Caleb Anderson: Are we experiencing a second counter-reformation?

A very specific (and often fraught) conflict around the nature of the social order significantly characterized medieval and early modern Europe.  Not alone a conflict between church and state, as for much of the past these were largely one, but by a conflict that had to do with rights and entitlements.

The Magna Carta, signed at Runnymede in 1215, quite radically instantiated the notion, new to most everyone at the time, that the rights of those that governed (King and Pope) ought to be bounded.

Most specifically they would be bounded by  ...

1.  The rights and entitlements of those governed (at that stage the nobility), and

2.  By the notion of property rights.  That property could not simply be taken from one, and given to another, at the whim of King or Pope.

Of course, Magna Carta had implications well beyond these two simple propositions, as time would reveal, including the extension of rights to the common man (and ultimately women, serfs, and slaves), liberty of thought and conscience, and the imperative that penalty could not be imposed (including to person or property) in the absence of due process and just cause.

Similarly, the Reformation, seeded in the fifteenth century by the writings and teachings of John Wycliffe in England and John Huss in Bohemia, endeavored to draw a line in the sand on two related issues ...  as, in a sense, did the enlightenment that followed.

1.  The right of the individual to discern for him or herself what was right

2.  To have access to the information that would make such discernment possible

This included the right to read the scriptures for oneself, rather than through a self-interested priesthood, to arrive at one's own conclusions, and to be personally accountable to God alone (not church or state) for the outcome of one's prognostications.

The reformation principles resonated and spread like wildfire.  

Despite the efforts of Kings and Popes to silence those who bore these messages, Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, Jerome, Calvin, Zwingli, and others would not be silenced.

The Roman Catholic Church responded with a counter-reformation - triggered in 1545-1563 by the Council of Trent   ...  and culminating, for the most part, in the bloody religious wars of 1648.  The Council of Trent aimed to address some of the excesses of the Roman church, but most of its efforts were directed at the elimination, no matter the cost, of  "heresy".  It established new religious orders for the promulgation of Roman orthodoxy (for example the Jesuit order), and emphasized the importance of church traditions and teachings ...  including the necessity of the sacraments for salvation, and the dogma of Papal Supremacy.

It also called for the elimination of Protestantism in all of its forms.

At the end of the nineteenth century, sociologist and political economist Max Weber put his mind to explaining the considerable disparities in wealth, freedom, and quality of life between the Catholic and Protestant countries of the time.  

In 1905 he published a significant work titled "The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", in which he argued that the protestant emphasis on the nobility of work, reward for effort,  personal choice and responsibility, and the opportunity to conjecture freely, had given rise to these disparities.  

Weber's work remains seminal.

It seems to me that the West is currently facing something akin to a second counter-reformation. As with the reformations and counter-reformations of the fifteenth century through to the eighteenth century, the issues at stake are no different.  At the heart of these issues are three primary questions.

1.  Do citizens have a right to make decisions free from coercion of the priesthood of old, or the elites of today?

2.  Do citizens have the right to the information that enables them to do so free from the censorship of the church, or the modern state (or a combination of both)?

3.  Do citizens have the right to the fruits of their labour and thought (good and bad) free from the correcting (and redistributive) hand of the state?

It is undeniable that the Reformation and the Enlightenment have produced a quality of life, and freedom of thought, unheard of in any other age or location.  Ninety-five percent of those who have lived in the last two hundred or so years (not only in the West), have lived better and longer lives than the most privileged five percent of those who have come before.  

In spite of the propaganda, historical revisionism, arrogance, and intransigence, of media, political, academic, and institutional elites, we strongly sense what we have to lose ... we know this intuitively ...  and we know it in the lessons of the past if we can be bothered to look, and in the evasion and double-speak of the present if we are bothered to listen.  

The spirit of freedom is a hard flame to extinguish and the pushback is only now becoming apparent across the West.

John Wycliffe is often referred to as the Morning Star of the Reformation.  In his dying months, he set his mind to translating the Bible into English so that Englishmen could read the scriptures for themselves, to come before their God without a mediating and directing hand, but personally, and to decide for themselves what was right, including whether to believe or not.

It seems to me that the kings, priests, popes (and tribal leaders) of old, have been replaced by others equally determined to tell us what we should do and think, who seek to censor and demean, and who long ago ceased to be interested in what we think and value.  

Perhaps in the diversity, equity, and inclusion ideologies, including the deification of indigenous culture, (all with their inherent cultic and faith-based orientations) we have a sort of church-state union reminiscent of the persecuting powers of earlier ages.

In short, democracy, and the rights and privileges to which this has given rise, have become a tradeable commodity, and to some more an encumbrance than a safeguard.  

Current propensities to dictate what words we may use, what ways we may think, what arguments might be put, what future we might envisage, and what compromises we might make, devoid of conscience and conviction, are a call to be less than human ... to fall profoundly short ...  and perhaps to invite our worst nightmare.

Forty years after his death, Wycliffe's body was dug up, his remains were burned and his ashes were thrown into the river Swift.  

Thomas Fuller wrote of this as follows in The Church History of Britain, published in 1655:

They burnt his bones to ashes and cast them into Swift, a neighboring brook running hardby. Thus this brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean.   And thus the ashes of Wicliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed the world over.

Maybe the ashes of Wycliffe, typifying countless others, unfolding over centuries past, may also be the inextinguishable emblem (or flame) of the doctrine of this age, whatever we (freely and democratically) agree that doctrine to be.

And what might we agree that doctrine to be?  

Perhaps, as with our reformation and enlightenment forefathers, it might be that most fundamental doctrine of all  ...  the right to think.

Is this where we might put a stake in the ground? 

One can only hope!

Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.