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It's often claimed that secularization in the modern world was ultimately caused by Protestantism. So in this narrative, medieval Western Christendom was once unified in a shared faith and a more sacramental worldview. And then Protestantism comes along and disrupts this unity and plants the seeds that will eventually blossom into the privatization of religion, the fragmentation of authority, the disenchantment of the modern world, and many other things. Let's call this the Protestant secularization thesis. And in this video I want to give five reasons to question that narrative. And along the way, I'll try to say some of the things. And this is just in my heart, I feel a little defensive of Protestantism. I think Protestantism has done so much good for the world. I want to draw attention to that a little bit, even while not acting like Protestantism is nothing to criticize about itself. Now, this is not designed to settle this question. Anybody who gets into the literature on this topic, which I've been working through, realizes this is very complicated. So see these not as settling everything, but rather these observations slow us down, push aside triumphalist narratives and help us envision some of the challenges that the Protestant secularization thesis faces. Number one, the timeline is very long that is involved here. So secularization really blossoms in the later portions of the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. We're thinking here especially of the 18th and 19th century in Western Europe, largely. Historians often divide the Enlightenment up into several different phases. I'll put on the screen one way of charting out the development of the Enlightenment into four distinct periods. That's from the historian Henry May. Now, you don't have to accept that particular schematization to recognize the basic point here that I want to make, and that's the early Enlightenment was much more, more friendly to religion. It's amazing to go back if you read John Locke's treatise, the Reasonableness of Christianity, it almost reads like a book out of the Puritan paperbacks series. Or if you go back and read through some of the Boyle Lectures, which were established in the 1690s to use scientific knowledge to defend the truth of Christianity. This is very pro Christian. I mean, it's amazing how pro Christianity a lot of the early Enlightenment efforts are you. You have more aggressive critics of religion like Voltaire or David Hume, but they are not representative of the general ethos of the 17th or 18th centuries. It's more in the 19th century that you get a blossoming of the full intellectual and cultural force of secularization as you're getting positivism, Darwinism, Historical criticism of the Bible really takes hold. You get the increasing prioritization of the natural sciences. This is where you're getting Nietzsche and Karl Marx and eventually Freud, who goes into the 20th century a bit. So I'm trying to demarcate a process of development here where you're moving from a climate of reason and reform of religion in the 17th and 18th centuries to an environment of suspicion and replacement in the 19th century. And then, of course, in the 20th century, you see just the swelling up of secular government, philosophical atheism, contempt for religion. You see this process. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't blame Protestantism, but any cogent argument for that is going to have to appreciate the timeline here. We're dealing with a vast expanse of time. Protestantism begins in the early 16th century, hundreds of years before all of this. The time gap between Luther and Nietzsche is substantially longer than the time gap from the Declaration of Independence to us today. So the entire history of America is shorter by about a century than this timescale that we're talking about. And any compelling Protestant secularization thesis is just going to have to account for that. Secondly, related to that, the timeline is very crowded. So the period of human history from the 16th to the 19th centuries has so many other epochal changes. You have the scientific revolution, you have the rise of the modern nation state. You have the movement from an agrarian to an industrial economy. You have urbanization, you have technological modernization from prior to the Reformation. You have the printing press. And then you think of how the world has changed from the steam engine, the telegraph, electricity, mass production of steel, so many other things we could mention. You have the rise of mass literacy and modern forms of education. You have global exploration. If you go back before the Protestant Reformation, you're not spread out. People are not communicating with each other across the planet. You have political revolutions. You have so much more going on. I've often said modernity is to human history, like the Cambrian Explosion is to fossil history. It's this rapid time of change. And so again, this is not a knockdown argument. This is envisioning the challenge here. If you're going to make a case that A led to B, Protestantism led to secularization, you need to find some mechanism to single out this particular entity among all these other changes that are also going on during this span of time. And if this can become very convenient and tidy, unless you have a real clear case, it's kind of like if there's a dead body in the room and someone walks in and Says, well, that guy did it, but there's 30 other people standing next to him. You need a reason for singling out that one person in particular. Same with Protestantism. Now, that is closely related to a third observation. And again, this is not a knockdown argument. This is an invitation to slow down. Although this one, I think, is where, for me personally, the gears don't just start grinding, they actually halt in seeing this idea as plausible. Let me explain. The timeline is not merely long and not merely crowded. It is