The Unintended Reformation

1. The Reformation's Unintended Secularization of Society

What transpired fi ve centuries ago continues today profoundly to infl uence the lives of everyone not only in Eu rope and North America but all around the world, whether or not they are Christians or indeed religious believers of any kind.

A profound paradox. The Reformation, a religious revolution aimed at purifying Christianity, inadvertently set in motion a chain of events that led to the secularization of Western society. This outcome was far from the intentions of its protagonists, who sought to make society more Christian, not less. The book argues that understanding this complex, often indirect, and largely unforeseen historical trajectory is crucial for comprehending contemporary Western realities.

Beyond simple narratives. This isn't a story of decline from a golden age or inevitable progress, but an analysis of how responses to perceived problems created new, unforeseen ones. Medieval Christendom, despite its ideals, suffered from a vast gap between its prescriptions and the actual practices of its members. The Reformation sought to close this gap by correcting what it saw as doctrinal errors, but in doing so, it introduced intractable disagreements that fundamentally reshaped the relationship between religion, politics, economics, morality, and knowledge.

A tangled legacy. The modern Western world is an intricate tapestry woven from rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Western Christianity, with the Reformation era serving as the critical watershed. Many aspects of our present reality, from our understanding of God and morality to our economic behaviors and educational institutions, are deeply indebted to these historical processes, even if their origins are often overlooked or misunderstood due to conventional historical periodization.

2. God's Exclusion from Modern Intellectual Discourse

If the natural sciences lead to anything and are suited to any belief along these lines, it is to make the notion that there is a “meaning” of the world die out at its roots!

A subtle metaphysical shift. The marginalization of God from modern scientific and intellectual discourse stems not from science itself, but from a subtle yet profound metaphysical shift that began in the late Middle Ages. Traditional Christian theology conceived of God as radically distinct from creation, incomprehensible and non-spatial, making empirical disproof impossible. However, the adoption of a "univocal" conception of being by thinkers like Duns Scotus, followed by William of Occam's nominalism, began to place God within the same conceptual framework as creatures.

The "God of deism." This intellectual move, combined with Occam's razor (the principle that explanations should not multiply entities unnecessarily), laid the groundwork for a "deistic" God. If God was conceived as a "highest being" within the universe, and natural phenomena could be explained by natural causes, then God became superfluous to scientific inquiry. This was not a scientific discovery, but a philosophical presupposition that allowed for the eventual "disenchantment of the world" and the rise of atheism in intellectual circles.

Reformation's indirect role. The Reformation's intense doctrinal controversies, particularly over sacramentality, inadvertently sidelined theological discourse about God's relationship to the natural world. This left empirical observation and philosophical speculation as the primary, supra-confessional means of understanding nature. With disputed Christian doctrines pushed aside, the widespread univocal metaphysical assumptions became the de facto intellectual framework, paving a path from deism to modern atheism, where science is often mistakenly seen as inherently antithetical to religion.

3. Sola Scriptura Led to Endless Doctrinal Pluralism and Relativism

The Bible, I say, the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants!

A foundation of sand. The Protestant reformers' insistence on sola scriptura—scripture alone as the sole authority for Christian faith and life—was intended to purify Christianity from perceived Roman Catholic distortions. However, this principle, far from yielding a unified understanding of God's truth, immediately led to an "open-ended welter of competing and incompatible interpretations." From the early 1520s, Protestants disagreed fundamentally on core doctrines like the Eucharist, baptism, and the role of good works, creating a cacophony of conflicting truth claims.

The Spirit's ambiguous voice. Appeals to the Holy Spirit as a guide for interpretation only exacerbated the problem, as all sides claimed divine inspiration for their divergent views. As Erasmus lamented, "What am I to do... when many persons allege different interpretations, each one of whom swears to have the Spirit?" This internal, subjective claim to truth proved impossible to adjudicate, further entrenching doctrinal divisions and leading some radical Protestants to relativize the importance of doctrine itself.

