Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie
grain of existing power structures, while others openly defied them; all shared the deeply subversive assumption that Christ’s kingdom was separate from and superior to human hierarchies of any kind. Chapter 3 looks at the most promising attempt at something Protestants have always longed for, namely reunion. Calvinism’s failure to achieve this dream ended up proving that it was not only impossible but positively damaging.
Chapter 4 turns to one of the first consequences of the Protestant upheaval: more than a century of brutal religious violence, as a result of which, slowly and reluctantly, some Protestants began to harbour notions of tolerance. Chapter 5 stops for a more detailed look at one particularly significant example of that process: the English Civil War of 1642–46 and its aftermath, the most fertile nursery of new Protestant sects and ideas since Luther’s day. Chapter 6 considers one vital consequence of violence: mass migration. Protestantism was profoundly shaped by the experience of exile, for good and for ill. In this first age of globalization, Protestants scattered not only across Europe but across the world, especially, fatefully, to North America. Here they tried and failed to build model societies, while initially making astonishingly little effort to convert non-Christian peoples.
In part 2, we see how Protestantism in Europe and North America recovered from its late seventeenth-century nadir only to face new crises in the modern world. Chapter 7 describes how, around the turn of the eighteenth century, Protestants rediscovered some of their old sources of spiritual strength and began a wave of global expansion that has scarcely paused since. This quickly led them into confronting the defining spiritual and political crisis of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Atlantic slavery. Chapter 8 looks at how slavery was defended and opposed by Protestants with equal vigour on both sides of the ocean. The slow but decisive shift to a Protestant consensus that slavery is intolerable would have lasting effects. Chapter 9 looks at another aspect of the early United States: the third great explosion of sectarian creativity in Protestant history, giving rise to a kaleidoscope of utopian, apocalyptic, antihierarchical, and Spirit-led movements, some of which continue to shape modern Protestantism to this day. Chapter 10 turns to a very different feature of nineteenth-century Protestantism, namely theological liberalism, a bold attempt to outflank the emerging secularist challenge. It was, if anything, too successful, and ended up being deeply implicated on all sides in the First World War.
Chapter 11 takes up the role of Protestants in the rise of and resistance to Nazism in Germany, where old Protestant orthodoxies and new liberal ideals combined to smooth the path to genocide. Chapter 12 follows that story to the present in Protestantism’s old heartland, arguing that the rise of secularism in Europe and in parts of the United States reflects many denominations’ inability to find a distinctive voice after the immense moral shock of the Second World War. The real novelty of our own time is not the prominence of the religious Right but the silence of the religious Left.
In part 3, the book’s final chapters look at what has now become a global story. Chapter 13 traces the longest and bitterest of Protestantism’s African adventures: South Africa, where an indigenous African Protestantism took root quickly but ran up against a settler population that justified white supremacy in explicitly Protestant terms. Protestantism was crucial both to apartheid’s beginnings and to its end. Chapter 14 turns to modern Protestantism’s strangest success story, Korea, where colonial and cultural politics combined to give Protestants an opening unparalleled in Asia. The other great Asian story, that of China, examined in chapter 15, is very different; here a long-standing missionary effort bore relatively little fruit, but the pressures of Communist rule have now given China the world’s fastest-growing Protestant population. Finally, chapter 16 looks at the greatest revolution in modern Protestantism: Pentecostalism, a global phenomenon from its inception, which for over a century has been quietly putting down roots in the United States, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere and now has a fair claim to be the modern world’s most dynamic religious movement. Its persistent avoidance of politics has allowed it to deflect attention, but that may turn out to be its most subversive feature of all. The epilogue asks, in the light of this story, where Protestantism might be going next: for it may be that its history is still only beginning.
Protestantism has affected every sphere of human life. I have focused on its political effects, especially how it has eaten away at established orthodoxies and distinctions of race, nation, and gender, sometimes despite itself. I have not paid much attention to its role in driving economic change or in fostering modern science, though we will touch on both subjects. I have said virtually nothing about the arts. It would take a whole chapter to do justice to Johann Sebastian Bach; here he gets a single sentence. If you finish this book impatient to know about the parts of the story I have skated over or left out, I will feel I have succeeded.
It will already be obvious that I am using the word “Protestant” broadly. There are narrow definitions, restricting it, for example, to Lutheran and Calvinist Christians and their immediate descendants. One of the things Protestants like to fight over is who does and does not count as a proper Protestant. As a historian, I prefer a genealogical definition: Protestants are Christians whose religion derives ultimately from Martin Luther’s rebellion against the Catholic Church. They are a tree with many tangled branches but a single trunk. So in this book “Protestant” includes those who are often shut out of the party, such as Anabaptists, Quakers, Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Pentecostals. These groups have radically different beliefs, but they share a family resemblance. They are as quarrelsome and fervent as any other Protestant, and that first spark, the life-changing encounter between the individual believer and the grace of God, is visible in all of them.
One definition does need a little more attention: the one on which Erasmus focused. As a much-quoted seventeenth-century Englishman put it, “The BIBLE, I say, The BIBLE only is the Religion of Protestants!”5 It is a truism that the Bible, the ancient library of Jewish and early Christian texts that Christians regard as Scripture, is close to Protestantism’s heart. It is also clear that one of the things Protestants love to fight over is what the Bible is and means. To understand those battles, we need to ask just what Protestants’ relationship with the Bible is – as a matter of historical practice, not of theological principle.
Some Protestants insist that Protestantism is “Bible Christianity”, a religion that takes the whole, inspired Bible as the only and final authoritative source of truth. This view makes Protestantism’s history of division easy enough to understand; these are simply arguments about the interpretation of a complex text. But the claim that Protestantism is mere Bible Christianity does not stand up. For one thing, there is that love affair. What Protestants share is an experience of God’s grace rather than a doctrine of authority. Martin Luther had his life upended by God’s grace before he decided that he could not be bound by any authority outside Scripture. Indeed, many Protestants have not treated the Bible as their sole authority. Some have found authority elsewhere, through (as they believed) the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Others have questioned whether and in what sense the whole text as we have it is authoritative at all.
Even those who do use the whole Bible as their sole authority do so in two different ways. They are Erasmus’s lovers and fighters. The Bible has from the beginning been Protestants’ weapon for defending their beliefs and dismissing their opponents’, citing chapter and verse to prove the point. This works best if you believe in the word-for-word authority of the entire text, and the earliest Protestants were as