The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (review)

Well-known to early modernists for his brilliant cross-confessional exploration of sixteenth-century martyrdom in Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), Gregory paints on an even larger canvas in the book under review, attempting to write a longue-durée account of the intellectual and social effects of Protestantism from Luther to present-day America. His title reflects his conviction that the most profound effects of the Reformation have been completely unintended. Gregory reminds his readers that Protestantism has persisted in multiple forms for almost five centuries, overwhelmingly under close state supervision, without ever coming close to achieving its original mission of supplanting papal Christianity with Biblical Christianity. He instead sees Protestantism as complicit in the relentless advance of secularism among modern Western intellectuals.

With eloquence and vehemence, Gregory champions the “seven percenters,” the share of registered American scientists in the 1990s who professed belief in a personal God (26–28), against what he considers the philosophical and ethical vacuity of the other 93 percent. Replete with italics, heavily ironic phrases, multiple quotation marks, and unconventional capitalizations (one wonders if the publisher vetoed exclamation points), he ultimately targets the current American-centered “Kingdom of Whatever,” in which discussion about essential Life Questions reduces to a lowest-common-denominator consensus that the author calls the “goods life”—autonomous individuals endlessly acquiring ever-better stuff through free-market capitalism (378, 379).

No less polemical in its own way than Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s Histoire des variations des églises protestantes (Paris, 1688), this book seems equally unlikely to persuade the uncommitted. Some major difference makers (for example, Voltaire, Charles Darwin, or Karl Marx) in the conventional “triumph-of-secularism-over-religion” narrative that Gregory calls “supercessionism” seem grotesquely shrunken. Moreover, Gregory’s so-called “genealogical” arrangement requires him to describe both the original intentions and then the long-term inadvertent effects of the sixteenth-century Reformation in multiple contexts, making both key arguments and prominent targets reappear in different chapters (Chapters 3 to 5). The net effect on readers resembles that from viewing the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon (1950), telling a story from multiple, if not contradictory, perspectives.

Interdisciplinary history is one thing; polydisciplinary history is another. This unusually ambitious enterprise fits the latter category; it “endeavours to analyze across half a millennium human realities that at first sight seem to have nothing to do with one another, such as conceptions of God, practices of consumption, and the character of universities” (21). Which disciplines does it privilege? At the outset, Gregory acknowledges his principal debts to an economist, a philosopher, and a historian of science (5). But the index provides five references to one of them and another gets only three, whereas Alasdair MacIntyre, his emeritus Notre Dame colleague whose endorsement appears on the book’s dust jacket, fills nine lines. Gregory admits that “to seek comprehensiveness would militate against comprehension” (123), and the most important disciplinary intersection truly plumbed in this book is where academic philosophy (MacIntyre’s department) encounters the history of Christianity (a subdivision of Gregory’s department). The scholarship is eclectic; for example, Chapter 5 offers a curious mixture of the now-antique “Weber thesis,” originating in the Kulturkampf of Wilhelmine Germany, with a recent wave of retrospective studies of the pre- and proto-history of contemporary consumerism.¹

Gregory’s first chapter outlines his basic thesis that the Reformation era produced “the unintended self-marginalization of theology through doctrinal controversy” (28). Despite the wide spread of unbelief over the last 160 years, Gregory insists that its intellectual bases remain what they were long before Luther: “Nothing conceptually original, including Darwinian evolution, has been added for many centuries” (64, his italics). Metaphysical univocity—the assumption that all things are ultimately commensurate with our human experience—plus Ockham’s razor—the argument that entities must not be created without sufficient cause—still undergird present-day denials of a wholly transcendent Christian (or Jewish...