Junior Faculty Fellow 2001-02
Brad Gregory (History)
Stanford University
The Seduction of Secularism:
The Displacement of Christianity in Early Modern Europe
I am in the first stages of a large-scale research project about
the ways in which the intractable religious disagreements of sixteenth-century
Christianity, and their embodiment in religious violence, transformed
not only the religious traditions involved but also the wider political
and cultural contexts in which they coexisted. An international,
cross-confessional, and long-term perspective on early modern Christianity
suggests that the fundamental motor for change in early modern Europe
was not “the Reformation” per se, but rather the conflicts
among Roman Catholicism and the divergent varieties of Protestantism
and radical Protestantism. Eventually and ironically, the pragmatic
solution to the religious conflicts was a deliberate refusal to
resolve them. Instead, a secular institutional and ideological framework
was gradually created that enabled multiple religious groups to
coexist in exchange for social, political, and economic quiescence
and the acceptance of the privatization and individualization of
religion. Such an acceptance must deeply have affected the character
of Christian traditions that were centrally concerned with the public,
collective shaping of concrete human reality.
What happens to religious traditions when they accept secular conditions
for their existence? What happens to society as a whole? Answering
these questions and telling this story will eventually require an
analysis that spans three centuries, from the early Reformation
to the Enlightenment and the American Constitution. It must explore
those areas strongly marked by religious conflict and controversy
in early modern Europe, including Germany, Switzerland, France,
England, and the Low Countries. I want to delineate and analyze
the unintended process whereby incompatible, concretely expressed
religious convictions paved a path to a secular society. This process
cannot be studied as an internalist history of religion. Institutionally,
it embraces the progressive domestication of Catholic, Lutheran,
and Reformed Protestant churches by territorial and national states;
legally, it concerns the articulation of individual rights to freedom
of belief and worship; intellectually, it includes the emergence
of post-Cartesian philosophy, the new science, and certain expressions
of cultural relativism; economically, it is inseparable from the
proliferation of an increasingly capitalist, consumer society that
lured human aspirations in new directions. My guiding hypothesis
is that today’s deep disagreements about truth and authority,
both in the academy and in society at large, are the long-term product
of disagreements about Christian truth and authority in the Reformation
era. Because such disagreements were displaced and transformed rather
than resolved, they remain with us, often in drastically individualized
and secularized forms. The tentative title for this project is The
Seduction of Secularism: The Displacement of Christianity in Early
Modern Europe.
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