The Parson’s Bind

Protestants
by Alec Ryrie

‘I also,’ states the author in the introduction to his book, ‘have my own corner to defend, and it is only fair to be plain about it. I am myself a believing Protestant Christian and a licensed lay preacher in the Church of England.’

In fact, as we learn from the acknowledgements (which have been placed after the text, very near the end of the volume), Alec Ryrie is Professor of Theology & Religion at Durham University in the United Kingdom.

Perhaps it was simple modesty that discouraged Prof. Ryrie from being more truthful about the size and shape of his ‘corner’. All the same, his evasion is symptomatic of the slippery nature of theology itself. It is the study of something that is acknowledged to be rationally incomprehensible, so we cannot expect either logical rigour or fidelity to empirical evidence from its arguments. Not that this book is a theological treatise; there is, for my money, a great deal less theology in it than there should be. Ryrie shows little interest in the philosophical and doctrinal differences that distinguish one variety of Protestantism from another.

My argument throughout this book has been that Protestants are best treated as a family... [whose common] characteristics are hard to pin down, but you know them when you see them. Protestants are divided from one another by their beliefs but tied together by a deeper unity of mood and emotion. Their tradition began from Martin Luther’s ravishing love affair with the God he met in the Bible... Since his day, Protestants have pursued that love in radically different ways... Often that old flame has been reduced to a simmer or doused altogether, sometimes it has blazed beyond any control, but it is the same fire...

Clearly nervous about being held to any strict account, the author insists repeatedly that his book isn’t about Protestantism, but about Protestants. Rubbish. There are a few more or less rudimentary character-sketches of famous individual Protestants – the founding fathers of the Reformation and a few pivotal figures from later in the history of the movement – but nothing remotely resembling biography in the tradition of Plutarch or Suetonius. Nor is it in any sense a book about the ‘Protestant character’; Ryrie is far from convinced that any such thing exists, and I agree with him. No, Protestants is a history of Protestantism, pure and simple, though the range of wildly differing sects and cults that Ryrie is willing to subsume under the heading of ‘Protestant’ is far wider than many people, religious or not, will accept.

Yet despite his reluctance, typical of academic theologians, to own up to a definite statement about anything, Ryrie must have surely have used some working definition to decide what to write about in his book and what not to; and so indeed it proves.

As a historian, I prefer a genealogical definition: Protestants are Christians whose religion derives ultimately from Martin Luther’s rebellion against the Catholic Church.

Well then, that’s that sorted. Now all we need to decide is who qualifies as ‘Christian’. Do Jehovah’s Witnesses? the author says yes, even though JWs deny the divinity of Christ. How about Mormons? No, although the full name of their religious organization invokes that of Jesus. The Taiping rebels of nineteenth-century China? No again – despite the fact that they fit Ryrie’s genealogical definition pretty well.

Before we continue, I suppose I should do as the author has done, and declare my own bias. I am culturally an Anglican, baptized and confirmed in the Church of Ceylon: a formerly religious man whose own individualism and fondness for ethical inquiry, combined with a scientific education, slowly eroded his faith in God without destroying his acceptance of the moral philosophy of Christianity or his fondness for the rituals and liturgy of the Church in which he was raised. I am no longer a Christian but you may call me a sympathetic fellow-traveller; and what I think the world needs is a history of Protestantism written, not by a believer like Alec Ryrie, but by someone like myself – someone who despises religious double-talk and is willing to take a firm empirical and moral attitude towards his material. Sadly, it is hard to imagine any unbeliever taking the trouble.

