A Response to Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation

Abstract

A Response to Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation Alexandra Walsham (bio) Brad Gregory has written a brave and provocative book that is destined to stimulate debate for decades to come. Sweeping in scale and striking in its erudition, The Unintended Reformation is a longitudinal study of how the past has shaped the present. It is an absorbing and sophisticated investigation of the complex historical legacies of the religious revolution inaugurated by the Protestant reformers in 16th-century Europe. It centers on the paradox that a movement that was designed to renew and purify religious truth and to intensify spirituality had the unforeseen consequence of creating the increasingly secular societies in which we live today. In tracing the process by which religious faith and theology have gradually been marginalized from public life over the course of the last five centuries, it provides a fresh perspective on the enduringly relevant question of the origins of modernity, albeit one self-consciously indebted to previous work by the economist Albert Hirschman, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, and the historian of science Amos Funkenstein.1 Breaking out of conventional molds, The Unintended Reformation is a hybrid work of history, philosophy, and contemporary moral and political commentary. In tackling this topic Gregory has two underlying agendas. One is a determination to discredit what he calls "supersessionist" models of historical change: models predicated upon teleology and upon the assumption that the steady displacement of "medieval" by "modern" ideas, practices, and structures is a wholly positive development. He conceives of his book as an answer to calls for a history of the Reformation with the notion of "progress" left out (366) and as a counterpoint to triumphalist post-Enlightenment narratives that celebrate the emancipation of Western society from the grip of "ignorance" and "superstition" and approvingly chart the rise of liberal democracy. They tell a story Click for larger view View full resolution Hans Holbeins, The Preacher (1547). From George Edward Woodberry, A History of Wood-Engraving (New York, 1883). of incremental Weberian disenchantment and of the inexorable growth of post-Darwinian atheism. Following in the footsteps of Herbert Butterfield and others, Gregory recognizes the roots of this whiggish historical vision in the very eras under his examination and regards its tenacity as a reflection of its success as a form of "ideological imperialism" (386).2 Against the sense of inevitability that underpins such accounts, he is at pains to draw our attention to a set of more interesting long-term trajectories: the tangled "web of rejections, retentions and transformations" by which a traditional Christian culture was slowly transfigured into something quite different, and by which the efforts of Luther, Calvin, and their disciples to recapture the spirit of primitive Christianity and build a new Jerusalem led, inadvertently, to the emergence of a world in which God has, to a greater or lesser extent, become an irrelevance— a world that the reformers themselves would have abominated. Expanding a theme of his first book, Salvation at Stake, Gregory's second agenda is a robust critique of what he regards as reductionist theories of religion derived from the social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology, and of postmodern social and cultural constructionism.3 The Unintended Reformation is a sharply edged rejection of interpretive tendencies that, implicitly if not explicitly, refuse to accept the reality of belief in absolute truths in the past and reduce them to mere symbols, categories, "languages," and "discourses." It repudiates such approaches as insufficient to the task of understanding and capturing historical realities. Indeed, it denounces them as evidence of a secular bias that is no less "confessional" than that which marks histories written by committed believers themselves.4 For Gregory, the intellectual trends that now dominate the academy are extensions of the very same processes that his book seeks to explain and illuminate. They are no less historically contingent and arbitrary than the faith convictions that secular academics denounce as inimical to the writing of "sound" history. Gregory's analysis here is incisive and penetrating, and it is certainly true that postmodernism has not been free of internal inconsistency. It has encouraged us to acknowledge the rationality of past belief systems, but it has not always...