Protestantism and the End of Modernity

Several years ago I picked up Jacques Barzun’s intellectual history of the modern West, From Dawn to Decadence. Interestingly, he begins his discussion of Modernity not with the Enlightenment, but with the Protestant Reformation (or, as he prefers it, Revolution). What this suggested to me is that part of the decline of the Protestant “Mainline” is that the historic Reformation Churches (as well as their immediate children such as Methodism) are products of modernity, and as such are suffering with the exhaustion of the modern project. The aforementioned Third Great Schism is in this light not only about the struggle between orthodoxy and heterodoxy but also about the end of modernity and the emergence of another paradigm (which I am not prepared to call post-modern, since I am not convinced that the whole po-mo thing is not either a transitional perspective or modernity in its final stage of entropy).

The churches that can adapt to what is emerging are those which we see thriving in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They are less enthralled by the modern project, and thus are more resilient.

This, of course, raises the question of just what are these aspects of modernity that make life so perilous for historic Protestantism? Let me venture a thought or two for now.

What strikes me today is that Protestantism emerged along with the development of the nation/state, and was indeed underwritten by this modern political project. We often forget just how important the emerging western nations were to the success of the Reformation. Obviously my own Anglican tradition provides the chief example. But we forget that the term “Protestant” was first a political one, wherein the German Princes siding with the Lutheran movement were called the “Protestant Princes.”

Historic Protestantism exists as the spiritual arm of a political trend that is in fact now under the immense stress of both globalism on the one hand and tribalism on the other. Nationalism posits a mediating unit, the Nation/State, as the ultimate political unit. Such a unit has been unstable as it is too large for the tribe and requires bureaucracy and a police or military force to maintain. With Protestantism no longer underwritten by the culture, either formally as in a state church, or tacitly, as in the case of the United States, and with ecclesial bureaucracy not able to adapt to rapid social and technological change, churches such as the Episcopal Church are destined to become moribund.

Enough for now. As I seem to actually have someone out there reading, I will leave it to you to consider this for the time being.