You’ll have guessed by now that I don’t think much of this book, though I slogged through it almost to the end. I skimmed through the penultimate chapter (about Pentecostalism, of which the author seems strangely fond), and let the last chapter go unfinished because I thought Ryrie’s predictions concerning the future of Protestantism were based on a poor and ill-informed understanding of trends and developments in the secular world. For all that, I found much to interest me within these pages, and quite a bit to praise. Concerning the former, the moral and theological support given to apartheid by the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa shocked and revolted me. It also put me in mind of the devil’s bargain between institutional Buddhism and majority-community racialism in my own country, especially when I read how ‘“Christian” was a tribal identity, “race-and-religion” a single word’ among Boer revivalists. In Sri Lanka, ‘Sinhalese Buddism’ is a tribal identity of exactly the same kind, race and religion proclaimed as one – but I digress.

Returning to Ryrie’s book, I must say it was news to me, though perhaps it should not have been, to read that Jehovah’s Witnesses suffered serious persecution in Germany under the Nazis (over a thousand died in concentration camps). I also found Ryrie’s account of the growth of Protestantism in Korea absorbing and enlightening; I had had no idea that, until the division of the country, there had been more Christians in the north of Korea than the south. By contrast, the chapter on China was plodding and rather confusing in terms of timelines, and much of the material concerning the Mao era seems to have been assembled from hearsay evidence.

I was equally disappointed by what the book leaves out. The theology professor seems largely inclined to paper over theological controversies; the Reformation and Counter-Reformation period are reasonably well covered, but there is almost nothing about – for example – the quarrels over ritual and doctrine among English Christians in the nineteenth century. There’s hardly anything about political Evangelicalism, no more than two sentences about Anglo-Catholicism, nothing at all about Muscular Christianity or the Oxford Movement. There are other yawning gaps of this kind: not nearly enough about colonial missionary efforts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or about the establishment and growth of Protestantism in the colonized world (China, Korea and South Africa are the only exceptions); nothing at all about huge missionary societies like the CMS and the rivalries between missionary groups that so agitated Protestants in that era. The public controversy over evolution and the age of the Earth, which was inflamed by the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 and continues to this day, is handled with asbestos gloves and the author’s eyes nervously averted; apart from this, the effects of the scientific challenge to Christianity (and especially to Biblical literalism) are largely ignored.

Concerning the interaction of Protestantism with the secular world, many obviously evil actors receive the benefit of Christian charity and tolerance not only for themselves, which is perhaps acceptable, but for their ideas. The section in which Ryrie recounts the pro arguments concerning the theological justifications for apartheid (which, he willingly admits, was ‘a form not of fascism but of Calvinism’) is positively nauseous.

So what are we to make of this deceitful book, which claims to be about Protestants but is really about Protestantism, which pretends to make no judgements while being constantly selective in the material it chooses to treat of, and says almost nothing about the ‘corner’ its author claims to defend?

Reading it wasn’t exactly a waste of time. Although history is a principal interest of mine, Protestantism isn’t my field, and there were many things I didn’t know until I read this book. For example, I was quite ignorant about the details of the Reformation and the developments that followed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I wish this section of the book had been bigger. I also wish the author had spent more time on events in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, instead of saving the bulk of his attention for the twentieth.

A more secular and sceptical approach to the material would have freed Alec Ryrie from the parson’s bind of never being able to call a spade a spade. This is what the book most lacks, and what is most likely to irritate those of us whose moral compasses do not need constant recalibration by Divine Authority. Protestants is a milk-and-water treatment of a religious movement that trades largely in fire and brimstone; a lukewarm posset, richly deserving of the treatment prescribed for such potions in Revelation 3:16.

What did stay with me from my reading was a sense of the apparently unbreakable association between Protestantism (however loosely defined) and intolerance. This intolerance appears in many forms: doctrinal, ritual, textual, racial, sexual, behavioural. Some Protestants even refuse to tolerate facts, as in the widespread refusal to ‘believe in’ evolution. Sometimes it is private or communal, and results in a turning away from secular society, as with the Quakers or the Amish; more often it explodes into public violence of one kind or another: witch-burnings, the drawing and quartering of heretics, pogroms and lynchings, religious wars and uprisings. It is hard, reading this book, not to think of Protestantism as a religion of hate. This is the real case the movement has to answer. Ryrie barely touches it.