The Real Revolution

On the Reformation, bigamy and boss babes

At the beginning of the Reformation, the father of the great French essayist Montaigne warned him that ‘this beginning of evil would easily degenerate into execrable Atheism’ (Essays, 54.2, chap. 12). Time, so often the best judge of opinions, has proven the old man wise. The Protestant principle of private judgement has, like an acid, eaten away at the foundations of faith. It’s a short, logical step from Protestantism to deism and then from deism to atheism. In fact, the Reformation was the real cultural revolution.

It was also the real sexual revolution. Although it’s still too early to tell the full impact, there are clear indications:

Protestant principles meant this was inevitable, and this article explains why.

Of Heresies and Hippies

Protestantism is New Age Christianity. Every guru talking about the inner light is the spiritual heir of Luther. His first mistake was to exaggerate the effects of original sin: human nature, he believed, was intrinsically corrupt. The will was totally lacking in freedom and therefore unable to pursue the truth that the intellect, totally corrupted, was unable to know. Instead, the will must submit completely passively —with no masculine questing or striving — to the grace of God. And faith becomes blind and unreasoning as the intellect is led by a mysterious force it can neither understand nor resist.

Ideas have consequences, and Kant saw the logical consequences of Protestantism. He denied the validity of metaphysical argument altogether. It was in principle impossible, he asserted, to prove the existence of God, the intellect and free will. Religion became merely an unreasoning religious feeling or a matter of doing what works. Kant’s student Schleiermacher called this ‘the religious sense,’ and it means each man can be led by his own inner light.

From this ‘religious sense’ stem New Age pragmatism, sentimentalism and mysticism. Thus Pope Pius X condemned Modernism, which accepted Kant’s rejection of the rational demonstration of all religious tenets, as ‘a compendium of all heresies.’ But whereas the Catholic Church stamped this out, affirming the truth that faith is fundamentally an act of the intellect, Protestantism rendered Christianity a matter of feelings and opinions.

When John of Leyden famously threw away his tools, headed a mob of fanatics, overran the town of Munster, proclaimed himself king of Sion and took fourteen wives at once, he was acting on his opinion that polygamy is Christian. And Protestantism entitled him to that opinion as his private judgement. It’s an opinion shared by many Protestant accounts advocating “Biblical” masculinity today. By the same logic, in fact, Unitarians, who deny the divinity of Christ, are also entitled to their opinion.

By substituting the private judgement of the individual for the authority of the Church, Protestantism ultimately left all problems regarding God and man unsolved. Paradoxically, the result is either indifference or fanaticism. One man shrugs his shoulders. Another submits to a favourite pastor — a Michael Foster, a James White, whoever — as more than just another man with an opinion. And yet another, with an especially strong personal ‘religious sense’, starts his own sect. Luther even ended by claiming personal infallibility.

What are we to make of this mess of contradictions? As the Vatican Council infallibly declared, ‘God cannot deny himself, nor can truth contradict truth.’ Protestantism and its New Age heirs are the sorry spectacle of the ‘inventions of opinion having been taken for the verdicts of reason.’ Ultimately, both appeal to human pride. The temptation to be one’s own ultimate theological authority is powerful. And if God has chosen to use the consequent chaos to chasten this foolishness, so be it.

No chastity, no masculinity

St. Jerome famously remarked that there are no chaste heretics. As rule, heresy either begins in unchastity or ends in it. Luther broke his vow of celibacy, and this set the tone. Protestantism has been accommodating itself to lust ever since. Historically, wherever Christianity doesn’t prevail, women are degraded, and that applies to Protestantism, too, as a deviation from Christian doctrine in the areas of monogamy, divorce, contraception and perhaps the most overlooked: nuns.

Regarding monogamy, Luther wrote that, ‘as to whether we may have several wives, the authority of the patriarchs leaves us completely free.’ Accordingly, he gave permission to Philip of Hesse to have two wives. Numerous Protestant “biblical” masculinity accounts on social media today also promote multiple wives. Catholic teaching, by contrast, is that God instituted monogamous marriage: He made Adam one wife. Polygyny was a product of the fall: Lamech, the first recorded instance, was in the line of Cain. Christ then corrected it: two, not more, become one flesh. This was a hard teaching for men to accept, and here as everywhere else — e.g., fasting, confession — Protestantism softened Christ’s demands to accommodate the weakness of the flesh.

Regarding divorce, Protestantism also applauded with senseless glee the scandal of Henry VIII — ‘a fat, horny coomer,’ as my friend Timothy Gordon described him. Against the degenerate passions of potentates the Catholic Church has always stood firm, intrepidly upholding the sanctity of marriage. Protestantism, by contrast, trembled and caved at the fear of displeasing them. It thereby conceded critical ground: the family is the foundation stone of society, and nothing affects the family more than sexual morality does.

Appeasement never works. It’s counterproductive, in fact, because it only emboldens the adversary. And so, naturally, contraception followed divorce. Once the torrent of lust broke the dam of doctrine, it could never again be contained. Indeed, some Protestant sects now permit abortion. As Aquinas warned, those who prevent a human life will also take one. He ranked contraception just below murder, and the sexual revolution — ultimately rooted in the Reformation — proved him grimly prescient.

As Elizabeth Anscombe said, contraception within marriage is in fact even worse than contraception outside it. Within marriage, it violates a sacrament. But of course Protestantism had decided marriage was not in fact a sacrament. Ironically, however, if you accept contraception, you lose the main argument against sex outside marriage. As Prümmer explains in his Handbook of Moral Theology, ‘the internal reason for the sinfulness of fornication is that of itself it causes grave injury to the welfare of the child and to the welfare of society.’

But if contraception means no child is involved, the fornicator reasons, what precisely is the problem? It’s just sterile friction for fun, right? And the sodomites, grinning with glee at seeing sex severed from procreation, realise that they, too, can be “married” according to Protestant logic.

Protestantism made the fatal mistake of giving free rein to the passions. "Quid vis videre, quod non licet habere?" (Why do you wish to see that which you are forbidden to possess?) is one of the wisest observations from the author of The Imitation of Christ. Catholic doctrine, understanding that things bad begun make strong themselves by ill, always stamped out the smallest sparks of degeneracy. But in place of that masculine severity, Protestantism offered only effeminacy.

Perhaps the greatest mistake of Protestantism, however, was the abolition of nunneries. The wretched state of modern women is one of the deep shockwaves of this. The Greeks had the priestesses of Ceres. The Romans had their vestals. The Gauls had their druidesses. The Germaic tribes had their prophetesses. All were virgins, and the importance of that was understood even by pagans.

The reason is simple. Being more naturally impulsive and imaginative than men are, more passionate, more easily led astray (hence targeted by Satan first), women have greater need to have set before their eyes models of virtue, especially modesty. No pagan society had ever tolerated single women as a social class. They were either in religious orders, married or regarded with disapproval (and usually prostitutes). With the Reformation, however, and its denigration of the Blessed Virgin and nuns, the boss babe was born — and femininity died along with masculinity.