Ironicwarcriminal posted:
There aren't really any actual Protestant countries anymore though, maybe parts of America or tenuously Britain.

the vast majority of catholics in america have protestant mentalities

Groulxsmith posted:
does anyone remember the SA poster called "orthodox" or "orthodoxy" who only posted about orthodox christianity

i always liked him

ya

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

jools posted:
scotland and scandinavia are ridiculously, unbelievably protestant. so are parts of the netherlands.

not really sure how protestant you can be when you're godless liberals and social democrats. I know you can argue that such philosophies arose from a protestant enlightenment thing but I don't think the Protestant God would be happy with those places today, he'd disown them.

A: very protestant

Belloc was close to Chesterton; so close, in fact, that Bernard Shaw referred to them collectively as ‘Chesterbelloc’. Like Chesterton he knew his history (in which he had gained a first at Oxford), and regarded Islam as a historic enemy, regretting bitterly the failure of the Crusades to destroy it. That failure, he wrote ‘ is the major tragedy in the history of our struggle against Islam, that is, against Asia’. We don’t know if he feared an Islamic future emerging from Chapel Christianity; but he would surely have sympathised with the moral of the Flying Inn.

Yet his account of Islam deserves respect, and cannot be dismissed as simple prejudice. Take, for instance, his explanation of the mass conversions of Christians to Islam in the wake of the early conquests. He has no time for theories of the bloody scimitar. Instead, he writes that Islam ‘zealously preached and throve on the paramount claims of justice, social and economic. . Wherever Islam conquered there was a new spirit of freedom and relaxation.’ Not only did it offer a more just social order, it was easy to understand, evincing ‘an extreme simplicity which pleased the unintelligent masses who were perplexed by the mysteries inseparable from the profound intellectual life of Catholicism, and from its radical doctrine of the Incarnation.’

For Belloc, the success and persistence of Islam are to be explained by its combination of Christian truths, such as the Virgin Birth, the messiahhood of Christ, and the second coming, a staunch life of prayer and fasting, and a kind of social gospel which medieval Christianity, in its feudal and ecclesial structures, could not accommodate. That is why, like John of Damascus, he treats Islam not as a new religion, but as a Christian heresy. It is ‘not a denial,’ he writes, ‘but an adaptation and a misuse, of the Christian thing.’ Muhammad ‘preached and insisted upon a whole group of ideas which were peculiar to the Catholic Church’.

Like Chesterton, Belloc lived in an English Catholic world of converts and recusants eternally pinched between an Englishness usually associated with the established Church, and the universal but foreign church of Rome. The Protestant triumph in his native land was eternally on his brain. Hence, just as Chesterton imputes to Nonconformity the capacity to turn Britons into Musulmans, Belloc ends by defining Islam as a kind of Reformation.

Belloc was not the first to classify the rise of Islam in such terms. Carlyle, in his Heroes and Hero-worship had made this connection, largely implicitly, years previously. So had Oswald Spengler. And a specifically Catholic polemic against Islam as a precursor to Protestant error dates back to counter-reformation polemicists such as Ludovico Marracci (d.1700), who, according to Robert Irwin, viewed Protestantism as ‘essentially a variant form of Islam’.

But Belloc makes the link explicit. The most lethal threat to the Roman church comes from a direction which may be very generally described as Arian, Islamic, and Calvinist. All these heresies denied the ordained priesthood and the communion of saints, downgraded or abolished the sacraments, and insisted on a programmatic return to a supposed apostolic age before Chalcedonian strictures turned the God worshipped by Jesus into a Greek conundrum. It was heresy in the name of sancta simplicitas.

Belloc writes this:

‘There is thus a very great deal in common between the enthusiasm with which Mohammed’s teaching attacked the priesthood, the Mass and the sacraments, and the enthusiasm with which Calvinism, the central motive force of the Reformation, did the same. It insisted upon the equality of men, and it necessarily had that further factor in which it resembled Calvinism – the sense of predestination, the sense of fate; of what the followers of John Knox were always calling ‘the immutable decrees of God’.’

