Religious Liberty without Religious Literacy?

   Religious Liberty without Religious Literacy?

                          Published in Marietta Daily Journal Feb. 19, 2017

            If literacy is a pre-requisite for liberty, westerners everywhere – particularly Christians – should be reminded that 2017 is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.

            In fact, at the time this column was begun earlier this week, we were 258 days, 5 hours, 20 minutes, and 16 seconds from the anniversary of Martin Luther’s stand at the Diet of Worms on October 31, 1517.

 “I cannot do otherwise. Here I stand,” Luther declared as he stood before an angry council that was prepared to excommunicate him for posting his 95 theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg.  Luther’s posting called into question particular beliefs and practices of the Roman Catholic Church.

            For those who dozed during 10^th grade World History or college Western Civilization, the Reformation wasn’t just another event in church history.  Luther’s action shook the European continent and would later affect the very origins of America.  In time it diminished a powerful, religious-social-political institution and grew a vastly different one.

            Without a deep forest of historical detail, suffice it to say that a German monk arrived at a conclusion which he was compelled by conscience to reveal.  From his own reading of Scripture he was persuaded that the Bible alone, not the church, was the guide for doctrine. 

Since the Roman Catholic Church was both the religious and political authority, Luther was treading dangerous ground.  No longer the sect persecuted by emperors for 400 years, Christianity in 1517 was the Way, the Truth, the Life, and the Empire.  From Constantine (337 A.D.) on, most emperors had Christian sympathies.  Long before Luther’s day, the Roman Catholic Church was indeed catholic (pervasive) and also very Roman, that is to say, powerful and authoritative.  It was a state church.

Into this secular-religious milieu came the first protestant, or the first protestant to shake the existing system so profoundly.  Soon thereafter, European kings, who owed their allegiance to the Pope, began to break with Rome, the most notable being Henry VIII of England.  Protestantism, born of protest, was spreading.

And why should modern working people whose days are spent laboring to pay bills know about Martin Luther? Because literacy aids liberty and a better life. Because knowledge of courageous people who turned history around can inspire those who think they are trapped.  Knowing about unlikely heroes can encourage us to be heroic.

No elite, Luther was an unlikely hero or reformer.  Unlike his fellow reformer John Calvin whose view of God matched his dictatorial, iron-fisted rule over Geneva, Luther was an humble scholar.

   Because of Luther’s stand, the Christian world today is made up of Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox believers.  Catholics still have a pope, Orthodox Christians still honor their icons, and Protestants still splinter off as quickly as one can say “church conference.”  But this is freedom and Luther birthed it.

If America isn’t a Christian nation, she is, as Supreme Court Justice William O. Justice observed, “a religious people.”  But according to a 2010 Pew poll, we are religiously ignorant. Particularly is Christian literacy in decline.  Only 46 percent of Americans know that Martin Luther initiated the Reformation.  Roughly 45 percent of Catholics don’t know that their church teaches that the bread and wine in the sacrament of the Eucharist have been transformed into the actual body of Christ.  Interestingly enough, 62 percent of Americans know that Hinduism is India’s majority religion.

Like once-Christian Europe, America has a case of cultural amnesia.  I suspect the growth of “nones” in Europe and America indicates forgetfulness as much as it does intellectual or religious choice.  If “faith cometh by hearing … ,” and children and youth don’t hear, then the chain of history (of cultural, religious memory, actually) is broken.  How shall they know of Martin Luther without a parent, teacher, or preacher to tell them?  Individuals and nations forget.

Happily, the schism brought about by Luther didn’t produce total separation.  Where would the pro-life movement be without Catholics and evangelicals working together?  How much more intense would America’s sexual chaos be without Catholics and evangelicals opposing it?  If two houses agree on traditional values, they agree on what should be valued.  Luther would be pleased with that agreement.    

We all need to know how freedom was born and how tyranny is best fought.  Come October, even Pope Francis will be commemorating the German monk who took a stand and changed the world.  In so doing, the good pope will be advancing religious literacy and religious liberty as well.

Roger Hines

2/15/17