This is an update of an earlier celebration of Reformation Day, because what the Reformation means to America doesn’t get old. The years pass and the Reformation’s ideas that motivate humankind matter more than ever.
Happy 2021 Reformation Day!
505 years on October 31, 1517 a wonkish, priest and professor posted 95 theses on the door of the church in Wittenburg, Germany. Young Martin Luther wanted to discuss 95 things about the teachings of his Roman Catholicism. It wasn’t an attack on the church. It was an invitation for a colloquium. Nailing it to the church was like putting up a Tweet.
But this tweet went viral in a 16th century kind of way. In a few short months, abbeys and nunneries that were over one thousand years old changed radically. It was an example of “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” Like, in modern times when Communism was swept away in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union empire collapsed. The Reformation transformed Western Civilization – and, consequently, the world.
There’s a direct connect the dots from the Reformation to the Enlightenment to the English Civil War to the First Great Awakening to our American Revolution. The power of these ideas moves through U.S. history to this day in our Great U.S. Culture War.
America wouldn’t be America without the Reformation. In 1776, the thirteen colonies were 98% Protestant, 1-2% Roman Catholic, and one-tenth of 1% Jewish. Importantly, the formerly warring Protestant sects united for independence to establish a country where they all would be free to practice their versions of dissident Protestantism in peace.
Dissident Protestantism established core values of individual liberty and opportunity, anti-authoritarianism, independent thought, and opened the door to tolerance – by putting up with one another to start.
These ideas became so “American” that the late Samuel Huffington wrote when the American Roman Catholic delegation arrived at Vatican II, someone quipped, “Here come the Protestants.”
Furthermore, the ideas are resilient and age incredibly well. They’ve been shaped by three Great Awakenings to keep their transformative power on society. The ideas still work. They motivate. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s wrote in The Reformation, “A modern Anglican and even a modern Roman Catholic is likely to be more like a sixteenth-century Anabaptist in belief than he or she resembles a sixteenth-century member of the Church of England.”
Even as the population of professing Protestants dips below half and the census of all confessing Christians plummets, the founding ideas remain fundamental to the direction of our future. The ideas of the Reformation are important to all Americans regardless of faith, profession, or their rejection of both.
Consider just one idea among the many that run as threads tying together over 500 years to create our American Civilization branch of the English-speaking Peoples:
The Reformation placed the written word above the spoken word.
Anything said by a person of power about religion was compared to what was written in the Bible.
Customs and traditions grown over a millennium and a half were checked against what could be read in one book. The book became the authority.
Even as people disputed the meaning of the same words they read in common, which lead to the fracturing of the Reformation into a multitude of religious denominations, they all insisted that one source document was superior to any other argument.
This is essential to the Rule of Law for our American Republic. It’s foundational to a nation-state conceived on a piece of paper on July 4th, 1776. It’s critical to the government of a nation-state established by paper in 1787. It’s vital to states if they are ever to be more sovereign than not under their own constitutions – as they were intended.
By contrast, the Roman Republic had an impressive body of laws. That Republic died when men with swords said the law on the succession of emperors reads one way, but what the swordsmen say goes. Republics end without the Rule of Law.
America isn’t a democracy. We’re a Republic. A Constitutionally-limited, federal, representative democracy – if you insist.
The Republic and Rule of Law are under direct frontal assault today. The Constitution has been shredded for over a century by every branch of the Federal Government. Today, the Biden Administration is flagrantly not enforcing some laws, making up others, and ignoring judicial constraints with impunity.
Yet, many Americans haven’t given up on the Constitution as it is written. And, won’t submit to a “living Constitution” as it is imagined by judges, legislators, Presidents and their minions, or the bureaucrats in the Deep State.
In fact, restoration and fealty to the 1787 Constitution, as it is written, may be the only way to avert another civil war. Returning to the federalism of sovereign states in our union allows the Blue states to build their socialist paradises and the Red states to preserve individual freedom and opportunity.
Taking most social issues out of the national government and returning them to the 50 laboratories of representative democracy could defuse the Culture War bomb. Witness the reversal of Roe v Wade – how good that is for the Nation. How it lowers the temperature of national conflict by returning the fight to the states.
Regardless of a restoration of the Constitution or not, America is heading fast to Reformation-like reckoning of ideas.
The question for a world-wide secular Reformation-like transformation or another grassfire American Revolution is “Who decides?”
Who decides what energy you use to fuel your vehicle and heat your home?
Who decides what every business and farm will use for the energy essential for the economy?
Who decides if you have to have a medical procedure called a “vaccine?”
Who decides about personal autonomy for your family – especially your children and their education?
Who decides if a child can be killed in the womb? Who decides if a child can mutilated and maimed to honor a mental illness?
Who decides on all of your choices for healthcare? Retirement?
Who decides that there will be two classes of citizens for access to jobs, public services, accommodations, and travel?
Who decides about mandates for personal clothing, behavior, and identity papers?
Who decides what is taught in schools?
Who decides who gets government hand-outs and who pays for them in taxes?
Who decides who gets hired based on the color of their skin or their sexual organs or the sexual preferences?
Who decides there are group rights for “protected classes of persons” and what are the equity payments they can claim?
Who decides illegal aliens are rewarded for breaking U.S. law to enter and invited to vote themselves more?
Who decides what riot is peaceful protest and what peaceful assembly is an insurrection?
Who decides what speech is hate speech or disinformation?
Who decides what you can’t say?
Etc.
It’d be easy to write up a new 95 theses of “Who Decides?”
Maybe a wonkish professor, a pastor or priest, or perhaps a yeoman American patriot should post such soon.
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
Parler: https://parler.com/AFNNUSA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA