The Reformation, The Ambiguous Expression of Christianity’s Adaptation to Modernity

The Reformation is an extremely complex movement both in its doctrinal religious dimensions and in the scope of the social transformations which accompanied it. It was deployed in very different European terrains, in some of the centres the most advanced in inventing capitalism (the United Provinces, England) and in backward regions (Germany, Scandinavia).

On the dogmatic level all the great reformers have called for a ‘‘return to sources’’ and among other things, have, in this spirit, rehabilitated the Old Testament which Catholicism and Orthodoxy had marginalized. I developed above the idea that Christianity had in effect been constituted not in continuity with Judaism but in rupture with it. The use, which is current today, of the term ‘Judeo- Christian', popularized by the expansion of a particular Protestant view (peculiar to the United States for the most part), implies a reversal in the vision of the relations between these two monotheistic religions, to which the Catholics (but still not yet the Orthodox) have belatedly rallied without much conviction, but rather through political opportunism.

The call for a ‘‘return to sources’’ is a method that is almost always found in movements that identify themselves with religion. But in itself it means almost nothing, the interpretation of the sources in question always being decisive. In the Reformation, the fragments of ideologies and value systems expressed on this religious ground retain all the hallmarks of primitive forms of reaction to the growing capitalist challenge. Certain aspects of the Renaissance had gone even further (Machiavelli is one of the most eloquent witnesses of this). But the Renaissance deployed on Catholic land (Italy). And the management of some Italian cities as real commercial companies controlled by a syndicate of the richest shareholders (Venice is their prototype) established a still more clear-cut relationship with the first forms of capitalism than the ProtestantismZcapitalism relationship was to be.

It can then be understood that, depending on historical circumstances, the Reformation was able to end either in the establishment of national churches in the service of the MonarchyZAncien RegimeZemergent upper middle class compro­mise, or in the retreat of the dominated classes into sects developing apocalyptic visions.

Catholicism, for long more rigid when confronted with the challenge of modern times, thanks to its hierarchical structure, also finished by opening up to the re-interpretation of dogmas, with finally no less remarkable results. I am not surprised, in these conditions, that the new progress in religious interpretation—I mean that which liberation theology represents today—has found fertile ground for reflection among Catholics rather than among Protestants. Obviously Weber’s thesis has not of much value! There is also a fine example of involution in the religious interpretation associated with the Reformation.

The protestant sects which were obliged to emigrate from seventeenth century England had developed a very particular interpretation of Christianity, which was not shared by either the Catholics or the Orthodox, nor even—at least not to the same degree of extremism—by the majority of European Protestants, including of course the Anglicans, dominant in the ruling class of England.

This particular form of Protestantism established in New England was going to be summoned to mark American ideology with a strong stamp up until the present day. Because it was to be the means by which the new American society would go off on the conquest of the continent, legitimating it in terms drawn from the Bible (the violent conquest by Israel of the promised land repeated ad nauseam in North American discourse).

In any event, whether it is a case of Catholic or Protestant societies, one school or another, I do not allow the religious interpretation a decisive independent role in the organisation and the functioning of the true dominant power.

The past does not become ‘‘atavistic transmission” by force of circumstances. History transforms peoples and religious interpretations, even when they persist in apparently ‘ancient’ and frozen forms, are themselves the subject of revision of their articulation to other dimensions of social reality.

That is because the subsequent paths of Europe on the one hand and the United States on the other have been different, that, Catholic or Protestant, European societies and United States society have divergent political cultures today.

Political culture is the product of history envisaged over the long term, which is of course always particular to each country. On this level, the history of the United States is marked by particularities which contrast with those characterising history on the European continent: the founding of New England by extremist Protestant sects, the genocide of the Indians, Negro slavery and the deployment of ‘com­munitarianism’ associated with successive waves of migration in the nineteenth century.

The ‘‘American revolution” so appreciated by many of the 1789 revolutionaries and today vaunted more than ever, was only a limited war of independence without social consequences. In their revolt against the British monarchy the American colonists wanted to transform nothing in economic and social relations, but only to no longer have to share their profits with the ruling class of the mother country.

