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The Reformation Didn't


It has been almost 500 years since the Great Reformation in Europe, when the Church that had been the symbol-bearer of the society split apart, most notably between the establishment, centered in Rome, and the followers of Martin Luther, located in Germany.  What had been the old Roman Empire and the uncouth Germanic tribes came raggedly apart; not along neat lines.

 The Roman Empire, the old Roman Empire, had stretched itself too far, and had found itself, a thousand years earlier, coming undone.  The barbarians in the north--those Germanic tribes who did not understand that the Emperor was divine, and all that, crowded in.  The Jews, over there on the other side of the Mediterranean, had spawned a Jesus cult, and it was spreading like cancer.  So the Empire adopted the new religion for itself--you use the glue you can find--and the Holy Roman Empire was formed.  The Holy Roman Empire had, in fact, two heads:  the Emperor and the Bishop at Rome.

 Ever since, even now, even still, there are people who think that governments and religions are a kind of divine arrangement to be achieved.  Christians got used to the idea when their god took the place of the gods who came before them.  

 If you look down the street, or listen to the news, or Sunday sermons, you will hear the echoes of "a Christian nation", or "a white Christian nation", or--when it gets even darker and uglier--that people with other religions do not belong here, and ought to go home (or much worse!).  We have drunk deeply of the nectar of a State Religion:  we demand our leaders be religious in the right kind of way, we pray at football games and at picnics and at community meetings, and hang the Ten Commandments of Moses on the public school wall.

 Donald Trump does not seem to be a religious man--Shall I say it so nicely?--but he is on to something when he says he wants to make American great again, the way it used to be great:  Christian, white, male, and military.  He does not quite say he wants to restore the Holy Roman Empire.  He just means European, Christian, with male priests and female objects and real men in the home, the way it used to be for white Christian males.  

 And even one of the best of the recent popes occasionally says that maybe Christianity could be what it used to be.  Pope Francis, a few days ago, noted the centuries-long divisions in the western European and colonial church, and proposed that maybe we should all just get along again.  Maybe Lutherans should scrunch back alongside Catholics.  Without women in the priesthood, of course:  that, he said, will never happen!

And there we are, still:  the establishment, immigrants from uncouth places, women out of their places.  Yearning for the Holy Roman Empire, when Europe was great; when god and man, the bishop and the emperor, were great and got along, and when men were men, and women knew their place.

It sounds like an election year.


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