What's Wrong With the Protestant Hypothesis
In defense of complexity and understanding in a culture obsessed with the opposite
The anglophone world is one defined by the presuppositions of a radically inegalitarian branch of the Reformation movement. Birthed from the first days after the Ninety-Five Theses, warped by the interests of the British crown, and solidified by a proto-fascist group of exiles in the so-called New World, this set of vulgar theological beliefs based upon nativism, exclusion, and aggression towards outsiders has culminated in an underlying morality that fundamentally opposes a strawman Catholicism that is simply no longer in existence today (even while the modern-day direct descendants of this tradition turn towards reactionary Catholics as their primary intellectual leaders). What began as a generalized nativism against Europeans to the cultural “East” of Germany, though not always geographically, morphed into anti-Catholic sentiment, which has amalgamated in a broad modern day rejection of complexity and historicity. To put it simply, the premise that people should be able to pick up the Bible and “understand it” without any context has morphed into the idea that one should be able to pick up any piece of work and inherently grasp it.
Where I’ve personally found this thought process to be the most disorientingly incoherent is, unsurprisingly, the realm of political philosophy. But first, some context.
An Overcorrection
The Protestant Reformation was, in every sense of the word, an objectively progressive movement in history. The demarcation of religion as a monopolized form of power to be wielded by an actor whose institutional structures were beginning to resemble proto-state form while still firmly existing within feudal property relations needed to be, at the very least, updated. The result of the Reformation was not just the birth of Protestantism but the reform of Catholicism as well in a way that did not occur with the Great Schism, which instead reinforced an imperial turn of the Church.
The Reformation was not just some event in history that can itself be excluded from its moment in time though. The European Religious Wars, the consolidation of the modern forms of Latin- and Germanic-based languages now spoken today, and the rise of capitalism all arguably occur within the same century. This massive linguistic, religious, and sociopolitical change in the way both our world functions and how we perceive ourselves as individuals has had a profound effect on the way we both view society today as well as how we understand the progression of history.
The confusion caused by all of these events happening in such a close proximity to one another is most apparent in what many Christians in the anglophone world believe is the primary takeaway of the Reformation, the translation and distribution of Bible to the masses. The first misconception is that the Bible only existed in Latin until Martin Luther’s German translation. This conflates the point of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, which was to systemically repudiate the Catholic authority over the afterlife mainly through the critique of indulgences, into one of democratizing access to scriptures. While this eventually became part of the Reformation movement to be sure, it was not out of an abstract notion that the Bible was something to be consumed by individuals in order for them to take away their own personal beliefs but as a pragmatic response to the Catholic Church’s initial hostility and marginalization of Luther’s arguments. By translating the Bible, Luther was allowing for more people to review his points, undermining Catholic authority In fact, many non-Latin translations of the Bible existed before the Reformation, with French translations existing over two hundred years beforehand.
The second misconception is that the Bible was mass produced because of the Reformation, when in fact the Gutenberg Bible had been made and sold nearly half a century before Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door. The mass production of the Bible, including vernacular translations, was embraced by both Protestant and Catholic movements during and after the Reformation. This fact of course is almost never brought up by specifically English-speaking popularizers of evangelical Protestantism when they retell their hyper-mythologized and vulgarized understandings of history.
But why is this important?
If the Reformation is understood as primarily a Protestant movement to purposefully spread the Bible through mass production and translations instead of an unintentional biproduct of a theological schism, then one walks away with a much different conception of what the entire point of the Reformation was. If one accepts the former understanding, then logically the question to ask is, “what is the theological importance of individuals reading the Bible,” which will inevitably build itself towards some formulation of the primary importance of individualism. This primacy is seen today within the rhetorical use of a “personal relationship with God” in Protestant circles. While the phrase itself is a relatively new one, only becoming popularized in the 1950s by Billy Graham after being introduced into the lexicon during the 1800s Christian revivalist movement, its origins can be traced from the individualism of the Puritan immigrants to the the Americas, through traditions like Methodism and Wesleyanism, and into the modern day vocabulary of almost all American Protestant traditions. To be clear, I personally think there is a strong argument to be made that the concept of the individual in its earliest forms are being described by Paul, but that is fundamentally different than the dogmatic belief in the sole primacy of an individual relationship with God.
What I have described so far is just a narrow view of Christianity in solely the United States. One may ask what this means and how this intellectual tradition translates outside of the theological sphere.
