How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (46 page)

Hence, local political autonomy played an important role in the success of Luther’s Reformation. But so did autocracy. Aside from the cities, many larger political units ruled by strong princes or kings turned Protestant too.

Royal Self-Interest

We come now to an apparent contradiction about the spread of Luther’s Reformation. In most of Europe, the decision to embrace Lutheranism or to remain steadfastly within the Catholic Church was made by an autocratic ruler—a king or a prince. Nearly without exception the autocrats opted for Lutheranism in places where the Catholic Church had the
greatest
local power and chose to remain Catholic in places where the Church was extremely weak. To see why things turned out this way, it will be useful to contrast France and Spain, on one hand, with Denmark and Sweden.

Beginning in 1296, when King Philip of France successfully imposed a tax on church income, papal authority steadily eroded in France. In 1516 the subordination of the Church to the French monarchy was formalized in the Concordat of Bologna, signed by Pope Leo X and King Francis I. The concordat acknowledged the king’s right to appoint all higher church posts in France: ten archbishops, eighty-two bishops, and every prior, abbot, and abbess of all the many hundreds of monasteries, abbeys, and convents. This gave the king full control of all church property and income. As the esteemed historian Owen Chadwick noted, “When he [King Francis] wanted ecclesiastical money, his methods need not even be devious.”
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His appointees simply delivered.

If anything, the Spanish crown had even greater power over the Church. It had long held the right to nominate archbishops and bishops, to fine the clergy, and to receive a substantial share of the tithes. Then, in 1486, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella gained the right to make all major ecclesiastical appointments, to prohibit appeals from Spanish courts to Rome, to impose taxes on the clergy, and to make it illegal to publish papal bulls and decrees in Spain or its possessions without prior royal consent.
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Of course, as Spain became the center of the Holy Roman Empire, these policies were extended to many portions of Italy and to Portugal, the Netherlands, Austria, and southeastern Germany.

In contrast, in Denmark in 1500 the Church owned from a third to half of all tillable land and required all laypeople (including the nobility) to pay tithes. None of this income was shared with the crown, and much of it went directly to Rome. The pope also had sole authority to make ecclesiastical appointments in Denmark. Thus, when Christian III became king of Denmark in 1534, he seized an immense opportunity
by declaring for Lutheranism and confiscating all church properties and income in his realm.
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Meanwhile, Sweden had successfully rebelled against Danish rule and crowned King Gustavus I in 1528. The new king was desperate for funds, and here, too, the Church possessed unchallenged authority and immense wealth. So Gustavus opted for Protestantism and confiscated all church possessions and income.
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To gain support among the nobles, Gustavus sold them appropriated church property at bargain prices. Even so, the church possessions he kept increased the crown’s lands fourfold.
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The same principle of self-interest accounts for the decisions of other rulers. German princes with much to gain from becoming Lutheran did so; others, such as prince bishops who already possessed control of church offices and income, remained Catholic. And did any king gain more from stripping the Church of its wealth and power than did England’s Henry VIII? Consider that from the shrine dedicated to Saint Thomas à Becket alone, Henry’s agents confiscated 4,994 ounces of gold, 4,425 ounces of silver gilt, 5,286 ounces of silver, and twenty-six cartloads of other treasure—and this was regarded as a trivial portion of the wealth confiscated from the Church.
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In many instances, too, it was very much in the self-interest of the urban bourgeoisie for local church property to be confiscated and church authority curtailed. The Church’s extensive holdings in the Free Imperial Cities—about a third of all property in most cities—went
untaxed
. Adding to the burden were the clergy and members of religious orders, who made up as much as 10 percent of a city’s population; these members of the Church were exempt from all taxes (including tithes to the Church) and all duties of citizenship (such as taking their turn as sentries on the walls, as all able-bodied nonclerical males were required to do). So the cities, too, had much to gain by expelling the Church. As the twentieth-century British Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc summed up, the Reformation benefited immensely from “the chance presented to territorial lords, large and small, from kings down to squires, of looting Church property.”
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It is all well and good to note the widespread appeal of the doctrine that we are saved by faith alone, but it also must be recognized that Protestantism prevailed only where the local rulers or councils had not already imposed their rule over the Church. Pocketbook issues prevailed.