Hyperpluralism's distant root. This intractable doctrinal disagreement is the most important historical source of contemporary Western hyperpluralism regarding life's fundamental questions of meaning, morality, and purpose. The inability to agree on what God's word said fostered a widespread perception that religious truth claims are inherently subjective and arbitrary. This historical reality, combined with modern liberalism's protection of individual belief, has led to a society where "literally anything goes as far as truth claims and religious practices are concerned."

4. States Asserted Control Over Churches, Leading to Religion's Privatization

The Commonwealth seems to me to be a Society of Men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing of their own Civil Interests... whereas a Church then I take to be a voluntary Society of Men, joining themselves together of their own accord, in order to the publick worshipping of God...

From shared authority to state monopoly. Medieval Christendom saw a constant jurisdictional struggle between ecclesiastical and secular authorities, but both generally agreed on the church's role in promoting salvation and the common good. The Reformation's doctrinal divisions, however, fundamentally altered this dynamic. With the church splintering into competing "churches," secular rulers gained unprecedented control, using their power to enforce confessional uniformity (Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed) and suppress dissent, as seen in the German Peasants' War and the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster.

The cost of conflict. The devastating "wars of religion" and the persecution of religious minorities proved ruinously expensive and inconclusive, leading rulers to seek new ways to ensure social stability. This prompted experiments in religious toleration, most notably in the Dutch Republic, where commercial interests prioritized peace over confessional purity. Here, religion began to be conceptualized as a private matter, separable from public life and politics, a pragmatic solution to intractable conflict.

American institutionalization. This privatization of religion was most influentially institutionalized in the United States, where the First Amendment's disestablishment clause protected individual religious freedom. While this was a blessing compared to European coercion, it paradoxically secularized religion by making it a matter of individual choice and preference, rather than a comprehensive, publicly shared way of life. The state, now the sole arbiter of public power, effectively controlled churches by defining the limits of permissible religious expression, a pattern that continues in all modern Western nations.

5. Morality Shifted from Objective Virtues to Subjective Rights

At the heart of liberty is the right to defi ne one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

The erosion of the common good. Medieval Christianity offered a teleological ethics of the good, rooted in divine creation and the pursuit of virtues like caritas for individual flourishing and eternal salvation. This framework, however imperfectly realized, provided a shared moral compass. The Reformation's doctrinal disputes shattered this consensus, leading to competing visions of the "Christian good" and mutually exclusive moral communities. This internal Christian conflict, coupled with Machiavelli's separation of politics from traditional morality, began to dismantle the idea of a universally acknowledged objective good.

From virtues to rules to rights. Magisterial Protestants, rejecting the Roman Church's virtue ethics, emphasized obedience to biblical moral rules as a consequence of salvation by grace alone. This moralism, also adopted by post-Tridentine Catholicism, shifted focus from character formation to rule-following. Simultaneously, the medieval discourse of natural rights, originally embedded within a teleological framework, was uncoupled from it. Radical Protestants, in particular, used the language of individual rights against both Catholic and magisterial Protestant coercion, asserting the individual conscience as the ultimate moral authority.

The paradox of modern rights. The institutionalization of individual rights in modern liberal states, while protecting freedom, inadvertently fostered the "subjectivization of morality." With no shared objective good, morality became a matter of personal preference, leading to emotivism and intractable disagreements. This formal ethics of rights, initially reliant on unacknowledged Christian assumptions about human dignity, now struggles to justify its own foundations in a secularized world. The result is a society where "rights talk" dominates, but without a coherent, universally accepted basis for what is truly right or wrong.

6. Avarice Transformed into the Virtuous "Goods Life"

The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.

A radical revaluation. Medieval Christianity unequivocally condemned avarice as a deadly sin, detrimental to both individual salvation and the common good. Money, while necessary, was seen as dangerous if detached from its use value and the pursuit of human flourishing. However, the Reformation era, with its intense religious conflicts, inadvertently created conditions for a dramatic ideological shift: the redefinition of acquisitiveness from a vice to a benign, even virtuous, self-interest.