He goes on to repeat the longstanding theme of an alliance satanée between Islam and the rise of Lutheranism: ‘One of the reasons that the breakdown of Christendom at the Reformation took place was the fact that Mohammedan pressure against the German Emperor gave the German Princes and towns the opportunity to rebel and start Protestant Churches in their dominions.’ It is true that both Luther and Calvin had railed passionately against the Turk, but this does no more than disguise a real sibling rivalry or even envy. In the end, all were against the fond superstition of the Mass, against images, against the ordained and celibate clergy, and against the Petrine principle without which there is no salvation.

In contrast to the Orientalist consensus of his day, Belloc does not, then, see Islam as sui generis, an eternally dissimilar Levantine Other. Muhammad is simply an Arab Calvin; and Medina is Geneva in a hot climate. But he claims that Islam’s reformation is stronger, having succeeded permanently, while Protestantism is failing. He points to the ongoing possibility of a great Islamic awakening:

‘In Islam there has been no such dissolution of ancestral doctrine or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal breakup of religion in Europe. The whole spiritual strength of Islam is still present in the masses of Syria and Anatolia, of the East Asian mountains, of Arabia, Egypt and North Africa. The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed: but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed.’

‘That culture happens to have fallen back in material applications; there is no reason whatever why it should not learn its new lesson and become our equal in all those temporal things which now alone give us our superiority over it whereas in Faith we have fallen inferior to it.’

Here we are back with Chesterton: ordinary Nonconformity, a milksop affair, can never win England, but Islam, Protestantism’s strongest strain, just might. Protestantism, as Weber thought, led to fragmentation and secularity; but the more successful and enduring reformation, that of the Prophet, has been better than Christianity at resisting this. And in contrast to Hegel, who voiced the usual assumption that Islam’s energy was spent, following which it ‘has retreated into oriental ease and repose’, Belloc warned that ‘the power of Islam may at any moment re-arise.’

To turn back the clock again: how did this apparent congruity find expression in the moment of Reformation itself? The actual history of the role of Islam in the Reformation has yet to be adequately attempted, beyond historiographies of the theme of the Turkish scourge. In Germany Islam was a positive theme not of Reformation, but of Enlightenment – witness Goethe’s Mahomets Gesang and Lessing’s Nathan the Wise. As a non-mediative relation with God it is implicit also in Rilke, where he writes:

‘Muhammad was immediate, like a river bursting through a mountain range; he breaks through to the One God with whom you can talk so wonderfully, every morning, without the telephone called ‘Christ’ into which people constantly shout, ‘Hallo, is anyone there,’ and no-one replies.’

In France, too, a sympathy for the Prophet accompanies some dimensions of the anticlerical early Enlightenment: the Comte de Boulainvilliers, writing in 1728, held that ‘there is no more plausible system than his, more agreeable to the light of reason’; but his concerns here are those of the lumieres: it is the simplicity and purity of the desert, not Ishmael specifically, that have allowed Islam to avoid the superstitions of the Catholic Church. For such French islamophiles, institutions such as wudu, circumcision, and the prohibition on pork, are worthwhile because they are reasonable and hygienic, not because they enact a submission to a personal God.

The English evolution, however, here as on other matters, was decidedly different.

I have written elsewhere on this (British Muslim Identity, 2003), outlining what I take to be an enduringly Pelagian streak in the national religious style, reinforced in various ways by the rediscovery of Plato during the Reformation period and subsequently. Figures like Henry Stubbe, physician to James the First, and author of the first appreciative biography of the Prophet ever written by a Christian, indicate the real convergence which his contemporaries noticed between Islam and a certain kind of Puritanism. He writes:

‘This is the sum of Mahometan Religion, on the one hand not clogging Men’s Faith with the necessity of believing a number of abstruse Notions which they cannot comprehend, and which are often contrary to the dictates of Reason and common Sense; nor on the other hand loading them with the performance of many troublesome, expensive and superstitious Ceremonies, yet enjoyning a due observance of Religious Worship, as the surest Method to keep Men in the bounds of their duty both to God and Man.’

The history of reformed Christianity in England is intricate, and it is important to note that the established Church represents a settlement substantially less protestant than was normal on the Continent. In her new book Reason and Religion in the English Revolution, Sarah Mortimer documents the role of Socinianism, associated polemically with Islam, as the trigger for an Arminian reaction which led ultimately to the settlement of the 1650s, which to this day defines the relations between church and state in the United Kingdom. In other words, on Mortimer’s view, the Socinian and, by implication, the so-called ‘Mahometan controversies’ in England were an antithesis that fed only weakly into the final Anglican synthesis; the role of Unitarianism and crypto-Islamic currents at the time of the Civil War was only to goad the bishops into the definition of a reaction which was firmly Trinitarian and also sacramental.

