant Impulse
However it telescopes time, the analogy is worth pondering: what the millennium before Christ’s birth was to Judaism and what the Middle Ages were to Catholicism, modern times were to Protestantism. Without the empowering impulse that removed the drama of salvation from the ministrations of the priesthood and placed it in each person’s lap, there would have been no modern times. Protestantism’s extraordinary focus on the individual, the errant but able person who could read his or her Bible and with that single voice that attest to what was lost and what was found, created the non-mechanical engine that made possible the mechanical ones. Protestantism opened a vast door of human agency that has yet to close.
The change was not merely from monarchy to democracy or hierarchy to equivalence or deference to self-consideration, though any one of those raises political and psychological matters that inform every present day. Above all, the change spoke to the stature of individual accomplishment. The tribalism that defined Judaism and the obeisance that defined the Holy Roman Church located the individual within a firm framework of prescription and proscription. For the laity, to fail in one’s religious tasks was understood as a matter of course. Jews lamented their shortcomings on their day of atonement while Christians confessed their sins and were absolved. Though not necessarily serenely, life went on.
In protesting the venality of the clergy, Protestantism raised the flag of betterment-cum- perfectionism. The flag was both millennial—you’d best fix your soul for all time—and practical—you can do great things when you set your mind to it. Though an individual could continue to go along with the world he or she was born into, the individual did not have to. Just to use the pronoun she denotes something extraordinary. When women began preaching in seventeenth century England and both men and women began listening, a world, as the historian Christopher Hill put it, turned upside down. Those women were not infrequently stigmatized and mocked, but the premise of Protestantism held true: each soul had the right to speak. Anne Hutchinson was as crucial a figure as any in defining the Protestant nation that came to be called the United States of America.
Although it became a powerful entity, Protestantism was born heterodox and retained that attitude. Judaism and Catholicism witnessed the rise of splits and sects; the latter punished heretics vigorously, but sectarianism was endemic to Protestantism. A Protestant was supposed to think for him or herself and search for the right, unencumbered relationship with God. This was not to deny God’s supremacy—that special humbling remained—but the seeker did not have to bow to the accumulations of power. In challenging the monolithic Church, the example Luther set was, at once, instructive and dizzying. Authority was not all it was supposed to be. Any sincere spirit could sniff out hypocrisy and act on that impulse. As the English kings came to learn in the course of the eighteenth century, denunciation was for the American colonials something like second nature.
When various schismatics emerged, bringing leveling insights and demands with them, Luther tried, in the name of reaction, to put the genie back in the bottle, but it would not fit. The theological tomes that Calvinism, in particular, devoted itself to as it sought to define its notions of grace, salvation, predestination, and the like were massive but also insubstantial before the weightlessness of spirit that had been let loose. Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam had nourished ardor, sometimes of a mystic variety, but had provided a relatively defined course for such impulses. The sheer intensity of Protestantism spilled over into every facet of life. Though protesting its lowness, even its nothingness, humankind began to justify itself before the Lord. No calculations could define such a rash enterprise.
The dynamics that differentiated Protestantism—self-worth versus abasement, certainty of salvation versus uncertainty, individual responsibility versus the Lord’s omnipotence, earthly achievement versus the riches of heaven, intuition versus reason—made for a remarkable eruption of human energy. Much has been written about the Protestant ethic, the striving to prove and better one’s self, but that was only part of the story. Protestantism enfranchised the human spirit: go forth and seize the workings of the world and make them your own. Benjamin Franklin (to choose a famous example) was fully that person, someone who, in his scientific proclivities and sheer range of imagination, was vastly more than a counselor of thrift.
The complaints about Protestantism were genuine. To adapt an ugly geological metaphor, the rock of the Lord could be fracked. Once the individual’s relationship to God was brought into the questioning light of daily life, the explanatory impulse came forward. That impulse was always there, as when Job kept probing God about suffering, but Luther and his cohorts brought Jehovah down to earth. Until Protestantism came along, there were saints but there were no preachers in the revelatory sense. The story already had been revealed: the task of the observant was to be heedful. “Preach it,” as an injunction, became a talisman for human endeavors. A crooked but traceable line could be drawn between the ranters of the seventeenth century and the advertising wizards and “experts” of modern times: all trafficked in the testimony of persuasion.
Did the Protestant impulse remove a sense of sacredness? Was the price that individual salvation came to assume too great, one that was essentially untenable and that issued fatally in breakdowns of civilization such as Nazism? The world that Protestantism made possible was workable—well-suited to personal aspiration and seemingly endless commercial refinement—but possessed of severe limitations, not the least of which was the frightful pliability of the ethic of achievement: Arbeit macht frei. In its banishing of intermediaries, Protestantism exposed yet passed over human frailty. Despite the pulpit fulminations, sin and evil seemed to be, beside the whirligig of modernity, decorative and out-of-date, the leavings of superstition. Protestantism streamlined the soul. Meanwhile, the furiously personal testimonies could not answer the calm magic of why anything was here in the first place. Miracle is a word that comes off the tongue easily but contains more light than we have known what to do with.
That last line! May we open to that.
Hi Barron, I was blown away by your essay on Protestantism and it’s affects on life as we know it. I think you got it just right, and so concisely. The only place you lost me was on its connection to the rise of Nazism. True the state church went along with Hitler, but the opposition to the authoritarian state church in the rise of the Consenting Church, one third of the churches, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others who were more in line with Protestants world wide and tried to protect the Jews was a violable force from my readings on that period. Except for that omission I thought it was brilliant and pointed out more than I had realized on the impact of Protestantism. Thank you SO much!!!