Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie

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СКАЧАТЬ It is a history of Protestants, who see themselves as God’s chosen people. There are towering thinkers like Martin Luther, the stubborn monk whose own overwhelming encounter with God began it all, and John Calvin, the brilliant and arrogant Frenchman who came tantalizingly close to forging a single, united Protestantism. There are outsiders like the self-taught Vermont preacher William Miller, whose apocalyptic hopes swept across 1840s America, and Choe Ja-Sil, the destitute Korean nurse who co-founded a tent church that became, by the time of her death in 1989, the world’s largest congregation. There are noblemen like Justinian von Welz and Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, whose conversions drove them from their German estates to cross the world spreading their subversive religion. There are women like Rebecca Freundlich Protten, one of the first ordained Protestant women, who risked re-enslavement rather than compromise her faith, and Pandita Ramabai, the Indian widow whose campaign for women’s rights was underpinned by her Pentecostal revivalism. There are heroes with clay feet, like Martin Niemöller and Johan Heyns, who only slowly and painfully realized that their faith could not square with Nazism or apartheid; and reactionaries, like Walter Grundmann and Gustav Gerdener, whose faith seemed to find its fullest expression in those doctrines.

      The book falls into three parts. Part 1 takes the story from the great crisis of the Reformation through to the eighteenth century, when it finally became clear that Protestantism would not only survive but spread around the world. The story begins in chapter 1 with Martin Luther’s attempt to work out the implications of his own personal spiritual crisis. What began as a decorous academic dispute quickly turned into a scandal, then a political crisis, and, within less than a decade, the largest mass rebellion Europe had ever seen. Chapter 2 asks how the fragmented, antagonistic reforming movements that emerged from this chaos tried to carve out space in which they could live. Some worked with the 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 СКАЧАТЬ