Protestant Political Thought Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The Protestant Reformation set in motion a series of largely unintended revolutions, from the sudden transformation of European geopolitics, to the formation of the modern nationstate, as well as the reshaping of families and the ideals of individuality. Martin Luther (1483–1546), a German, and John Calvin (1509–1564), a Frenchman, were the leading figures introducing and spreading Protestant political thought leading to the creation of Protestant churches and Protestant states and societies.

Beginnings Of Protestantism

The first phase of the Protestant Reformation, beginning with Luther’s Ninety-five Theses in 1517, was a widespread Gospeloriented critique of the Catholic Church doctrine and polity, especially regarding salvation. As civil authorities enlisted in this movement, there developed a magisterial Protestantism, which spearheaded the reform of church doctrines and practices but included religion under the guidance of godly rulers. The initial phase of the Reformation created protonational churches, converting normally recurring political struggles into prolonged internecine religious wars. By the end of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), the principle cuius regio, eius religio—“whose realm, his religion”—was established in which state-building and church-building went hand in hand. Essentially, the religion of the ruler dictated the religion of the ruled. The Thirty Years War, primarily fought in modern day Germany, involved the major European powers of the sixteenth century and is considered a war between Protestants and Catholics. The result for political thought was paradoxical: as Protestant political leaders became heads of their respective confessional churches, politics increasingly subsumed sacred duties and purposes as the state undertook the spiritual and ethical elevation of its members. The loss of the sacerdotal, or priestly, authority of the church was mirrored in the increase in the moral and tutelary tasks undertaken by governments.

While this early development of a macro politics of Protestantism from above might seem to confirm an increasing secularization of society and the increasing consolidation and authoritarianism of politics, the power of Protestantism from below in the churches and local communities tells a different story. Replacing priests and masses were intense religious communities bound together by prayer, sermons, and hymns. The micropolitics flowing from a religion of personal conviction—exemplified by Calvinist Geneva—destabilized many regimes, leading to the independence of the Low Countries from Spain and the rapid rise to power of the Netherlands.

The most prominent example of the power of a new religious and social discipline from below, however, occurred in the mid-seventeenth century with the rise of Puritanism and the English Civil War (1642–1651). In both England and the Netherlands, a “revolution of the saints” forged strong links in religious community between personal and familial discipline and republican citizenship. These revolutionary movements, whether intended or not, set the framework for the development of early modern political thought: the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf, Hugo Grotius, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are incomprehensible absent the “disciplinary revolution” of Independency, Calvinism, and pietistic Lutheranism. In addition, colonial New England and the American Revolution (1776–1783) would be even less understood without the context of these movements.

Adapting To Modern Culture

A strong but quite different relationship between Protestantism and political thought was forged in the nineteenth century. Protestantism from below had always had a strong social reform impulse fueled by hopes of millennialism, meaning a paradise on Earth when Christ rules for nearly one thousand years before the anticipated final judgment. Lay-dominated disciplinary consistories in local churches, the formation of orphanages and work houses, the reform of prisons, the establishment of common schools, and reforms in marriage and the family all attested to a Protestant evangelical imperative to fulfill one’s calling and to manifest one’s inward regeneration. Protestantism from above lodged important ethical tasks in the state.

It was the task of German academic theologians, philosophers, and historians in the nineteenth century to incorporate these dual imperatives into a systematic Protestant theology and biblical interpretation studies. F. C. Baur, Albert Ritschl, Adolf Harnack, and, later, Ernst Troeltsch, sought to integrate religious and secular history in a larger narrative of the progressive revelation of God’s spirit. This philosophical history, in which the birth of Protestantism was the signal modern event, tended to make cultural, political, social, and economic life the chief site of God’s contemporary revelation. As God’s kingdom becomes more clearly revealed, the distinctive role of the church and Christian dogma is progressively displaced. Through moral philosophy and social reform, an increasingly noncreedal Protestantism became the vehicle through which Christian ethics would achieve a world-universal status. On this reading of history, this kind of secularization represents the progressive fulfillment of Christian prophecy and not its denial. Georg W. F. Hegel’s philosophy of history stands as the most notable product of this project.

Elsewhere, political philosophers and public moralists quickly adopted these readings of history as a sacred story. In England, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Stuart Mill, Mark Pattison, Benjamin Jowett, and Thomas Hill Green incorporated and reworked these ideas into their own historical-philosophical writings, while theologian F. D. Maurice and clergyperson Charles Kingsley, along with novelists like Humphrey Ward and George Eliot, conveyed these same ethical-historical teachings into the homes and churches of the middle classes.

It was in America, however, where political values and Protestant ethical ideals were most closely bonded. Before the Civil War (1861–1865), an evangelical united front spearheaded a series of national moral and social reform programs, most notably the abolition of slavery. After the Civil War, German-trained political economists and historical sociologists infused the new research universities with reform ideas that quickly became allied with Progressive reformers and intellectuals and with the reform projects of a noncreedal social Christianity. The early John Dewey, Jane Addams, Richard Ely, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Lyman Abbott are representative of this fusion.

The legacy of Protestantism for political thought was less a set of new Christian doctrines and more a series of new and often unintended conditions within which modern political thought—and modern society itself—developed. Since Protestantism was hostile to hierarchic priesthoods and claims of sacerdotal authority by church governments, the authority of individuals, families, and governments was enhanced. The individualism inherent in a religion of personal conviction was increasingly augmented with a belief that gathered congregations, voluntarily constituted by the body of believers and protected in their corporate freedom by the state, represented the true ideal of human association. Finally, a covenantal political theology projected an ideal that all true polities achieve their unity and purpose, in this world and at the end of time, through a common dedication to transcendent ends.

Bibliography:

Berman, Harold J. Law and Revolution, II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformation on the Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Block, James. A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Curtis, Susan. A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Gorski, Philip S. The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation: A History. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
Reventlow, Henning Graf. The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World. Translated by John Bowden. London: SCM Press, 1984.
Troeltsch, Ernst. Protestantism and Progress: The Significance of Protestantism for the Rise of the Modern World. Translated by W. Montgomery. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986.
Walzer, Michael. Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965.
Welch, Claude. Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 1789–1870. Vol 1. New Haven:Yale University Press, 1972.
Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 1870–1914. Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

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