Consequences of the Reformation

An amazing number of consequences have been traced to the Lutheran Reformation—some of them immediate, some of them occurring far later; some of them plausible, some of them as nutty as the claim that Hitler was Luther’s direct heir.
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(Granted that Luther was a bitter anti-Semite, but so were many others in that era, including leading Catholics,
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and Hitler was a quite militant atheist.)

The Revival of Mass Piety?

The most widely accepted belief about the Lutheran Reformation is that it touched the hearts and souls of the German masses to such an extent that it resulted in a huge revival of popular piety. As Lawrence Stone put it, the combination of Luther and the printing press “made the Bible available to the unsophisticated.… The result was the most massive missionary drive in history, a combined assault on indifference, cynicism, paganism, and ignorance … [making] the sixteenth century the era of the rise of Christian Europe.” Stone then explained that the Reformation “achieved such immediate success” because it was able “to harness the powerful feelings of separatism and nationalism.”
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But it wasn’t so. Eventually even Martin Luther admitted that neither the tidal wave of publications nor all the Lutheran preachers in Germany had made the slightest dent in the ignorance, irreverence, and alienation of the masses. Luther complained in 1529, “Dear God, help us! … The common man, especially in the villages, knows absolutely nothing about Christian doctrine; and indeed many pastors are in effect unfit and incompetent to teach. Yet they all are called Christians, are baptized, and enjoy the holy sacraments—even though they cannot recite either the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed or the Commandments. They live just like animals.”
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Luther’s despair was not merely due to his having unrealistic expectations. Rather, Luther and his colleagues were properly distressed on the basis of carefully collected evidence. Beginning in 1525 and continuing until after Luther’s death in 1546, official visitors made systematic observations of local churches, interviewing Christians and writing up their evaluations in formal reports. The distinguished American historian Gerald Strauss extracted these reports, noting, “I have selected only such instances as could be multiplied a hundredfold.”
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Here is a sampling of the reports Strauss published.

In Saxony: “You’ll find more of them out fishing than at service.… Those who do come walk out as soon as the pastor begins his sermon.” In Seegrehna: “A pastor testified that he often quits his church without preaching … because not a soul has turned up to hear him.” In Barum: “It is the greatest and most widespread complaint of all pastors here-abouts that people do not go to church on Sundays.… Nothing helps; they will not come … so that pastors face near-empty churches.” In Braunschweig-Grubenhagen: “Many churches are empty on Sundays.” In Weilburg: “Absenteeism from church on Sundays was so widespread that the synod debated whether the city gates should be barred on Sunday mornings to lock everyone inside. Evidence from elsewhere suggests that this expedient would not have helped.”

Nevertheless, it is not clear that having a large turnout at Sunday services would have been desirable. In Nassau: “Those who come to service are usually drunk … and sleep through the whole sermon, except sometimes they fall off the benches, making a great clatter, or women drop their babies on the floor.” In Wiesbaden: “[During church] there is such snoring that I could not believe my ears when I heard it. The moment these people sit down, they put their heads on their arms and straight away they go to sleep.” In Hamburg: “[People make] indecent gestures at members of the congregation who wish to join in singing the hymns, even bringing dogs to church so that due to the loud barking the service is disturbed.” In Leipzig: “They play cards while the pastor preaches, and often mock or mimic him cruelly to his face; … cursing and blaspheming, hooliganism, and fighting are common.… They enter church when the service is half over, go at once to sleep, and run out again before the blessing is given.… Nobody joins in singing the hymn; it made my heart ache to hear the pastor and the sexton singing all by themselves.”

