I was asked to elaborate a bit on the question of proto-Protestantism's relationship to Magisterial Protestantism and the question of conservative vs. progressive movements.
I had mentioned in a recent piece on Vigilantius how Gibbon
labeled him a proto-Protestant, meaning that he was a Protestant in an
anachronistic sense. For many like Gibbon, Protestantism represented the
shedding of the medieval mindset and as a movement it prepared the ground for
later Enlightenment Liberalism and its values concerning the individual,
politics, and so forth. And so (it follows) Vigilantius making a stand as he
did, was something of an anachronism, a non-medieval (Protestant) thinker
centuries before the Renaissance and Enlightenment and as one basing arguments
on Scripture – he was thus very much in keeping with the early forms of
Reformation theology that would emerge a thousand years later.
Up until the rise of the Theological Liberalism in the
nineteenth and (on some sociological levels) into the twentieth century,
Protestantism was progressive and associated with liberalism. Apart from say
the Church of England, the movement as a whole was not fond of monarchy, put
stock in the individual, tended toward republicanism, and embraced the
Enlightenment's 'rights' regime and the values associated with it. These values
also happened to overlap with Freemasonry which though incompatible with New
Testament Christianity was often viewed as a compliment to Magisterial and
later Enlightenment Protestantism.
These things were all anathema to the Old Throne and Altar
Conservatism – that defended the Medieval order, rule by aristocracy, and
resisted the Enlightenment and the revolutions it spawned. The old conservatism
viewed Protestantism as revolutionary, reckless and its individualism (in terms
of speech, art, and economics) as being absolutely cankerous and destructive.
Protestantism was associated (broadly speaking) with public
and higher education, industrialisation, a new social class of elites, a new
ethos for society – the early stages of the modern world. Politically it was
progressive and represented a type of revolutionary ideology. And Protestants
largely celebrated this and viewed Catholics and Catholic countries as
backwards and primitive.
This only began to change when Theological Liberalism kept
pushing the ideology into realms that ultimately opposed Scripture. The higher
education ethos and epistemology of Protestantism Scholasticism had turned on
itself and began to self-destruct. The authority of Scripture was overthrown
and yet the various Churches continued on, redefining themselves and their
purpose along the way – to the point of no longer being recognizable as
Churches. Individualism and economic success began to become corrosive by the
mid-twentieth century and traditionalist Protestants began moving over into a
'conservative' column vis-à-vis the new and emerging 'liberal' culture and the
acculturated mainline churches that embraced the same.
At the same time Catholicism was undergoing massive shifts
and pendulum swings as well. Catholic Social Teaching sought to create some form
of stability as did the anti-modernist measures of the early twentieth century.
But this provoked a response as seen with Vatican II and its liberalisation.
The subsequent conservative reaction in Catholicism took a generation or more
to materialize but it's increasingly represented by a longing for Throne and
Altar-type paradigms, various permutations of Integralism, and ironically a
kind of functional rapprochement with traditionalist Protestants – many of whom
seem to be in the process of abandoning Classical Liberalism as well. This is
further confused by the retention of American nationalism – the internal
contradictions of such views are stark to say the least, and as yet unresolved.
Secular Humanism has become the common enemy for both groups and as that
movement and its cultural ethos seeks to dismantle and deconstruct old forms –
traditionalist Protestants keep moving in both a conservative and Right-wing
direction, trajectories that are often contradictory as they are not rooted in
the same concerns. Often overlapping or even (seemingly) the same, the end
result is the idea of progress has been incrementally abandoned, opening the
door to revisionist narratives concerning industrialisation, modern medicine,
history, and the like. And though it's completely at odds with the kind of
conservative Protestant ethos that existed a century ago – many of today's
Confessionalist and traditionalist thinkers are embracing extreme forms of
anti-science/anti-medicine ideology, neo-agrarianism, and Right-wing extremism
attached to related narratives.
