Reading in progress: Introduction to Unintended Reformation by Brad S. Gregory

Unintended Revolution with a Fidgetland Noah fidget on top of the book to keep the cover down

As I grapple with history, I feel the need to get a broader perspective. I am returning to a book I read a few years ago to help myself with this broader perspective. The book is Brad S. Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. I originally read this book because it was recommended by Michael Sean Winters, a nuanced thinker. I borrowed it from a library when I first read it but decided to buy it to read it again. What I love most about this book is its goal of exploring and understanding what happened, and not merely to push answers.

I don’t normally blog my way through books, but Unintended Reformation is a challenging book. History is always challenging to me because of the names, places, dates, and ideas from other times. Gregory is exciting to read, but his average sentence length is high, and his prose is full of complex sentences. Many of topic sentences of paragraphs are long, complex sentences. As I read, I’m underlining key ideas in passages, making marginal notes either about the content or about related things that I think of. He also has that historian’s quirk of referring back to something he wrote previously. On page 20, he refers back to a Nietzsche quote on page 4. As I blog, I’m not going to summarize Gregory’s points so much as synthesize my own understanding.

Understanding how historians work

Since this work is different from a lot of other history, Gregory’s comments are useful to me. He mentions the “reconstructive exhaustiveness” (3) as a characteristic of historical writing. This is definitely familiar to me from reading Cities of God by Thompson and Afro-Atlantic Catholics by Dewulf. Gregory lists two divisions in history, that of lumpers and splitters and that of parachutists and truffle hunters (14). Lumpers/ splitters refers to those who generalize similarities and those who prefer preciseness. Parachutists/ truffle hunters refers to a quote from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who said that “All historians are either truffle hunters, their noses buried in the details, or parachutists, hanging high in the air and looking for general patterns in the countryside far below them.” With regard to these two divisions, Gregory does not find either one to be sufficient for his study.

Supersessionist history

Supersessionist history is a big part of Gregory’s introduction. He says that “Long-term, wide-ranging, synthetic narratives that are attempted tend to presuppose a supersessionist model of historical change. That is, the distant past is assumed to have been left behind, explanatorily important to what immediately succeeded it but not to the present” (9). As a religious reader, I was immediately aware that the term ‘supersessionist’ has a deep context. Supersessionism is a religious concept, which means that one thing replaces another. It has been used to refer to Christianity replacing Judaism and to Protestantism replacing Catholicism (theologically, there are degrees of supersessionism: hard and soft, with the hard versions being intolerant of Jewish existence). In English, the term dates to the 1650s, the contentious time that Gregory is looking at. Gregory argues that the modern world came from the problems and tensions of the medieval and renaissance world, and that by understanding these better we can better understand our own times. A supersessionist history regards modernity as having sprung into being like Venus from the sea.

Three books which inspired Unintended Reformation

1. The Passions and the Interests (1977) by economist Albert Hirschman

2. After Virtue (1981) by moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre

3. Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (1986) by historian of science Amos Funkenstein.

Of the three, I’ve read After Virtue. The other two look super interesting and well worth adding to my reading backlog.

Three concerns which led Gregory to write the book

Unintended Reformation lists three reasons for tackling this study:

1. growing polarization in the United States leading to political instability

2. global climate change due to unrestrained acquisitiveness

3. “the blithe and incoherent denial of the category of truth in the domains of human morality, values, and meaning among many academics” (18). This last is important because most people would like to affirm that “It is true that genocide and rape are wrong for everyone” (19).

The overall argument

Gregory argues that the Reformation was an attempt to solve a problem with late medieval Catholicism, but that these solutions caused other problems, and that solutions to these problems led to other problems. He lists three sets of problems:

1. The first problem is that “Late medieval Christianity was an institutionalized worldview, but one long and deeply marked by the gulf between the faith’s own prescriptions and many Christians’ actual practices, between its ideals and its realities” (21, emphasis mine). As an aside, this is the problem that Luigi Giussani still saw in 1950s Italy.
   The solution to this problem was the Reformation’s principle of “scripture alone.”

2. The second problem was how to determine which Christianity was true, with endless debates over countless doctrines.
   This was not resolved directly except by political fiat: Catholic countries, Lutheran countries, etc., but which put countries in control of religions (23).
   In the modern age, countries have privatized religion, but continue to regulate religions (23).

3. The third problem was how to keep the peace among people with radically different understanding of life and truth?

Chapters are as follows:

1. Excluding God

2. Relativizing Doctrines

3. Controlling the Churches

4. Subjectivizing Morality

5. Secularizing Knowledge

Conclusion: Against Nostalgia