complicated. And let me explain what I mean by that. If we think of the staple axioms of secular thought, like skepticism toward miracles, the prioritization of reason over revelation, these are things that don't obviously or directly depend on anything specifically Protestant. So at best, they this chain of causation is going to be very indirect and inferential. That's the thesis on the table here. So you might think of a series of dominoes, and you could say Protestantism is Domino 1, secularization is Domino 10. Maybe Domino 1 is Luther nails up the 95 theses, and Domino 10 is Notre Dame being rededicated as a temple of reason during the French Revolution. We're trying to think of other iconic images that represent these events. And the point is, you've got eight intervening dominoes between the cause and the effect. We're dealing with a long and indirect process of causation. That's what we're talking about here. By the way, the best arguments in favor of a Protestant secularization thesis acknowledge this complexity. The big book that I've been reading recently is Brad Gregory's book the Unintended Reformation. And this is something he, you know, that's such a better case than a lot of the triumphalist narratives that you hear on the Internet. Let me just read how he acknowledges this and bakes this into his argumentation. Very early on, he writes, the Reformation's influence on the eventual secularization of society was complex, largely indirect, far from immediate, and profoundly unintended. And then throughout the book, he goes on to argue for six ways that the Reformation sowed the seeds for secularization. Now, I have disagreements with his thesis, but that is a much more careful way to argue than the more simplistic narratives we often hear. But we need to appreciate how difficult it is to establish this kind of inferential, indirect cause and effect. Narrative causation is one of the most difficult areas for historical interpretation because it's very easy to fall into the causation correlation fallacy. Okay? This is the fallacy of assuming that this is one of the biggest problems in historical study. The fallacy here is saying A came before B, therefore A caused B. I'll put up a Latin phrase where you can say this is how it's often summarized after this, therefore, because of this or because or with this, sometimes it'll be that's worded a little differently. So hopefully you can see the nature of the worry here. Basically, I'm trying to gesture toward the difficulty and the high burden of proof for getting to causation. And let me here now, in this video, we're going to slow down a little bit. I'm kind of giving some broad thoughts, but now I'm going to slow down and really drill down into one particular example of where I pause when I'm reading an account like this. Protestantism, it was the first domino, and then you end up with secularization. And here's one of the big problems, I think if you're saying Domino 1 is Protestantism and Domino 10 is secularization, you can increase or decrease the number of dominoes there. The problem is this many of Dominoes 2 through 9 are really good things. In other words, many of these alleged intermediate causes between Protestantism and secularization are pleasing to God, good for humanity. I think most people would recognize that's a really good thing. See, not everything about modernity is bad. But what happens so often. Please hear me on this, and I hope you'd consider this. Protestantism gets blamed for the bad things of modernity, but it gets none of the credit for the good things of modernity, which seems inconsistent. So here's an example. Religious toleration. As I'm reading through the introduction to Gregory's book, I'm looking for the particulars. I want to understand the exact. The little tiny details of the argument. What are these intermediate dominoes and what's the specific pathway that we're to chart out in our minds here of causation? And one of the things he references is freedom of religion. I'll put up an example. From early on in the introduction, when I read this sentence, I noticed those last few words that he includes in the narrative. Freedom of religious belief and worship. And I'm thinking, wait a second, that's a good thing. I'm glad that we're not burning each other at the stake anymore for heresy or drowning each other because of a different theology of baptism and so on and so forth. If you think of the complete alternative to freedom of religion that that eventually came to replace, we forget how brutal that was. So I'm Just at this point, I'm just slowing down and listening more carefully. I keep reading. A little bit later, he's describing chapter three. He talks about how the Reformation transformed the growing late medieval oversight of ecclesiastical institutions by non ecclesiastical authorities, leaving a lasting legacy of the modern state's control of religion and its eventual midwifery of secularization via religious toleration. What a fascinating image. So you know what a midwife is? A midwife is someone who helps deliver a baby in this imagery. I'm not trying to say that, Brad. I'm not trying to get inside his mind. Maybe he would cash this out differently. But the imagery here is Protestantism is the mom, secularization is the baby, and the midwife helping to deliver the baby is religious toleration. So you say, wait a second. My pushback to that is religious toleration is a moral achievement, not a regrettable halfway house on the road to nihilism. It's true that some modern thinkers have absolutized toleration into relativism and privatized religion in unhealthy ways. That's a problem, but it doesn't make the toleration itself the problem, because the bad use of something does not take away its good use. This is a good domino. See, we forget this. I think. I think, you know, it's like Tom Holland's thesis, what he's saying about Christianity, where he's saying we just take for granted Christianity's influence. We don't even realize how much it has influenced