Creating a New Religion of Individualism

In 1517 Martin Luther (1483-1546), an Augustinian friar, nailed his famous ninety-five theses on the castle church door in Wittenberg and set in motion the process known as the Reformation. His attack on the church’s sale of indulgences resonated with discontented townsfolk, who were sick of clerics extorting money from gullible people on dubious pretexts.

The ecclesiastical establishment treated Luther’s protest with lofty disdain, but young clerics took his ideas to the people in the towns, who initiated local reforms that effectively liberated their congregations from the control of Rome. The more intellectually vigorous clergy spread Luther’s ideas in their own books, which thanks to the new technology of printing, circulated with unprecedented speed, launching one of the first modern mass movements. Like other heretics in the past, Luther had created an antichurch.

Luther and the other great reformers — Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) and John Calvin (1509-64) — were addressing a society undergoing fundamental and far-reaching change. Modernization would always be frightening: living in medias res, people are unable to see where their society is going and find its slow but radical alteration distressing. No longer feeling at home in a changing world, they found that their faith changed too.

Luther himself was prey to agonizing depressions and wrote eloquently of his inability to respond to the old rituals, which had been designed for another way of life. Zwingli and Calvin both felt a sense of crippling helplessness before experiencing a profound conviction of the absolute power of God; this alone, they were convinced, could save them.

In leaving the Roman Church, the reformers were making one of the earliest declarations of independence of Western modernity, and because of their aggressive stance toward the Catholic establishment, they were known as “Protestants.” They demanded the freedom to read and interpret the Bible as they chose — even though each of the three could be intolerant of views opposed to his own teaching.

The reformed Christian stood alone with his Bible before his God: Protestants thus canonized the growing individualism of the modern spirit.

Source: Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence by Karen Armstrong © 2014; Anchor Books; New York, NY; pp. 242-243.

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