A Cultural Hegemony
From the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, through around 2021 the United States could arguably be understood as the single world superpower, able to influence economically, politically, and socially most if-not-all countries. This unipolarity is built upon a foundation that the United States developed during the Cold War of cultural exportation in order to promote neoliberalization. The fruits of this cultural exportation can be seen everywhere from the highest grossing movies to the best selling artists of all time. Simply put, political and economic institutional structures lend themselves towards cultural reproduction of a hegemon’s society, especially in a unipolar world.
What does it mean then when a hegemonic nation is defined so entirely by vulgarized Protestant suppositions that trace itself back to a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of the Reformation? As I stated recently in a discussion with a friend, I believe the biggest weakness of American Protestants is their expectation to “read” the Bible without adequate context which leads to them grafting the Bible onto whatever the hegemonic cultural norm of the day is. In the era of the End of History, the death of the mass movement, and the popularization of a vulgarized postmodernism that synthesizes the worst of post-Occupy anarchist-with-no-labels thought with conservative anti-intellectualism, that cultural norm is one of post-truth and post-reality. What something means to one as an individual is all that matters and this has allowed organized groups to undermine and circumvent living traditions. To return briefly to the religious space, the commission of the RSV translation of the Bible in 1946, which is the first ever to mention the word “homosexual” in English, and subsequently Biblica’s popularization of the NIV translation, now the best selling Bible translation in the United States, as a “middle ground” between the RSV and informal translations is a perfect example of the systemic ideological ratcheting (or hijacking) one can do when the primary method of approaching a complex work is without any context or background.
Though this growth in anti-intellectualism, perpetrated by a predominately a right-wing movement to depoliticize the masses in order to prevent the type of popular uprisings of the 20th century, has based its ideological roots in this popular but misunderstood reading of the Reformation, its ramifications spread much further, seeping into all political and casual circles. The popular phrase “when will I use this in real life” in regards to education, usually some part of mathematics that a person is struggling to understand, is a term brought about by an unconscious but deeply influential view of the world as one where understanding should both be immediate -divinely inspired - and said understanding should provide a material virtue - evangelizing/building the kingdom - to the individual. If one does not “understand” something, it must either be not important in real life or it is something intentionally confusing and meant to mislead away from so-called “common sense.” That a person expects that they should be able to pick up a piece of work, especially one that is inherently in conversation with other works, and “get it” is a deeply naive view that only further highlights a growing illiteracy crisis.
In liberal spaces this exact same tendency can be found, but to reinforce existing institutional monopolies over information through a faux-meritocratic system to keep people in their place. The podcast Citations Needed has a great recent episode on this phenomenon. The tendency to defer to “experts” whose expertise is only valorized by, in essence, the amount of money spent to obtain a piece paper is not only reinforcing anti-intellectual tendencies through class control but also simultaneously hiding that fact behind a rhetorical support for intellectualism. And to be clear, that is exactly the system we have built, with institutions like Harvard openly admitting half of their white students had been admitted through processes that don’t take merit into consideration. It might sound contradictory at first, but to institutionalize education and gatekeep access to it through financial means, one is simply reifying a society-wide structure which maintains class domination. This only further promotes that some people inherently have access to knowledge that they “can use in real life” while others shouldn’t ever have to think or worry about that. It is always interesting when the dominant logic of the day seems to just be emulating the strawman critiques of pre-Reformation Catholicism but I digress. This is why snake oil salesmen passing themselves off as intellectuals, such as Jordan Peterson, can become so powerful among a subset of depoliticized and dehistoricized groups of people; if one doesn’t even have access to the intellectual traditions that inform where a person is coming from, how can they possibly inoculate themselves from the bad ideology that flows out of them especially if that person has been valorized as an “expert.”
Figures even marginally considered to be on the anti-capitalist left, found within the umbrella term of Post-Left or Post-Anarchist, have only further perpetuated this phenomenon through the promotion of reactionary anti-ideology moral purism over intellectual examination and rigorous investigation. David Graeber’s Are You An Anarchist is probably the worst offender in this category, turning ideology into something innately within a person instead of a synthesis of presuppositions determined by, to quote Otto Bauer, different communities of character and individual investigations into the world as it exists.