the world. We forget all that it has done. I think something similar is true for Protestantism. We just take it for granted today that you can have a small town in Nebraska and you can have a Roman Catholic parish and a Methodist church and a Lutheran congregation, all within one mile. And none of them are attacking the other with a battle axe, thank God. But it wasn't always that way. I think we really forget how bad things got. Let me just give a few examples of this. When Luther's teachings were first getting traction, right at the dawn of the reformation, back in 1520, Pope Leo X wrote a papal bull entitled Ex Sergei Domine. And it's basically condemning 41 propositions that are associated with Luther. It starts off saying, in virtue of our pastoral office committed to us by the divine favor, we can under no circumstance tolerate or overlook any longer the pernicious poison of the above errors without disgrace to the Christian religion. And then it says, here's the list of these errors. Then it lists 41. You read through them, you can go online and find this. And some of them are about indulgences. For example, number 19 says indulgences are of no avail to those who truly gain them. And so the bull is condemning that as a condemned proposition and saying, no indulgences do avail those who gain them. Some of these are about the papacy, like number 25, the Roman pontiff, the successor of Peter, is not the vicar of Christ. And it's condemning that and saying, no, he is the successor of Christ. Well, another of these condemned propositions is number 33. That heretics be burned is against the will of the Spirit. And it's saying, no, that's wrong. It's consistent with the will of the Spirit, not against the will of the Spirit to burn heretics. Because the early Luther was challenging that. And this is, you know, this is a real thing. The theology of burning heretics is real. People sometimes just cannot accept this, but it is there. If you have any doubts about that, watch the video I did recently on the burning of Jan Hus. Because what I do in that video thumbnail on screen, it'll be linked in the video description. First, I narrate the sequence of events leading to Hus's burning. But. But then I situate that in about 250 years of the medieval development of the theology of heresy purgation, that was real. That's how the world was back then. And sadly, religious violence remained very common among the leading Protestant groups. I mentioned the drowning of the Anabaptists as common, but other things as well. How did that begin to change? Why does Brad Gregory include religious toleration as opposed to coercive violence as one of these dominoes? Well, early advocates of religious toleration were often among the more persecuted groups among the Protestants and among the Anabaptists. You think of the Anabaptist Balthasar Huber Meyer and his treatise on heretics and those who burn them. He's arguing that heretics should be answered with scripture rather than killed. You know, we forget again, we take this for granted, but people had to argue for that once upon a time. And of course later Baptists as well, because Baptists and Anabaptists are different. But people like Roger Williams, the Baptist theologian, making this case as well. Baptists take a lot of abuse these days, but this is one area where I'm very proud of the denomination I am a part of. Another area would be missions, people like William Carey and Adoniram Judson. Baptists don't deserve the abuse that they get. They've done a lot of good for the world. But now. So here's the point I want to say, if you want to say, no, no, no, no, Protestantism didn't lead to religious toleration. That was other things. Be consistent. Don't say that Protestantism didn't lead to religious toleration, but it did lead to secularization because we've got the same chain of dominoes. You can't just pick out which dominoes. Pick and choose from the dominoes. Right. You see what I'm trying to argue here? People should not blame Protestantism for the bads of modernity and then refuse to credit it for the goods. I've given religious toleration as one example, but there are others we could talk about as well, ways that Protestantism benefited the world. Another example would be literacy. Protestantism's emphasis on Bible reading and catechesis and preaching and translation and printing and education massively fueled literacy. Another example would be reform movements and moral activism and abolitionism, prison reform, missionary medicine, education for the poor, Bible societies, antislavery campaigns, temperance movements, orphanages, social reform. Many of these had heavy Protestant energy behind them. If you have any doubts about this, watch my video on England before and after John Wesley. It is stunning how God used that man. So this is why I'm wanting to defend Protestantism in my sermons. I use these sermon illustrations about particular Protestants. I'm thinking of one guy who founded hundreds of orphanages. I can't remember his name right now, but there's so many Protestants like this who have done this. So what we're saying is the timeline from Protestantism to secularization is really lengthy. Hundreds of years. It's very crowded with a lot going on. And it's very complicated because to get from A to B, you go through all these different things, and many of them are good. Okay, here's a possible objection. Someone might say, okay, yeah, it took a long time, and yeah, there was a lot going on. And yes, it's very inferential and indirect, but it began with Protestantism. Yeah, there's a lot of dominoes, but Protestantism is the first domino. This is when you began to get the unraveling of the thread. Right. The sacramental worldview of the Middle Ages begins to unravel. This is where it all starts. Well, in response to that, I would give a fourth challenge, and that is the pre Reformation world was not united. There's a romanticized view of the past. Sometimes that comes in here. Whatever the Reformation