In a year crowded with anniversaries, none is more consequential than the 500th of a little dispute in a backwater town in northern Europe in 1517. That’s when a middle-aged monk nailed his 95 Theses to the Castle Church door and changed the world.
What provoke Martin Luther was the practice of selling indulgences, a kind of get out of jail free card for purgatory. For a price, one could escape the punishment one’s sins deserved. Not only did this seem morally dubious, but it raised the question of the scriptural authority for such a practice. And that, in turn, raised questions about the whole edifice of the Holy Roman Catholic Church and its legitimacy.
The more pushback Luther got, the harder this classically-educated, German logician resisted, eventually launching a call for the reformation of the church’s hierarchical structure. He was lucky in having backing from local princes who had economic reasons for resisting the taxing power and corrupt practices of the church that funneled revenues from the hinterlands to Rome.
In some ways, what he launched was a populist revolution, though when it slopped over into violent threats to the social order, he took a more conservative line. Luther argued that the church had interposed itself between God and the individual and asked where in the teachings of Jesus or in scripture the justification for a self-serving, elitist priesthood could be found. Or for the veneration of relics, the monopoly on the Bible by the priests, the idea of salvation by works instead of faith and on and on.
By 1522 he had published a German language New Testament, a democratizing thunderclap that permitted individuals to read and interpret scriptures for themselves, without relying on intermediaries. Soon, similar movements were changing the face of the Netherlands, Scandinavian countries, England and Scotland. And the need for all believers to read the Bible had the unintended consequence of making literacy much more widespread.
The science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, who was trained as an engineer, was fond of saying that when it’s time to railroad, somebody will railroad. The same may be equally true of great social changes as of technological ones.
The Italian Renaissance had revived interest in learning beyond the theological, and introduced new ways of thinking. A spirit of inquiry, questioning, and self-determination was in the air with characters like Gutenberg, Machiavelli, More, Calvin, Copernicus, Vesalius, Erasmus and Leonardo spelling an end to the medieval mindset.
Luther looked at what the Bible said and how the church behaved and said to the Pope, “You’re not the boss of me.” He was promptly excommunicated, but soon was inventing a reform church. Nuns began to leave their cloistered life and one became his wife.
As we well know, this spirit of individual self-determination and free inquiry and the spread of literacy changed the world forever. It shifted the European center of gravity from the Mediterranean south to the Atlantic north. It suggested that the notion of a religious hierarchy with a few rich and powerful prelates at the top and mass of subservient parishioners below was wrong.
And if that model was wrong, then maybe a social model with a few hereditary aristocrats calling the shots for a lot of serfs was equally dubious. Enter capitalism, democracy, the rise of ths middling classes, social mobility, The Enlightenment. A lot of mighty ripples from one little pebble of dissent in Wittenberg.
A lot of those ripples washed ashore in the American colonies which were founded by dissenters unwelcome at home, Puritans in New England, Quakers and Protestant Palatine Germans in Pennsylvania, Baptists in Rhode Island, Dutch in New York, Scots-Irish Presbyterians in the Southern backcountry, Huguenots in South Carolina.
After a couple centuries of thinking for themselves and making their own societies, faiths, and economic designs in the New World, they declined to embrace an order imposed from abroad. All because a monk found selling indulgencies disasteful.