The Reformation lives
by Diarmaid MacCulloch
[ opinion - october 04 ]
Why should anyone apart from scholars pay any attention to Europe's 16th-century Reformation? While I was writing a very large book on the Reformation, one of my purposes was to show readers that this series of ancient upheavals lived on into the present, not least because it was tangled up with the founding of colonies in north America, the nucleus of the United States. The thoughts and struggles of Martin Luther, a German monk seized by a longing to tell the Christian story in an older and purer form than he found in the Church of his day, are still shaping world events - and if those involved do not understand that, then disaster may follow.
Admittedly, the 16th century can seem very strange to us. Sixteenth century Europeans burned one another for denying that bread could become God. But if we forget or misread the past, it will often catch up with us in unexpected ways and places. Reformation Europe manages to be alarmingly similar to many swathes of the world at the present day, and no more so than in the re-emergence of a very old idea. Historians have come to realise that in 16th-century Europe, a very large proportion of otherwise apparently sane Catholics and Protestants were convinced that the Last Days were about to arrive: God was about to judge the world and bring an end to everyday society. Already he was sending plenty of signs: the Pope's power was destroyed through much of Europe, monasteries were being sacked, and above all the Islamic armies of the Ottoman Empire were remorselessly advancing westwards, wrecking Christian powers like the Kingdom of Hungary, an ancient and cultured European monarchy which was simply annihilated by the Turks over less than two decades. That is one of the reasons why the Reformation was such an urgent, bloody affair, because those involved had to get things right with God before he came on his final tour of inspection in the Last Days.
The imminence of the Last Days seemed to make sense during the Reformation - only it did not happen, despite continual ingenious recalculations of all the biblical data. Now once more, the varied tribulations of the world have convinced countless Christians that this time it is for real. The belief is common in Africa and Asia, but it has especial significance in the United States. The Last Days theme is infinitely malleable, and in its present American form it has a new aspect which did not figure in Reformation discussion: a nineteenth-century American Protestant preacher invented a particular sub-theme, the 'Rapture' of the saved before God's final tribulation, which is based on a strained interpretation of one of Paul's epistles to the Thessalonians. The success of the ‘Rapture' notion can be gauged by the publishing phenomenon of the 12 ‘Left Behind' novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins: well past 62 million copies now. Those sort of sales begin to rival those of the Book of Revelation and the Epistle to the Thessalonians which inspired the fiction.
Why is this so important? The Last Days theme, which LaHaye and Jenkins have made central to a certain sort of American popular culture, has also become a major motor in the contemporary foreign policy of the United States. Just as in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, the American Christian Right holds a strong belief that we need to sort out the world before the Last Days arrive. That suits the ethos of the United States, which ever since the days of Woodrow Wilson has spent much of its energy trying to sort out the rest of the world, but it has one particular and troubling consequence. One aspect of the Last Days ideology is that the end-time cannot happen before God's ancient people the Jews are converted to the full understanding of the Christian message. Hence the powerful link-up between the American Right and the State of Israel: conservative American Protestantism (abandoning traditional anti-Semitism) seeks an intimate relationship with the Jewish people, and has furthered this by steadfast support for the aims of the Israeli government. The State of Israel must be given every support that it needs, regardless of what others might see as long-term consequences. This ideology which in its basic framework would have been familiar to Martin Luther makes it very difficult for countless Americans to hear the case put by the people of Palestine, many of whom, ironically, are fellow-Christians. And there are those in the White House who hear the message of the Last Days - or at least, who see how useful it might be in winning elections.
This is by no means the only reason that the United States has become such a staunch ally of a state which many others see as pursuing a self-destructive course - but it is a factor which simply could not operate in the politics of a European country. Talking religion is a vote-loser in Europe, except in certain peculiar timewarps such as Northern Ireland. Both the United States and Europe are products of the Enlightenment as well as of the Reformation, but there is now a huge contrast in culture. Many people sailed to north America just to escape the misery and intolerance of Reformation Europe. But now their descendants in the United States still go to church, when their descendants in Europe have ceased to do so. The cultural divide has become vast, and has only intensified over the last three decades; it is one of the greatest puzzles in the modern history of religion. It lies at the heart of why Europe and America now find it so difficult to understand each other, and why so many Europeans are baffled and angered by what their traditional ally and friend across the Atlantic is doing.
For me, as a European, teaching in one of Europe's great universities, it is crucial to see just how different the United States now is from the sort of world in which I live in the United Kingdom, or in which the French, the Germans, the Scandinavians live. Donald Rumsfeld talked darkly of ‘old Europe'. If he had wanted to find the real old Europe, he should have looked to the mid-West of the United States. There the Reformation lives. If we begin to understand that, we will see why Europeans find it hugely difficult to understand what is going on in American politics, and why our two cultures are now so dangerously far apart. Perhaps the United Kingdom, whose English, Scots and Ulster Protestantism of the Reformation was the fountain-head of so much of American culture and identity, may prove to be the vital intermediary between two worlds. There is no doubt that someone needs to take up this task, before in our mutual misunderstanding and growing ill-will, we all bring on our own version of the Last Days.