It is hardly surprising, then, that most Germans were ignorant of basic Christian teachings. In Saxony: “In some villages one could not find a single person who knew the Ten Commandments.” In Brandenburg: “A random group of men was … asked how they understood each of the Ten Commandments, but we found many who could give no answer at all.… None of them thought it a sin to get dead drunk and curse using the name of God.” In Notenstein: “[Parishioners], including church elders, could remember none of the Ten Commandments.” In Salzliebenhalle: “[No one knows] who their redeemer and savior is.” In Nuremberg: Many could not name Good Friday as the day of the year
when Jesus died. And the pastor at Graim summed up: “Since they never go to church, most of them cannot even say their prayers.”

So much for claims that the Lutheran Reformation produced a revival among the general population.

Religious Freedom

So much, too, for the notion that the rise of Protestantism resulted in a new climate of religious freedom. Recall the measure Kim and Pfaff used to identify cities and towns that accepted the Reformation—the date when they outlawed saying the Catholic Mass. Luther’s Reformation had nothing to do with religious freedom of choice; what took place was a switch from one monopoly church to another. Similarly, Henry VIII burned, beheaded, and hanged all sorts of dissenters from his newly imposed Anglican Church, including many Lutherans, and the English began a long era of searching out and executing priests. But nothing so testified to the religious intolerance of Europe as the series of brutal and bloody wars of religion.

First came the German Peasants’ War, stirred up by Lutheran radicals in 1524. The war lasted a year and cost about one hundred thousand lives by the time it was suppressed. Then came the Schmalkaldic Wars, during which Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, tried to reimpose Catholicism all across Germany, arousing the opposition of a group of princes who had adopted Lutheranism. The war was settled in 1555 by the Peace of Augsburg, which recognized Protestant principalities. This peace soon broke down, and the Thirty Years’ War began in 1618. By war’s end in 1648, Germany had been devastated—a third of the towns were wiped out, along with about a third of the population. But in the end, Protestant areas survived. In the Low Countries, the war to restore Catholicism lasted for eighty years, but the Dutch Protestants outlasted the Spanish (as seen in chapter 12). And, of course, religion was a central aspect of the English Revolution. Nor did peace bring much more than grudging toleration. For the most part, Catholics were unwelcome in Protestant areas and vice versa.

Nor is this a thing of the distant past. Recently, Brian Grim and Roger Finke created quantitative measures of government interference in religious life.
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They based their coding on the highly respected annual
International Religious Freedom Report
produced by the U.S. Department of State. One of Grim and Finke’s measures is the Government Favoritism
Index, which is based on “subsidies, privileges, support, or favorable sanctions provided by the state to a select religion or a small group of religions.” This index varies from 0.0 (no favoritism) to 10.0 (extreme favoritism). The United States and Taiwan score 0.0, and Saudi Arabia and Iran each score 9.3. And while Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates score 7.8, so too do Iceland, Spain, and Greece. Belgium scores 7.5, slightly higher than Bangladesh’s 7.3 and India’s 7.0. Morocco scores 6.3, while Denmark scores 6.7, Finland, 6.5, Austria 6.2, Switzerland 5.8, France 5.5, Italy, 5.3, and Norway, 5.2. Of course, these high scores reflect favoritism toward Protestantism (often the official state church) in northern Europe and toward Catholicism in southern Europe. Thus does the long tradition of religious inequality and intolerance survive!

Puritan “Achievements”

The most significant consequences claimed for the Reformations involve effects that supposedly arose when Puritan forms of Protestantism emerged. Perhaps the most widely circulated of these is that the Puritans initiated an era of extreme sexual repression that has lived on to disfigure modern life. As Bertrand Russell put it, Puritanism consisted of the “determination to avoid the pleasures of sex.”
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It turns out that this is a malicious myth: the Puritans were very frank and enlightened about sex!
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