did, it did not disrupt a Time of happy tranquility. Late medieval Western Europe was a time of boiling divisions, not unity and order. The Protestants did not divide Christendom. The Protestants inherited an already several times over divided Christendom. You got the big schisms, like the 5th century Christological schisms, the great schism of the 11th century, of course, but in the late medieval west in particular, you have a lot of chaos. You have the Western schism. This is a schism lasts a long time, almost 40 years. At one point. You have three different popes. You have the Council of Florence, which is unable to heal the prior schism between the east and the West. But most poignantly and probably most relevantly, you have savage persecution of dissident groups that are regarded as heretics. And I've discussed this in other videos. I have a video on the Lollards, I have a video on the Waldensians, I have a general video on proto Protestants. As such, this is again, we forget how bad it got. Some historians speak of the violent campaigns against the Cathars as religious genocide. This is not a time of unity. This is a time of unbelievable bloodshed. You also have intellectual debate and intellectual disagreement prior to the Reformation that many have interpreted as the real seeds of modernity and secularization. So, for example, I'm not endorsing this genealogy right now. I'm skeptical of this as well. But I'm just saying you've got a lot of people, especially associated with radical orthodoxy, if you're familiar with that movement, who trace various aspects of the modern secular world back to late medieval developments like scotus, account of univocity or nominalism as associated with William Occam. You don't have to even know about that. I'm just saying the point I'm trying to make here is if you're looking for a first domino, it's very difficult to isolate Protestantism as an obvious starting point for modern fragmentation. One final point that kind of rounds out the picture here and I think challenges the Protestant secularization thesis, is that the geography of secularization does not neatly map onto Protestantism. If Protestantism caused secularism, you might expect that Catholic and Orthodox regions would be more immune to its effects. But that is not what we see. Catholic heavy countries like France aggressively secularize, particularly after the French Revolution, while Protestant heavy countries like the United States stay very religious for a very long time. Now, of course, I'm not saying it's always like that. You've got lots of secular Protestant places like Scandinavia. But I'm trying to Say this is not neat and tidy here. And then today as we look around the world, we find secularization as kind of an equal opportunity employer in all different parts of the world, even in the non Western world. Peter Berger famously talked about the counter modernizing tendencies of the non Western world. But I wonder if the Internet is really changing that. Secularization seems to be basically pushing everywhere. I remember when I was in Greece two summers ago, it was fascinating to see how secular Greece is becoming. And the conference I was at in Rome had pastors from South America and Eastern Europe and other places. And we're all facing these challenges right now. Secularization is an enemy of all different Christian traditions, putting pressure on all of us. We could put it like this. This is a real danger and a real threat and a real force. But it is not a distinctly Protestant problem or Catholic problem, or Orthodox problem. It is a human problem. Secularization is what happens when human beings push God out into the margins like the builders of the Tower of Babel. Let's not waste time trying to blame each other. This is something that we're all facing and it presses on us all in different ways. What I want to give my life to is the renewal of Christianity in our day. That is the deepest heart between everything else, sorry, beneath everything else that I do. The cure is spiritual. The cure is not a triumphalist, you know, looking down our nose at someone else. The cure is humility before God, spiritual renewal, deeper faith, holier churches dealing with problems of. I think of Mike Winger and others who are addressing issues of abuse in the church. That's part of it. We have to do that. It's not fun work, but you have to do that. Clearer preaching of the gospel, stronger families, more courageous evangelism. There's so many things we can put the focus on that are going to. The biggest is just a fresh vision of the glory of Christ. This is what I want to give my life to. I hope you'll join me in that. You know, when I think final thought, when I think about, okay, there's secularization, what do we do about that? The best way forward is not blame, especially when the blame game isn't an easy one to make. The best way forward is repentance and humility and what I pray for. A moment ago I mentioned John Wesley and how God powerfully used his life. Would you kind of getting off of the intellectual stuff right now for a moment, Would you join me in praying for a third Great Awakening? If you study the first two Great Awakenings, it's hard not to be moved. And it's hard not to say, lord, do it again. Would you join me in praying for a third great awakening in the 21st century that's the antidote to secularization, a fresh wave of gospel renewal in the church, many coming to know Christ, and churches being strengthened and solidified in the gospel. That's what I want to give my life to. That's the ultimate answer here. All right, that final point was just sort of a hey, let's pray for this. But I hope these five observations I've made would at least. I know this doesn't settle everything, but I hope this would at least slow us down, push aside the triumphalist narratives and see actually how difficult this case is to make that Protestantism caused secularization. Thanks for watching, everybody. Let me know what you think in the comments.