The only place I've seen the older ethos survive is in Ulster
– wherein Unionist Protestants have (last I knew) continued to celebrate the
North's industrial prowess and economy, and the South (the Republic) is looked
down on as agrarian, backwards, and traditionalist – even to the point of
criticizing large Catholic families and how it leads to stagnation and a
failure to advance culturally.
How foreign such thinking is in some of the most conservative
Protestant Confessionalist circles in our day! Some of these Neo-Confederate
and Neo-Agrarian Protestants have embraced narratives that once were only compatible
with traditionalist Catholicism. Once tending toward the Modern, today's
Protestantism seems to be flirting with its own forms of Romanticism. In
reality, it's as if these ideas and many more have been thrown into a blender.
Because of this shift wherein contemporary traditionalist
Protestants are viewed (and view themselves) as staunch conservatives, some of
the older progress narratives and Whig interpretations seem strange and
nonsensical.
Until recently, the traditionalist and theologically
conservative Protestants in Britain and Europe tended to be left-leaning.
Protestants had often been the under-class, the workers, and plain folk. They
were not keen on social conservatism which was associated with Throne and Altar
– stifling tradition and the empowerment of the aristocracy.
This has begun to change due to the influence of American
political Christianity and its Dominionism as well as various economic and
social factors – immigration plays a consequential role as well.
But in the United States the WASP-Establishment meant that
Protestants were favoured and often empowered. It was groups like the Catholics
and other immigrants that were marginalised and as the downtrodden and
exploited, they tended toward Left-wing and Progressive-type politics.
But all of this is changing as well and increasing numbers of
traditionalist Protestants are revisiting the American story and narrative.
Some are re-writing and revising it to their liking – others seem willing to
abandon its ideology and embrace a kind of Neo-Christendom authoritarianism –
even while they still (in patriotic but deluded sincerity) wave the flag, this despite
the fact that their views are antithetical to the ideology of the American
Founders. They are embracing a conservatism that falls off the scale of
Enlightenment Liberalism and thus (in historical terms) represents a form of
counter-revolution – which tends toward everything from Bonapartism to Fascism.
As such, the progressive-conservative appellations are
becoming somewhat meaningless as their parameters continue to shift. But there
has been a shift, that's what really needs to be understood.
Proto-Protestantism as defined here is connected to the First
Reformation which in its primitivism and attempts at repristination was anti-progressive
at its core. The First Reformation wanted to re-capture the Christianity of
antiquity, rejected Christendom viewing it not as some form of progress but
degradation and apostasy. The Magisterial Reformation embraced Christendom and
yet sought to transform it and move beyond the papacy. The First Reformation
rejected the entire system and when the majority of sixteenth century Anabaptists
did the same – they were viewed as evil and anathematized by the confessions of
the Magisterial Protestants. The First Reformation (for the most part and certainly
before the era of The Western Schism (1378-1417)) was not Anabaptist nor shared
in its rationalist tendencies, and yet its pilgrim ethics were more or less the
same and thus at utter odds with the Magisterial Reformation.
I've argued for a return to the First Reformation and as such
a rejection of Magisterial Reformation epistemology and sociology – and the
Ages of Reason and Enlightenment it helped to spawn. This does not mean a
re-embrace of medievalism but something closer to it – sans the Catholic order.
I'm not calling for a return to the philosophy of Aristotle, the cosmology of
Ptolemy, nor the medical theory of Galen, but a rejection of the Renaissance
culture and its attitudes regarding philosophy and culture – of which the
Reformation was a part.
A return to the ethics of the New Testament and the
supernaturalism of Scripture will mean for a different view of the world,
theology, and history than what is encountered in the heirs of the Magisterial
Reformation. It seeks to return to a way of thinking and authority that antedates
the advent of Roman Catholicism and yet also explicitly rejects the Magisterial
Reformation, its rationalism, and the degenerate Evangelical mongrel it
produced. Thus, I advocate 'anti-progress' one might say but that in no way
places me on the same trajectory as the so-called 'conservatives' of today's
Right-wing Christians. Our rejections of modernity are built on different
foundations and different premises.