Review: Unintended Reformation by Brad S. Gregory

I’m done. I got through Unintended Reformation’s Chapter on morality, read a bit of chapter 5 on economics, and then (this time through) I skipped to the conclusion. For me, this book reads pretty quickly— Gregory’s urgency drives me on. It’s well-organized so you can see where the author is going next. The complexity of the writing is well suited to the intended audience: academics. The heart of the book is Chapter 2, Relativizing Doctrines, in which Gregory traces the various attempts to solve pluralism since the Reformation. The book is well-researched and filled with details about the changes from the Reformation to today. When thinking about making changes in life, it’s important to really understand your current state so that your efforts have a realistic beginning point. Gregory contributes to this understanding. I will add that in his consideration of morality, he admirably stresses avarice and contempt for the poor more than sexual morality.

To me, it looks like Gregory’s intention was to provide historical context for Alasdair MacIntyre’s book about virtue ethics, After Virtue. Gregory also wants to stress the urgency of the problem and motivate academics to take hyperpluralism (his urgent-sounding neologism) seriously enough to change their deeply-held assumptions. He proposes that “some things might be done in the small world of higher education and research universities” (382). A modest scope, to be sure, but (as Gregory himself notes) in the wake of centuries of unintended consequences from sweeping political changes, this scope is appropriate.

My main criticism of Unintended Reformation is that by going back to the institutionalized worldview of the High Middle Ages, Gregory does not go deep enough. This institutionalized worldview was the fruit of a thousand years of Christians meditating on the mysteries of faith in dialogue with non-Christian ideas and events. But the solutions proposed by the reformers came not from outside this worldview but from within. If the tension between a corrupt clergy and a devout laity was intense, perhaps that was because the hierarchy had already come to the conclusion in their hearts that faith had nothing to do with life. And similarly with the indifference of the rich to the plight of the poor. Machiavelli’s cynicism with power was preceded by Dante’s valley of the rulers in the Purgatorio, where rulers repented of their neglect of faith in order to rule. If the elite failed to be transformed by Christianity, then it must be that within the rich moral theology of virtues, vices, works of mercy, imitation of Christ, etc., something of the vitality of the encounter with Christ had been muffled or dampened. No wonder the reformers sought to “return to the spirit of the founder” in Scripture. Gregory shows the consequences of this bold break, especially since it included a break with community and communion. But, the cracks of dissolution were well established before Luther, and each revolution intensified these breaks. The Reformation was not “paradise lost.”

In the wake of the Reformation, Ignatius of Loyola (16th century), Thérèse of Lisieux (19th century), and Luigi Giussani (20th century) all read Thomas à Kempis (Gregory’s example of the High Middle Ages), but each of them expressed the Christian faith in a fresh and attractive way. The expression of their faith, however, took a very different form from that of Thomas à Kempis and the High Middle Ages. Because Christian faith remains incredibly generative, there is no need to revive particular forms of the past.

In his urgency, Gregory can come across a bit shrill. In a couple of passages, Gregory focuses on the violence engendered by competing claims for the truth. For example:

“The more the limits of the tolerable are legally extended and politically protected via rights, the more do those citizens object, who, because of their different conceptions of the good, find intolerable precisely the novel goods that are being protected through the assertion of rights under the aegis of liberty. The result tends to be friction, faction, and anger.”

(187, emphasis in original)

This passage strikes my ear very similarly to a passage from Joseph Ratzinger's 1986 letter to the bishops on pastoral care of gay people. After condemning violence, Ratzinger continues:

“the proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered. When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.”

(#10, emphasis mine)

In both examples, violent rejection of different ways of life within pluralism is considered to be natural and expected. As I was reading through the various controversies among Protestants, between Catholics and Protestants, and between one rationalist philosopher and the previous ones, I couldn’t help thinking of René Girard and his theory of the scapegoat as the founding myth of society. With the flattened worlds of Protestantism, rationalism, or pluralism (which now includes Catholics and others as well), anxiety increases and precipitates a mimetic crisis. Gregory suggests that intolerance could be provoked by downturns in prosperity (189), but this outcome could be even better explained by a search for scapegoats. Scapegoating is especially more likely when one considers that transgender people make up perhaps 2% of the US population, but are yet the target of a record-breaking number of laws intent on restricting or even eliminating transgender people. Such a disproportionate reaction indicates mimetic forces rather than mere decrease in tolerance of pluralistic views.

What now?

As Gregory demonstrates, the absolute last thing we need now is a new manifesto or a new strategy to solve the problems of modernity. Gregory’s aim is to clear the way within the academy. MacIntyre suggested that we need a new Saint Benedict to propose the Christian life in a new way. Instead, I think of what Augustine wrote to Pelagius: “This is the horrible root of your error: you claim that the gift of Christ consists in his example, while that gift is his person itself." Therefore, the starting point cannot be ethics, virtue ethics or otherwise. For Catholics and Christians, the next step should be a return to the person of Christ instead of focusing on political battles. Is this a privatization of faith? No, it means to return to the core of the faith, which is the basis for any proposed public morality. Everyone would do well to reflect deeply on their humanity and their most core desires, while at the same time restraining envy and self-aggrandizement. This is a personal work, which I invite anyone who reads this to take seriously.