I'll have to blog very quickly and briefly, continuing the Catholic-Protestant mix-up that Rick and I have started.
On my point that, apart from whether Protestantism was a good development, the mere fact of the Reformation ushered in fundamental disagreement: Rick is right that there was dissent before then, but surely the Reformation level of disagreement -- the size, power, and determination of both sides -- marked a fundamental break in Western Europe. The continent had to deal with pluralism of a nature and degree it never had before. Many things stemmed from that, including tyranny in some places (including in England directed at Catholics). But the effects also included a proto-federalism (as in the "whose the rule, his the religion" solution of 1555) and eventually, as it became clear that dissenters were still around in each place, rights of individual conscience. To treat England under Elizabeth and James as the epitome of Protestant arrangements is to pick out the worst case -- the most Erastian (state ruling church) variation -- and overlook what developed later out of Protestantism in England, America, and elsewhere. And by Murray's own account, the degree of religious diversity in (Reformation-influenced) America was at a new level and called for a further limiting of state power.
Second, I acknowledge the important contribution made by the medieval fight for the "freedom of the church" that Murray and others have described. But I think it would be way too easy to say that this was the determinative battle for institutional pluralism and freedom, and pass over the difficulties that the Church had over the next 700 years in acknowledging a similar freedom for any non-civil institution besides itself. We can contextualize the Syllabus of Errors, "error has no rights," and the defenses of monarchy as against democracy --and it's important to do that contextualization -- but even after that's done, I think there remains an undeniable, irreducible sense in which the Church was formally negative for a long time about freedom for institutions other than itself, and sought arrangements in which (to oversimplify) there were not multiple sources of authority, meaning, and power in society, but two sources, civil authorities and the Church. America was quite different, but largely because the American Catholic Church contextualized the Syllabus and those other things practically out of existence.
And for all of America's plank in its own eye with respect to Catholic freedom, it was in early America -- with a largely Protestant rather than Catholic influence at that point -- that the model of a full array of non-state social institutions, with varying religious and non-religious bases, really took shape. Protestantism was not, and is not, incompatible with a thick civil society, as various writers such as the Dutch "sphere sovereignty" Calvinists show. (My comment that Protestantism led directly to all the problems of "unmitigated individualism" was meant as partly tongue in cheek.)
Let me emphasize that I think (and have written) that there's been loads of Protestant triumphalism over the centuries, claiming that Catholicism stood for nothing but ignorance and persecution, and that Protestantism's emphasis on the individual is the key to freedom of all kinds. These claims have been both wrong and dangerous. But recognizing that fact should make one all the less inclined to substitute a Catholic triumphalism, under which the Church's fight for its freedom solved the basic problem, and after that the Protestants messed everything up by enthroning the individual. (I'm not at all saying that Rick goes there; I'm just saying let's be wary about moving in that direction.)
Tom