The industrious revolution. As religious disputes proved destructive and inconclusive, many Europeans, across confessional lines, increasingly preferred the pursuit of material prosperity. This "industrious revolution" saw households working longer and more intensely to acquire more goods, driven by desires that were increasingly detached from traditional moral constraints. This was not a direct result of Protestant theology, but an unintended consequence of the era's disruptions, as people sought a more tangible and less contentious path to a "better life."

Capitalism's cultural glue. This growing embrace of acquisitiveness, initially justified as providing for the family or serving the state's prosperity, eventually became the engine of modern capitalism and consumerism. Philosophers like Hume and Smith, observing these changing behaviors, naturalized avarice as an inherent, insatiable human passion, thereby legitimizing it. Today, this "goods life"—the endless cycle of acquiring and consuming—serves as the primary cultural glue holding together hyperpluralistic Western societies, even as it potentially undermines the planet's sustainability and traditional moral values.

7. Knowledge Became Secular, Exiling Theology from Universities

The irrelevance of theology to the secular disciplines is a taken- for- granted dogma.

Theology's self-inflicted wound. On the eve of the Reformation, knowledge was integrated within a Christian worldview, with theology as the queen of the sciences. However, the Reformation's doctrinal disagreements, particularly over sola scriptura, created an unresolvable crisis within theology itself. This internal fragmentation, coupled with the political imperative to control universities and prevent further religious upheaval, led to the "confessionalization" of higher education. Theology, though privileged, became insulated from broader intellectual currents, focusing on defending specific orthodoxies rather than integrating new knowledge.

The rise of external inquiry. As universities became sites of doctrinal policing, much of the most dynamic intellectual inquiry—especially in the natural sciences, but also in humanism—migrated outside their walls to courts, academies, and informal networks like the Republic of Letters. These new sites of knowledge-making deliberately bracketed contested religious matters, focusing on universal, verifiable, and useful knowledge that could transcend confessional divides. This practical separation of religious and non-religious inquiry laid the groundwork for the eventual secularization of knowledge.

The modern university's secular mandate. The 19th century saw the rise of the modern research university, notably in Germany, which prioritized specialized research and the natural sciences. Theology was effectively quarantined, and its claims increasingly reclassified as subjective belief rather than objective knowledge. In the U.S., Protestant pluralism's inability to provide a coherent intellectual foundation for a unified curriculum further cemented this trend. By the early 20th century, the secularization of knowledge was largely complete, with religious truth claims excluded from academic discourse, a situation that persists globally today, often without critical examination of its historical origins or underlying assumptions.

8. Modernity's Liberal Foundations Are Undermined by Its Own Success

The intellectual foundations of modernity are failing because its governing metaphysical assumptions in combination with the fi ndings of the natural sciences offer no warrant for believing its most basic moral, po liti cal, and legal claims.

A paradoxical predicament. Modernity, born from the failures of medieval Christendom and confessional Europe, sought to establish peaceful coexistence through liberal states, individual rights, and secular reason. While achieving remarkable successes in science, technology, and protecting individual liberties, it inadvertently created conditions for its own intellectual and social unraveling. The very mechanisms designed to manage religious pluralism—privatizing religion and secularizing public discourse—have eroded the shared moral and metaphysical foundations upon which liberal society implicitly relied.

The "Kingdom of Whatever." Modern philosophy has failed to provide a convincing, universally accepted rational basis for morality, leaving a hyperpluralism of subjective preferences. Simultaneously, the triumph of scientific naturalism, while yielding immense knowledge, offers no grounds for objective values, meaning, or purpose. This leaves modern liberal states in a precarious position: they protect individual rights and choices, but lack a coherent justification for why those rights exist or what choices are truly good, beyond mere preference.

The cost of unacknowledged assumptions. The exclusion of religious truth claims from academic and public discourse, often based on unexamined metaphysical naturalism, means that fundamental concepts like "persons" and "rights" are left without intellectual warrant. This ideological imperialism, masquerading as intellectual inevitability, leaves society reliant on a "manufactured goods life" for cohesion, even as this consumerism contributes to global crises and further erodes the very social bonds and shared values necessary for a flourishing liberal democracy. Modernity's success in liberating the individual has inadvertently led to a crisis of meaning and a weakening of its own moral and intellectual underpinnings.