We Are All Protestants
Especially if you don't think so.
This post is part of a series on the way religious ideas have decisively shaped everyday experience. This one follows the logic of the Reformation to America.
The United States is a Protestant country.
This statement is empirically false in a number of ways. For one thing, religious diversity was a fact in North America, English and otherwise, from the very beginning. For another, the U.S. Constitution explicitly guarantees freedom of religion in the First Amendment and explicitly bars a religious test for office holding (Article VI, clause 3). For a third, we live in a nation that has become, through fits and starts, progressively more secular.
But Protestantism sits at the very foundation of our national life—its premises remain central to this very day—even for people who are not themselves Protestant. Or Christian. Or believers in any religion. Especially for those people.
To understand why, we need to consider just what Protestantism is and how it happened. As its name suggests, the cluster of Christian sects that fit under the Protestant umbrella were born under protest—an expression of grievance against a Roman Catholic Church that had deteriorated into empty ritual and corruption. At the heart of those grievances was the practice of selling indulgences, or forgiveness of sins in exchange for payment of one kind or another. The primary objection was not the sheer crassness of the exchange, the way it would be for us moderns, but rather a more specifically theological one: the notion that any human being could dispense absolution that the Creator alone could grant. This revulsion against playing God animated the objection some Protestants would have against theater, some forms of painting, and even holidays like Christmas, rooted as they were in pagan traditions.
You remember how it all began: Martin Luther nailing those 95 theses to the church door in 1517. That was the match that finally lit the bonfire of rebellion against Catholicism (there had been others, but none had quite caught on the way this one did). Luther became the founder of the new sect that bears his name. But implicit in the very notion of Protestantism was a reluctance to tow a party line, whether that line was new or old. It was probably inevitable that there would be those who would break with the breakers. So it was not only that we got Lutheranism, but also the Continental Reformed Churches, Anabaptism, and a series of spinoffs in the centuries that followed.
One those early branches of Protestantism was the Anglican Church, also known as the Church of England, which was founded by King Henry VIII after his difficulties in obtaining a divorce from Queen Katherine of Aragon in the 1530s. As this fact suggests, the king’s motives, unlike those of Luther, were not really theological. (That there was a lot of money at stake in terms of church properties and rents, in England and elsewhere, is also worth noting, at least parenthetically.) In the decades that followed, England see-sawed between Anglicanism and Catholicism before his daughter Elizabeth I captured control of the Crown and secured a permanently Protestant future for England.
But it wasn’t quite that simple. That’s not only because the people living through that time and long after weren’t sure that England would remain Protestant. It’s also because Protestantism splintered in England, just as it did on the continent, into a series of sects, each of which claimed to be more authentic than the Church of England. From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, the country experienced roiling religious instability—which also meant political instability, which in turn meant people killing each other over their religious commitments: God was too important a subject to be left for individual people to decide for themselves. In the famous words of Louis IXV of France, “one king, one law, one faith.” Anything else was a prescription for anarchy.
No one was more aware of this than Elizabeth I, who was also aware that acting too aggressively against dissent was also a prescription for anarchy. So it was that she tried to steer a middle course of holding fast to Anglicanism but acting with restraint toward dissidents who didn’t get too far out of line. This was politically smart; it was also ethically wise. But it dispirited many of those who cared very deeply about their faith.
Because tolerance is just another way of saying you don’t give a damn. By definition, you don’t tolerate that which you consider unacceptable. Instead, we (by which I mean moderns, Westerners, Anglo-Americans) came to think of religious tolerance as common sense, and we came to think of religious discrimination as something that’s antithetical to the very idea of religion: if you can’t choose it, it can’t really be meaningful now, can it?
But that’s not how most people have thought about religion for most of human history. Religious orthodoxy has generally been regarded as the basis of a stable social order, and insofar as there have been exceptions to the rule, those exceptions have usually assumed an obligation (or, at the very least, an incentive) to keep their heads down and avoid calling attention to themselves. Doing otherwise was often asking for trouble. In the larger sweep of history, we tolerant choosers are, in fact, are the weirdos.
(And our weirdness is provisional. Indeed, it is one of the precepts of that cluster of concepts originally embraced, but now derided, as “woke”—a term with notably religious overtones—that politically unacceptable ideas must not be platformed to avoid any connotation they might be condoned.)
All through Elizabeth I’s long reign (1558-1603), the crown and its various dissident subjects maintained an uneasy equilibrium. She demanded obedience to the Church of England without ruthlessly stamping out the heretics she knew were out there, while her critics were generally discreet even as they worked to systematically articulate their alternative visions. There were flashpoints, to be sure. But relative to what came before or later, Elizabeth was notably (if to some depressingly) moderate.
As far as her critics were concerned, Elizabeth’s successor, James I, was a different story. He was a different story as far as he was concerned, too—of his religious critics, the King famously proclaimed, “I shall make them conform themselves, or I will harry them out of the land.” Some did conform, after a fashion. And some did leave. The most famous case is that of the so-called “Separatists” who gave up on the Church of England—and England itself—relocating to the Dutch city of Leiden. Given that the Dutch, who had adopted their own form of Protestantism, had waged an 80-year struggle to win their independence from Catholic Spain, these Separatists figured that they would find a welcome haven among kindred spirits. And they did, sort of. But relative to the Separatists, the Dutch were dismayingly, even alarmingly, lax in their religious habits. (They were—ugh—tolerant.) For the spiritual safety of their children, among other reasons, they decided they had to leave. They wanted to find somewhere they could worship as they pleased—which is to say they sought a place where they wouldn’t have to tolerate the wickedness and sloth that they’d been forced to endure. They decided to journey to the very edge of the known world and start over. An American Dream was born.
These religious dissenters—they were known as Separatists; we know them as Pilgrims—weren’t the first people to make this move: a steady stream of migrants had been pouring into North America in the century following the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492, among them the Dutch financial speculators who founded New Amsterdam and the English investors who received a charter for a corporation they named the Virginia Company and founded a colony of the same name in 1607. The Pilgrims weren’t even the first people to make the trip for explicitly religious reasons (and many of those who went along with them for the ride weren’t, either). For over a century, Spanish and French missionaries had established religious communities in the name of the Roman Catholic Church, venturing forth to convert souls. Sometimes they had the blessing of secular authorities; often they were regarded as a nuisance at best. We can question how much good these people did—certainly many faced resistance, prominent among them Native Americans who questioned their motives no less than their doctrines. But these missionaries could also be simply astonishing in the depth of their commitment, and, yes, love for the people they served, whether they were appreciated or not.
The Pilgrims were more self-interested. There was some rhetoric in the Mayflower Compact, the document for governing themselves named for the ship on which they traveled, about converting heathens for “the advancement of the Christian faith.” But they were more preoccupied with the state of their own souls than anybody else’s. In their wake followed a larger group of dissenters known as the Puritans (these people did not break with the Church of England entirely, hoping to reform it from within). So did a plethora of other Protestant believers—English Quakers, German Moravians, French Huguenots, among others—who spilled across the North American seaboard and pushed into the interior.
Amid this bewilderingly diverse array of people, and even more bewildering array of doctrines, lay a core conviction that formed the bedrock of Protestantism as a whole: a conviction that this fallen world might yet be made better. How it might be better was of course an open question. The variety of solutions, the skepticism that often surrounded them, and the intensity with which they were pursued, would make the concept of tolerance a practical necessity. In English North America, the emphasis was on what Protestants shared, especially when compared with the perceived corruption and sloth of Catholic powers such as France and Spain.
While all this was being worked out, there was also emerging consensus about the means by which a new and better world would be achieved. At the core of the Protestant imagination was an insistence on the primacy of the individual’s relationship to God. Protestants varied in their degree of objection to the mediating role of clergy, ranging from ministers dispatched to churches by the Crown to those, like the Quakers, who dispensed with leaders entirely and sat silently in meetinghouses until the Spirit moved a congregant to speak. But all these churches agreed on the necessity for an instructed conscience. This meant an unusual degree of enthusiasm for education and literacy, especially in New England, which became about the most literate place on the face of the earth by 1750. People weren’t being taught to think for themselves, exactly. But this is what began to happen. As with tolerance, pragmatism became principle.
You can see where this all was headed. Many Protestants, especially those in New England, subscribed to its Calvinist branch, which insisted that since an individual’s fate was an all-knowing God’s alone, your salvation, or lack thereof, was fixed from the moment of your birth. While God knew your fate, you yourself could not, and so you lived your life in the shadow of doubt, hoping—and acting as if, since the alternative was too terrible to embrace—you were among the Elect. But such uncertainty was difficult to sustain in a world where people were being encouraged to reflect on their own salvation: surely a loving God wants what’s best for me, no? Within a generation, the Puritans began searching for escape hatches with theological doctrines like “Preparationism,” whereby an unregenerate soul might reposition oneself toward salvation, or the Halfway Covenant, whereby devout grandparents might provisionally save their grandchildren from wayward parents. Not everyone went along with such ideas—Yale was founded in protest over Harvard’s tolerance for them—but over time they became irresistible. The American Dream of salvation began to shade into the American Dream as salvation. The bitterness of much recent commentary on how the American Dream is dead is actually testimony of deep collective investment. America somehow isn’t America without it.
Next: From Puritans to Progressives