The Reformation

Today's New York Times included an interesting review by John Keane of what sounds like an equally interesting book, "The Reformation" by Patrick Collinson.  Both the review and (it appears) the book challenge some of the all-too-common myths about the Reformation, including -- for example -- the idea that the Protestant Reformers, unlike their Catholic targets, were invariably suspicious of orthodoxies and committed to toleration-in-principle. 

Then, after noting that the leading reformers could be, like their opponents, "fanatical", Keane suggests that "the revolutionary events of the 16th century [were] doubly ironic" in that, "[i]n the name of shoring up the old order, the Reformation laid the foundations of modern liberty."  He continues:

The Reformation also brought us traditions of civil liberty. In the struggles that clawed at the heart of Christian Europe, the faithful on both sides at first clung to the canon that the ruler determines the religion of his state. In this way friends and enemies of the Reformation helped to discredit political abuses of religion. They saw that religion and despotism might hold hands, that faith and force could be confused. Hence, religious dissenters like George Buchanan (tutor to King James I of England) and John Milton (a great champion of liberty of the press) promoted the project of limiting state power. They spotted the importance of nurturing nongovernmental spaces -- families, schools, congregations -- protected by laws. From the time of the American Revolution, those spaces were called civil society -- a religious, not a secular, invention designed to promote toleration of different faiths and to check governments bent on orthodoxy.

Here, unfortunately, it sounds like Keane and Collinson are as vulnerable to myth as those whose myths they deflate.  It is simply not the case that it took the Reformation to alert Christians and others to the importance of "nongovernmental spaces . . . protected by law."  Indeed, although contemporary writers often assume that, before the Reformation, the "State" and the "Church" were united, in fact, it was (almost) always the Church that articulated forcefully and often arguments that limited the rights and competence of political authority.  In a way, it was for a millenium the task and achievement of the Church precisely to "protect[]" the "nongovernmental spaces" that Keane (rightly) sees as essential to the development and safety of civil liberties.

Rick