I don’t know Ross Douthat, but he seems to have a gift for pulling my chain. His latest provocation was a column in yesterday’s NYT in which he attributes anomie and totalitarianism to the peace of exhaustion and the strengthening of the state which followed the Reformation.
Here are my comments:
- Thomas Cromwell was a committed Protestant, not a secular figure who worshiped the state. His ultimate political failure came when he got too far ahead of Henry VIII on doctrinal issues.
- The argument that Catholic imperialism was more benign for the subject people than the Protestant version doesn’t even pass the straight face test.
- Douthat believes that the Church, in time, would have found a way to accommodate the political and scientific advances of the Enlightenment. That conclusion is based on . . . what? The Church had fought all sorts of heretical movements ferociously and successfully long before Luther; why would anyone believe that would change in the future? There was no indigenous Enlightenment among the Sunnis within the Ottoman Empire; why would a universally Catholic Europe have been any different?
- While you can fairly say that Communism is the product of the Enlightenment, it is worth noting that it first took root in a country that didn’t experience the Reformation–Eastern Orthodox Russia.
- Today’s international institutions are very limited and purely pragmatic measures that were created to deal with the aftermath of World War II. They are in no way analogous to the Church, and are not its tepid replacement.
- Would you rather live in 13th century Europe than America in 2017? Would the benefits of an undivided Christendom outweigh the lower standard of living? I think not.