Book Review: Protestants

Protestants:The Faith That Made the Modern World

by Alex Ryrie

Viking, 2017

It's an especially brave history of Protestantism that would quote Erasmus, the great Dutch humanist who was the originator of most of Protestantism's ethos and who ended up being one of Protestantism's shrewdest critics. A book attempting to paint the multi-country multi-sect movement in a more-or-less positive light might do well to steer clear of Erasmus altogether, and the Alec Ryrie, professor of the history of Christianity at Durham University, not only engages with Erasmus in his superb new book Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World, he does so immediately, opening his proceedings with an Erasmus quote about this new sect he saw flourishing everywhere he went:

They are like young men who love a girl so immoderately that they imagine they see their beloved wherever they turn, or, a much better example, like two combatants who, in the heat of a quarrel, turn whatever is at hand into a missile, whether it be a jug or a dish.

“It turns out that Erasmus was right,” Ryrie writes. “Protestants are fighters and lovers. They will argue with anyone about almost anything.” Which is inviting, yes, but willfully, almost hilariously optimistic. When Erasmus wrote that little passage, he obviously wasn't opining about how Protestants were fighters and lovers – he was mocking their fecklessness.

A movement that began when Martin Luther publicized his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 in Wittenberg objecting to corrupt Church practices such as the selling of indulgences would obviously have the abolishing of those corrupt practices as its very reason for being, but Protestantism quickly became not a set of objections but a set of denominations, each with corrupt practices of its own. The revolution became permanent, and over the centuries it has splintered into tens of thousands of sub-sects like Pentecostals, Puritans, Quakers, Methodists, Calvinists, and Unitarian Universalists.

Ryrie's book – magnificently researched and written with exactly the kind of knowledgeable accessibility that has characterized his lectures for a decade – tours readers through the long history of these denominations, tracing the rise, the architects, the scandals, and the doctrinal derivations of each. The wonder of the book is that it remains so consistently, energetically readable all throughout this Dantean tour through these many rings and levels, when a lesser guide might have balked when the backwoods Baptist cults started multiplying like the loaves and fishes. Ryrie never balks, never flags in his enthusiasm, and tries always to enter into the mind-frame of each sect, in both their best moments and their worst.

For Protestantism in Europe, surely the “worst” would be the supine attitude the churches adopted to the brutalities of Nazi rule, which Ryrie describes unsparingly but with sympathy:

Martin Luther's doctrine of the two kingdoms insisted that church and state not encroach on each other's territory. This had by now evolved, or degenerated, to the point that the church doubted it had a right to express political opinions at all. This apolitical instinct is a recurrent theme in Protestantism. In its milder forms, it has often served Protestantism very well, but in Nazi Germany it infected the churches with a fatal lassitude … When the regime appealed to reasons of state to justify its actions, Lutheran churches had no reply. God had permitted the Nazis to take power. The church could hardly defy his manifest will.

Naturally, in a book so rife with the spirit of intellectual investigation, Protestants doesn't avoid the biggest question of all: what is Protestantism? And after the gigantic amounts of research that must have been necessary to produce a book with this kind of sweep and erudition, Ryrie can perhaps be allowed a bit of overstatement in the answers he comes up with. That he instead opts for a whole lot of overstatement? Well, even that is forgivable:

It is not a doctrine or a theology. Defining it that way is usually an attempt to exclude people, by arguing, for example, that anti-Trinitarians, Quakers, liberals, or Pentecostals have crossed some red line that has been drawn for the purpose. Nor is it a purely genealogical category, of people who share a common descent from Martin Luther's act of defiance but are now split into such a wild variety of branches that their only connection is historical … Protestantism helped … to seed a great deal of what we now think of as purely secular: rationalism, capitalism, Communism, democracy, political liberalism, feminism, pluralism. Even some forms of atheism have Protestant fingerprints all over them.

Protestantism helped to seed the ground for modern atheism? Now that's a miracle.