And you thought I wouldn’t ever return to the Chomsky-Foucault debate
An Example
All of this has remained relatively abstract so I want to provide an explicit example. This is a tweet from a right-wing talking head arguing that because he “has read the material” of certain left-wing thinkers he understands how fundamentally bad their ideologies are.
Now if one looks closely they will see a majority of these books are actually written by founders of the a-priori pseudo-intellectual Austrian School, with one of the authors not even taken seriously by his fellow conservatives who criticized him for being an “archetypal unscientific economist,” and everyone from Hayek to the National Review having disputed and disavowed his works. We’ll ignore those people. Let’s also ignore the fact that none of these books pass the spine check and a lot of them have bookmarks in them showing just how little of them Cam has read and instead look at the ideological tradition these books have presented to see if this “leftist reading list” is a coherent one.
Cam has between nine and twelve books actually broaching “leftism” depending on how generously you want to include some unacademic pseudo-histories. Capital Volumes 1,2 and 3 by Karl Marx is in fact a good start. If one wants to understand modern revolutionary thought, even if you believe you oppose it, a good place to begin would in fact be Marx’s seminal - but importantly incomplete - works describing how capitalism formed, exists, and will tear itself apart by taking Adam Smith’s presumptions about liberalism and logically working them out to their final conclusions using Hegelian dialectics (“turned right side up again” of course). Curiously though, Smith’s Wealth of Nations is not to be found on this shelf and neither is any of Hegel’s works or that of Proudhon, the founder of mutualism with whom Marx heavily criticized both in Capital and other published works. While Ernest Mandell’s introduction to Volume 1 does briefly bring up Ricardo and Malthus, two thinkers of political economy who - depending on which Marxist you talk to - Marx either criticizes or builds upon, it is also not nearly enough to form a conclusion on what, if anything, Marx is critiquing in this book subtitled “A Critique of Political Economy.”
The next book was published half a century after Capital, after the First International convened and broke apart, after the Marx-Bakunin schism, after the 1905 uprising in Russia, in the middle of World War One and you get my point. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladmir Ilyitch (Lenin) is an important work in the trajectory of Marxist thought; however, it is a book that on this shelf is out of place. Lenin is explicitly writing within a dialogic established by Engels and refined by Kautsky after the Bernstein revisionist crisis, with him even building upon phrases first coined by Kautsky such as the labor aristocracy to help him make sense of the causes and effects of the first world war. Without reading Imperialism in the context of both its historical moment as well as what philosophically Lenin is responding to, what exactly is Cam getting out of this book? The same can be said about his one other book by Lenin, ‘Left-Wing Communism’ An Infantile Disorder, which is explicitly one side of a debate with Council Communists directly after the Russian Revolution and during the consolidation of the Soviets. What of course isn’t present here is Anton Pannekoek’s response to Lenin, any of histories of the Russian workers’ movement compared to the German compared to the Belgian, or even that this was a debate between many other Marxists within The Second International.
I could keep going here with Rothstein’s book on the U.S.S.R. but no books on the British communist movement or the multiple books about Mao but nothing by him but I believe I’ve made my point clear enough. Cam’s bookshelf is the aesthetic of knowledge and understanding without the work to back it up. It is the same mentality of picking up the Bible one day and reading it all the way through expecting to “get something” abstractly out of it that’s not just what one already believe.
As final little present for me, Cam has one single book by Max Weber that is about how Protestantism is the ideal form of Christianity for capitalist development. Even though I broadly reject Jungianism I do enjoy a bit of ironic synchronicity every now and then.
Conclusion
I think it would be potentially easy for a reader to walk away from this being frustrated that I am advocating for some kind of gatekeeping from having opinions. I need to be clear that this is not my aim for this piece. “Nuance trolling” as Citations Needed describes is the type of liberal institutionalism that tries to undermine popular movements by claiming they don’t have a moral leg to stand on if they don’t know every nuance about an issue, inherently positioning the status quo as something that does not need justification but any change must account for every possible variable.
I am not making an argument to dissuade people from praxis like those on the Post-Left. I am critiquing a growing trend within ideological spaces that can be charitably defined as the zealotry of the convert. You should not in fact be able to explain the complexities of an ideological or theological tradition hundreds of years to a second grader. We should not be simplifying the complex in order to meet others where they are at. Instead we should be pushing for greater curiosity, greater understanding, and a more humble approach to everything in between.