On his book Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism
Cover Interview of October 16, 2019
The wide angle
In my reading, the Reformation is less a religious movement
than a movement of illiberal revolutionary modernity. Every aspect of Reformation
practice is taken up and recycled by later, political revolutionary movements
that claim to usher in modernity by repudiating the obscurantist past. The following
features of the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformation set the template for many
future revolutions in both West and East: historical determinism; revolutionary
purity and integrity of self; iconoclasm of “idols”; targeting of
“superstition”; literalism; and anti-democratic claims to be introducing
“liberty.”
So, modernity has two, deeply inter-related stories: a
highly centralized, authoritarian version, and a decentralized, liberal
version. The early Reformation expresses the authoritarian version of
modernity. The end of the Reformation period expresses modernity’s liberal
version.
Once we describe the Reformation as part of the story of
modernization, then we understand the continuing magnetism of evangelical
religion, in both the West and elsewhere: evangelical religion is a key
expression of modernity, a non-reformist, non-conservative revolutionary form
of modernization in every respect. As long as liberals do not understand this,
they remain utterly bewildered by evangelical culture, dismissing it, with 180-degree
inaccuracy, as “conservative.” It is unquestionably, and objectionably,
illiberal and regressive, but it is also by far the most powerful expression of
early European revolutionary modernity, which is one of the reasons it remains
powerful in the United States and globally.
I came to this thesis as a cultural historian of the later
Middle Ages. Enter the Reformation through, as it were, the back door of the
late Middle Ages, and you are in for a shock. You discover that many cultural
forms routinely characterized by liberal culture as specifically “medieval”
(e.g. iconoclasm, slavery, persecution of “witches,” judicial torture in
England, Biblical fundamentalism, political absolutism) were either revived by,
or specific to the early modern period. Above all, you discover a massive
upshot in religious persecution and violence after 1547. Suddenly, late
medievalists understand, that is, that liberal modernity throws its embarrassments
over the cultural back fence into premodernity (aka, here, pre-Reformation
Catholic later Middle Ages).
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
In my reading, the Reformation is less a religious movement than a movement of illiberal revolutionary modernity. Every aspect of Reformation practice is taken up and recycled by later, political revolutionary movements that claim to usher in modernity by repudiating the obscurantist past. The following features of the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformation set the template for many future revolutions in both West and East: historical determinism; revolutionary purity and integrity of self; iconoclasm of “idols”; targeting of “superstition”; literalism; and anti-democratic claims to be introducing “liberty.”
So, modernity has two, deeply inter-related stories: a highly centralized, authoritarian version, and a decentralized, liberal version. The early Reformation expresses the authoritarian version of modernity. The end of the Reformation period expresses modernity’s liberal version.
Once we describe the Reformation as part of the story of modernization, then we understand the continuing magnetism of evangelical religion, in both the West and elsewhere: evangelical religion is a key expression of modernity, a non-reformist, non-conservative revolutionary form of modernization in every respect. As long as liberals do not understand this, they remain utterly bewildered by evangelical culture, dismissing it, with 180-degree inaccuracy, as “conservative.” It is unquestionably, and objectionably, illiberal and regressive, but it is also by far the most powerful expression of early European revolutionary modernity, which is one of the reasons it remains powerful in the United States and globally.
I came to this thesis as a cultural historian of the later Middle Ages. Enter the Reformation through, as it were, the back door of the late Middle Ages, and you are in for a shock. You discover that many cultural forms routinely characterized by liberal culture as specifically “medieval” (e.g. iconoclasm, slavery, persecution of “witches,” judicial torture in England, Biblical fundamentalism, political absolutism) were either revived by, or specific to the early modern period. Above all, you discover a massive upshot in religious persecution and violence after 1547. Suddenly, late medievalists understand, that is, that liberal modernity throws its embarrassments over the cultural back fence into premodernity (aka, here, pre-Reformation Catholic later Middle Ages).