The successive waves of immigration also played a role in the strengthening of American ideology. The immigrants were certainly not responsible for the misery and oppression which caused their departure. On the contrary they were the vic­tims. But circumstances—that is to say their emigration—led them to abandon the collective struggle to change the common conditions of their classes or groups in their own country, in favour of adhering to the ideology of individual success in the host country. This adherence was encouraged by the American system which it suited perfectly. It delayed the development of class consciousness, which, scarcely had it started to develop, than it had to face a new wave of immigrants which frustrated its political crystallization. But simultaneously, the migration encouraged the « communitarisation » of American society, because « individual success » does not exclude strong insertion into a community of origin (the Irish, the Italians etc.), without which individual isolation would risk being unbearable. Yet here again the strengthening of this dimension of identity—which the American system retrieves and flatters—is done at the expense of class con­sciousness and the formation of the citizen. Whereas in Paris the people got ready ‘‘to capture the sky’’ (here I refer to the 1871 Commune), in the United States gangs constituted by successive generations of poor immigrants (Irish, Italians etc.) killed each other, manipulated in a perfectly cynical way by the ruling classes.

Protestant Europe—England, Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia—shared in the beginning some fragments of an ideology similar to that of the United States, transmitted by the ‘‘return to the Bible’’, although certainly in attenuated form, without comparison to the extreme forms of the sects which emigrated to New England.

In the United States, there is no workers party, there never has been. The communitarian ideologies could not constitute a substitute for the absence of a working class socialist ideology. Even the most radical of which, that of the black community. Because by definition communitarianism falls into the framework of generalized racism which it fights on its own ground, but no more.

The combination specific to the historical formation of United States society— dominant « biblical » religious ideology and absence of a workers’ party—finally produced a still unparalleled situation, that of a de facto single party, the party of capital.

Today, American democracy constitutes the advanced model of what I call ‘‘low intensity democracy’’. Its functioning is based on a total separation between the management of political life, based on the practice of electoral democracy, and that of economic life, ruled by the laws of capital accumulation. What is more, this separation is not subject to radical questioning, but is rather part of what is called the general consensus. But this separation annihilates all the creative potential of political democracy. It castrates the representative institutions (parliaments and others), made impotent in face of the « market », the dictates of which it accepts.

The American State is thus in the exclusive service of the economy (that is to say of capital of which it is the exclusive faithful servant, without having to concern itself with other social interests).

In Europe in contrast, the State has been (and can become again) the obligatory crossing point for the confrontation of social interests, and, thereby encourage the historical compromises that give a meaning and a real significance to democratic practice. If the State is not constrained to fulfil this function by the class struggle and political struggles which remain independent from the exclusive logics of the accumulation of capital, then democracy becomes a derisory practice, which it is in the United States.

American ideology, like all ideologies is ‘‘eroded by time’’. During the ‘calm’ periods of history—marked by strong economic growth accompanied by social spin-offs judged to be satisfactory—the pressure the ruling class exercises on its people weakens. From time to time then, according to the needs of the moment, this ruling class ‘re-inflates’ American ideology by means which are always the same: an enemy (always external, American society being decreed good by definition) is designated (the Evil Empire, the Evil Axis) allowing the ‘‘total mobilisation” of all means intended to annihilate it. Yesterday it was communism, allowing, the cold war to be engaged and Europe to be subordinated by Mac Carthyism (forgotten by pro-Americans). Today it is ‘terrorism’, an obvious pre­text, (the 11 September so much resembles the Reichstag fire), that gets the ruling class’s true project accepted: to ensure the military control of the planet.

But lets not be mistaken. It is not the fundamentalist ideology with religious pretensions that is in the driving seat and imposes its logic on the real holders of power—capital and its servants in the State. It is capital that alone makes all the decisions that suit it, then conscripts this ideology into its service. The means used—unparalleled systematic disinformation—are then effective, isolating criti­cal minds, subjecting them to permanent unbearable blackmail. In this way the government is able to manipulate without difficulty an ‘opinion’ maintained in its foolishness.

From the debate of the past -reconciling Faith with Reason—to the modern debate—making social power laic.

To proclaim that God is the supreme law maker is a beautiful theory but with no or little practical feasibility. Muslims and Christians will experience that in their area where their religion prevails.

Highly civilised societies of the Muslim or European Middle Ages alike, had to solve a major antinomy: how conciliate Faith, or more precisely their religion which is the foundation of the legitimacy of political power in their own society and Reason which they need every day and not only to solve the petty technical problems of everyday life but furthermore to found new laws and rules in order to face the new arising challenges.

Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Diaspora would resolve this problem in the same way, by the same methods (the Aristotelian scholastic)—which are neither Jewish, nor Christian, nor Islamic, but Greek!—and with the same brilliant results. The avant gardists, Ibn Rochd among the Muslims, Saint Thomas Aquini among the Christians, or Maimonide among the Jews in Islamic lands, would go even further. They did know to put dogmas into a relative perspective, interpret the holy texts as well of necessary, to soften their insufficiencies, to substitute the textual reading by the image of the educating example. The most daring ones would be condemned later on as heretics (which was the case of Ibn Rochd) by the con­servative interpreters at the service of the powers. But it does not matter. European society in rapid movement develops in fact along the prescriptions that the avant gardists recommend, while the Muslim world which refused to do this, enters from that fact onwards into decline from which it could not as yet recover. Ghazali, the spokesperson of Islamic Conservatism, the enemy of Ibn Rochd, becomes the definitive reference in all matters—up to this day—for the ‘revolu­tionary’ Ayatollahs of Iran as well as for the conservatives of El Azhar or Saudi Arabia.

Starting from the Renaissance but especially since the Enlightenment the European Christian West leaves behind the old debate in favour of a new beginning.

The issue is not anymore to reconcile Faith and Reason, but Reason and Emancipation. Reason took its independence, and it does not negate that there could exist a field which would be reserved for Faith, but it does not interest itself anymore for it. Henceforth, the task is to legitimise the new needs; the liberty of the individual, the emancipation of society, which takes up the risk to invent its laws, to mold its own future. Modernity resides precisely in that qualitative rupture with the past.

This new vision implies neatly and full laicisation, that is to say, the aban­donment of the reference to religion or to any other meta social force in the debate about the laws. The different bourgeois societies would go more or less far, in this domain as well in others, according to circumstances. The more radical the bourgeois revolution is, the stronger is the affirmation of laicism. The more the bourgeoisie makes a compromise with the forces of the old regime, the less pro­nounced is laicism.

Modern Christianity has adapted to that profound social transformation. It had to re-interpret itself because of it, it had to renounce its ambition that its law rules, it had to accept to inspire the souls of its believers in liberty and in competition with its adversaries. A beneficial exercise because it had the effect that Christians discovered the dwindling of laws attributed to God by their ancestors. Modern Christianity became a religion without dogmas.

Whatever might have been the advances produced by the attempts to reconcile Faith and Reason, it is nonetheless necessary to recognise their limits. In effect, the advances among the Muslims and the Jews were bogged down in the old prob­lematic, and then after left in benefit of a return to the orthodoxy of the origins. On the contrary, in the western Christian world, these very advances perhaps could have prepared—without necessarily having known it—their own overtaking. How can one try to explain such a miscarriage among the ones and such a success among the others, who would become the inventors of modernity? The materialist tradition in history has given priority to social development and supposed that the religions—in their quality as an ideological instance—would end up interpreting themselves to satisfy the necessities of the movement of reality. This research hypothesis is certainly more fertile than its opposite, according to which the religions would constitute dogmatic given entities, given one and forever, with invariable trans-historic characteristics. This second hypothesis—which at pres­ently is sailing strong—prohibits all reflection on the general movement of the history of humanity taken as a whole and trapped in the affirmation of the “irreducible difference among the cultures’’.

But the materialist hypothesis does not exclude the reflection on the reasons why certain evolution of religious thought took the way here and not there. Because the religious instance—like any other instance constituting the social reality (the ideology, the politics, the economy) is moving in its own logic. The logics of each of these instances can facilitate their parallel evolution, assuring the acceleration of social change, or enter in conflict resulting in abstracting it. In that case which of those logics shall prevail? It is impossible to predict it, and it is in this under determination that the liberty of societies rests, where the choices make the real history characterised by the submission a particular instance to the logic imposed by the evolution of another.

This last reflection—and the hypothesis of under determination which I sub­mit—will permit us perhaps to advance in the response of the question posed here.^[29]

Judaism and Islam have constituted themselves historically by the affirmation that society (Jewish or Muslim) is a society where the true King is God. The principle of ‘hakiyama’ reintroduced by the Muslim fundamentalists of our age, do nothing but reaffirm this principle, with the most extreme force, to draw all pos­sible conclusions. In addition, Judaism and Islam give their original Holy Scripture (the Torah and the Koran) the strongest possible interpretation: not a word is superfluous. To the point where men of religion in both cases have always expressed strongest reservations against any kind of translation of the text, Hebrew and Arabic respectively. The Jewish and Muslim people are the people of the exegesis. The Talmud among the Jews, the Fiqh among the Muslim don’t have their equivalent in the reading of the Gospels.