British Christianity continued to claim apostolic continuity; while not in communion with Rome, it remained avowedly ‘catholic’. Only in the last twenty years has the exodus of Anglo-Catholic priests, triggered by the admission of women to holy orders, reconfigured the power-balance in favour of the Protestant wing of the church.

A few have claimed even this will to synthesis and mediation as indicative of an Islamic convergence. Most notable here is the former Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic, whose book Islam between East and West concludes with an odd eulogy to Anglicanism as a middle way.

The debate over Izetbegovic’s claim will continue. However my point here is not dependent on its outcome. I wish only to signal the continued hospitality, at the energetic margins of British religion in the early modern period, of forms of radical dissent which were descended organically from the Socinian disputes which produced the likes of Henry Stubbe, or John Toland’s Mahometan Christianity, indicated for instance in his 1718 attempt to repristinate the Christian religion ‘before the Papal corruptions and Usurpations’.

One might, then, make this claim for British Islam. It originates as a community in the temperance halls of Liverpool: Quilliam’s mosque cleverly replicated core dimensions of their form and function, to the extent of adding a pedal-operated organ to the adjacent meeting room. This matrix is unsurprising and the continuity persuasive, as Islam, seen as Protestant heresy, was a theme already of the English Reformation. And the Reformation itself was a kind of, in Belloc’s language, second Islam, revisiting the old errors of the Arabian reform and bringing them to the north of Europe, where Berber and Turkish invasion had never reached. Chapel Christianity, in particular, would be seen from this perspective as a victory for the Ishmaelite error. Hence the growth of Islam here is not so much the transplantation of a quintessentially foreign essence; instead, from the viewpoint of Chesterton and Belloc, it can be seen as a belated incorporation into the country’s religious life of a principle which is superficially exotic, but is already partly indigenous as one of the themes of the Reformation, and of some of the most characteristically English chapel-going forms of dissent. If the Protestant settlement in this country envisaged the existence of marginal groups – Quakers, Congregationalists, Ranters, Unitarians and others, many of which may be seen as partaking in this convergence we have noted between Islamic and Reformation principles – then British Muslims might potentially be seen as best incorporated in the nation’s religious life by expanding the principle of the settlement. This may be more helpful than to treat them in an ad hoc fashion as an immigrant community which sometimes upsets the DCLG by seeking recognition in confessional rather than conventionally ethnic terms. Such a model does seem to have potential. On this view, mosques might be viewed by unbelievers not as exotic temples to an unknown foreign God, but as Socinian meeting houses of a particularly successful kind.

The parallel and the continuity, it must be constantly stressed, will not be at all exact. For instance, the model of community life in the dissenting sects is substantively different from the Islamic notion of the umma. The jama’a, the mosque congregation, might seem, in its obedience to an elder or presbyter, rather than a priest appointed by a bishop, to set Muslims well within the familiar Protestant order; however the larger community is defined not as ‘church’, but as the Ishmaelite ecumenical world, the umma. One boundary marker of this is the purity laws; which are all but unknown to Protestantism. Of course they are not, as with some Old Testament religion, understood as defining solidarity and identity against a hostile Other. Still, Islamic and Reformed notions of sociality will be considerably different. The Reformation proposed an often charismatic spirituality, but one linked to an individualism which, in its idea of the equality of every believer’s reading of scripture, sometimes seemed to reduce the spiritual value of human community. This is the alleged, and widely-admired, Reformation root of modern individualism; in an Islamic context, where bodies are collectivised through purity laws, and where a principle of ijma’ controls scriptural reading, the more fissiparous tendencies of the Reformation moment are avoided. It is significant that it is Shi’ism, a more hierarchical, mediative form of religion, which in Islam has generated sects; while the Sunni, apparently Protestant mainstream, has usually managed to remain integrated..

http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/AHM-British-Muslims-and-the-Rhetoric-of-Indigenisation.htm

Edited by babyfinland (March 22, 2012 02:15:21)

Meursault posted:
There's not a lot of quicksand in movies these days

new indiana jones had some, but you're right.