May 29 2009
Was the Protestant Revolt the Cause of Many of Today’s Social Ills?
I have been reading The Catholic Worker Movement by Mark and Louise Zwick and just completed the chapter “The Common Good vs Individualism”. In the chapter, this passage stood out:
Peter and Dorothy especially quoted Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Modern Capitalism, which shows the dramatic changes in concepts away from the common good. Tawney contended that what happened in the historical process generated by the Reformation was the movement of the focus of exchange from the social solidarity group (common good) to the individual. He argued that the social character of wealth that had been the essence of medieval doctrine was lost through the unexpected development of economic individualism that sprang to a large extent from the notion of private interpretation of Sacred Scripture. In their eagerness to rid the world of the corruption of the Catholic Church at the time, the reformers replaced the church teaching of solidarity with the teaching of individual salvation without good works. As Tawney put it, “Individualism in religion led insensibly, if not quite logically, to an individualist morality, and an individualist morality to a disparagement of the significance of the social fabric as compared with personal character.”
In England and in the young United States, with time and pressure from merchants, Puritanism (the outgrowth of Calvinism) added a “halo of ethical sanctification to the appeal of economic expediency, and offered a moral creed in which the duties of religion and the calls of business ended their long estrangement in an unanticipated reconciliation.” Gradually, the Reformation idea that individual conscience decides led to the practical conclusion that might be thought of as whatever works, whatever is comfortable, whatever makes a profit. Those in trade argued that “business affairs should be left to be settled by businessmen, unhampered by the intrusions of an antiquated morality or by misconceived arguments of public policy.” Economics became separated from ethics. The contrast with earlier Christian teaching on the sin of avarice is striking. The church had always taught that greed, the implementation of the desire to gain more and more wealth, was one of the capital sins, and the idea of acquiring wealth was limited by a body of moral rules imposed under the sanction of religious authority. (pg 141-142)
I would tend to agree in the above assessment. Protestantism has fragmented Christianity to the point where, in some cases, it is completely detached from its roots. This allows for the the individual to interpret what Christianity is to fit with what they want, not what it is. This individualism is what has given root to the social ills of Relativism and Materialism (via Capitalism).
Furthermore, earlier in the chapter, Peter Maurin (one of the founders of the Catholic Workers Movement with Dorothy Day) believed that “socialism would not have existed if not for the excesses of capitalism (pg 135). I would tend to agree with this premise also since tends to be a backlash when there are excesses in any system.
With Socialism and Global Capitalism combining forces these day with their incestuous relationship, I think we may be starting to see a backlash to both systems. What replaces it will depend on who presents the best alternative. I believe by combining aspects of the Distributism, Catholic Workers, and Catholic Land movements (along with some others which I have not researched yet), I think we Catholics could provide a viable alternatives to both Socialism and Capitalism.