That double Judeo-Islamic principle explains without doubt many of the visible aspects of what were the Jewish or the Muslim societies. Because the Holy Scriptures can be read as collections of laws, or even, of Constitutions (Saudi Arabia proclaims that the Koran is the political constitution of the State) including all the details of everyday life (the law of persons, penal law, the liturgies) inviting the believer to ‘‘renounce his own will to submit himself integrally to that of God’’ as it was often repeated in writing, imagining this life, as it should be regulated in all details like in a monastery.

The conciliation between Faith and Reason has therefore developed within the limits imposed by this double principle, equally with the Muslim Ibn Rochd as with his Jewish contemporary Maimonide. And in both cases the traditionalist reaction brought back here the talmudic exegesis recommended by Judah Halevy, there the return to the Kalam of Ashari and Ghazali (two important fundamentalist Muslim thinkers). In both cases it will be proclaimed henceforth that certainly rests in Revelation and not in Reason. The page of philosophy among the Muslims and the Jews was turned. Accompanying the stagnation, later the decline of Muslim societies, this miscarriage of religious reform was balanced in both cases, by the accentuation of the formalistic and ritualistic interpretation of the religion. The compensation for such a form of impoverishment was found in both cases in the development of mystic sects, Muslim Sufis and Jewish Kabalists, who by the way largely borrowed their methods from traditions coming from India.

If Christianity finally became more flexible, and if, from that point onwards, the locking within the horizons of the conciliation between Faith and Reason could be broken, that was possible, at least partially, for the reasons which were spelt out above: because Christianity did not propose to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth, because Gospels did not erect a positive system of laws. Now one can also comprehend the following paradox: even that the Catholic Church was strongly organised and had an official authority which could impose its interpretation of the religion, she did not resist the assault of the new problematic separating Reason and Faith, and it was Christianity which gave itself to adapt to the new emanci­patory conception of Reason, while the absence of such an authority in Islam after the prophet and in Judaism after the destruction of the Temple and the dispersion of the Sanhedrin could not prevent the maintenance of the orthodoxy of origins.

The Jews of the Diaspora on European soil could not but be affected by these radical transformations and the new conceptions about the relationship between society and religion.

Moises Mendelsohn attempts, then, in the eighteenth century to undertake this step and make in Judaism a revolution analogous to the one in which Christian society is engaged. By interpreting freely the Torah, not anymore as an obligatory legislation, but only a source of inspiration which everybody can do according to his desire, Moises Mendelsohn engages himself on the way of laicisation of society. The very evolution of European society contributes to facilitate this assimilation of the Jews, whose community is declared dead by the French Rev­olution which only recognises citizens, eventually of Israelite confession. From there the risk was great that Jewry disappears progressively in the indifference, which the Israelite bourgeoisie of Western and Central Europe shared with all its class and comprising its fractions of Christian believers.

The persistent anti Semitism—for all types of religious or simply political reasons—especially in Eastern Europe, did not let the Reform triumph in Judaism as in the populations of Christian origin. A counter—reformation was then designed, which developed in the ghettos, and took the shape of Hassidism, per­mitting the Jews to find a compensation for their inferior status shouldering their humiliation for the love of God.

The culture of the modern world is not ‘Christian’, and neither it is ‘Judeo- Christian’, as it is henceforth written in the contemporary media. That last expression has by the way strictly speaking no sense at all. How can one explain then its frequent usage? Very simply, according to my view. Christian Europe was strongly anti-Jewish (one could not say anti-Semitic because the reference to a pseudo ‘race’ had substituted religion only in the late nineteenth century) for reasons whose discussion would be beyond the framework of these reflections. After anti-Semitism led to the horrors of Nazism, Europe, becoming aware of the dimension of its crime, adopted the expression of ‘Judeo-Christian’ in a sympa­thetic and laudable intention to eradicate its anti-Semitism. It would have been more convincing to recognise directly the decisive contributions of so many ‘Jewish’ thinkers to the progress of Europe. The hyphens are used here because simply modern culture is not Christian, nor Judeo-Christian: it is bourgeois.

The criterion is removed from the field dominated by the old debate (to reconcile Faith—a religion—and Reason) to situate itself on a terrain which ignores religion. Modern thinkers henceforth are fundamentally not Christian, nor Jewish, they are bourgeois, or beyond, socialist, although they might be of Christian or Jewish origin. The bourgeois civilisation is not the creation of Christianity, or Judeo- Christianity. Inversely, it were the Christianity and the Judaism of the Jews of Western Europe which adapted themselves to the bourgeois civilisation. One expects that Islam would now be the next to make it. This is the condition that the Muslim people participate in the making of the world and that they don’t exclude themselves.

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