The Intentions of The Unintended Reformation

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press recently published Brad S. Gregory's The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. It is one of those big books that even its critics concede is astonishing in its scholarly breadth and bold in its interpretive sweep. We are pleased to devote a major portion of the June issue to a discussion of this important work of historical synthesis and interpretation. Gregory opens our forum with an overview of the book's method, approach, and argument. Then a distinguished panel of historians—Alexandra Walsham, Bruce Gordon, Carlos Eire, and Euan Cameron—offer their commentaries. We close with Gregory's rejoinder.

The Unintended Reformation is a work of historical analysis that takes the present as its point of departure. I am most grateful to the editors of Historically Speaking for devoting this forum to it. While disclaiming comprehensiveness, the book aims to be as explanatorily powerful as possible while making as few theoretical and methodological assumptions as necessary. Secondarily, the book addresses some major contemporary concerns based on its historical analysis. These remarks will speak mostly to the first ambition and briefly to the second.

I endeavor in The Unintended Reformation to answer a basic but very big question: How did contemporary ideological and institutional realities in North America and Europe come to be as they are? The book intends to characterize these realities matter-of-factly. Ideologically, they include an open-ended range of secular and religious truth claims made by individuals about matters pertaining to human meaning, morality, purpose, and priorities, including some religious truth claims articulated with great intellectual sophistication by theologians and philosophers of religion. Insofar as the present is the product of the past, any adequate history must be able to account for all these claims. The modern liberal institutions variously characteristic of all contemporary Western states permit this ideological heterogeneity through the legal and political protection of individual citizens to believe and live as they please so long as they obey established laws.

The book's explanation of how the past became the present questions many widely held assumptions. The reason is simple: typical narratives, common conceptions of change over time, and ordinary historical methodologies cannot answer the book's central question. They fail to do justice to the full range of moral and metaphysical commitments encompassed under the first-person plural—we—when it is used inclusively of all present-day Europeans and North Americans. Who are "we"? Predominant large-scale historical narratives— in which Catholicism is thought to have been superseded by the Protestant Reformation, which was in turn superseded by Enlightened modernity only to be superseded in turn by the postmodern present—would seem to imply that we are all now secular, skeptical, fragmented selves. But we are not. This inaccurate generalization does not describe even highly educated Westerners because it fails to account for the wide varieties of secular rationalists or religious believers. What needs to be explained is not a nonexistent uniform secularism but a heterogeneous hyperpluralism of individuals who hold rival secular and religious truth claims that diversely influence their actions and collectively influence public life.

Formidably complex questions of historical explanation confront anyone who seeks to know what people today believe, where their beliefs come from, and what their beliefs are based on, and not just because individuals' beliefs so often change over time and are usually complicated hybrids. Not only the beliefs but also their related assumptions arose through historical processes. Divergent believers are also always embodied practitioners who enact behaviors within social relationships and political institutions, all of which can and do change over time in complicated ways. No explanatory narrative could possibly consider all the relevant evidence. Examples would overwhelm coherent explanation, losing the forest in the trees. Even historians devoted to answering far less ambitious questions ordinarily divide their labor by historical period, type of history, and country or region. But the prevailing periodization and parceling of the past themselves reflect institutionalized assumptions about change over time, which are in turn related to other intellectual disciplines with their own aims and...