Protestant Roots of Marxist Ideology?
Color me lame for posting on Saturday evening. I am away from home playing Citizen Airman and taking advantage of the time to catch up on reading.
Through my love of Chesterton, I discovered Hilaire Belloc. He and G.K. were great friends and were so close that some melded their two names to Chesterbelloc.
Though they held the same ideas, the manner in which they espoused them was vastly different. While Chesterton exuded joy, Belloc was rather grumpy…which is perhaps why I have to read him with caution lest the grumpy side of myself rear its head more than it does naturally!
At any rate, in a loosely cited, almost oratorical historical account titled The Great Heresies, Belloc discusses Protestantism.
Don’t let me lose you just yet if you take offense to the Reformation be labeled a heresy. Or if discussing religion at all is off-putting.
To the first objector, Belloc admits:
[The Reformation] did not propound a particular heresy which could be debated and exploded, condemned by the authority of the Church, as had hitherto been every other heresy or heretical movement.
In the interest of brevity, Belloc concedes the Reformation is to be, however dubiously to him, admired for not attempting to promote a separate religion, but
Rather did it create a separate moral atmosphere which we still call “Protestantism.” It produced indeed a crop of heresies, but not one heresy—and its characteristic was that all its heresies attained and prolonged a common savor: that which we call “Protestantism” today.
The second objector will undoubtedly acknowledge that religious thinking has permeated all of history and, in conjunction with the Enlightenment, has informed our Western anthropology. Of course, volumes have been written on that subject. I’ll spare any reader (I’m mostly thinking of my son later in life) an exposition on that topic here. 😀
As I was once an ordination-tracked student at a well-known, prestigious sounding, mainline Protestant seminary who (showing my cards here if one has not yet figured this out oneself) read his way into Catholicism, several of Belloc’s assertions not quoted here made complete sense to me. But the one that intrigued me most—because it is not one I had explicitly read or thought about before—relates to the rise of banking.
Usury was practiced everywhere, but in the Catholic culture (my clarifying comment: he is referring to the states that remained Catholic during the Reformation) it was restricted by law and practiced with difficulty. In the Protestant culture, it became a matter of course. The Protestant merchants of Holland led the way in the beginning of modern banking; England followed suit; and that is why the still comparatively small Protestant nations began to acquire formidable economic strength.
Leading up to this assertion, Belloc noted how
[i]n the Protestant culture…the free peasant, protected by ancient customs, declined. He died out because the old customs which supported him against the rich were broken up. Rich men acquired the land; great masses of men formerly owning farms became destitute. The modern proletariat began and the seeds of what we today call Capitalism were sown.
Here we see an orthodox Catholic somewhat conceding the Marxist/Leninist (even Bernie Sanders) criticism about the unnatural, inhumane origins and evils of capitalism. Dwelling on that is not my point here, but suffice it to say there are valid criticisms of capitalism but also that capitalism has done a great deal to raise many people out of poverty. Things are always getting better and always getting worse, as Peter Lawler used to say.
Additionally, we can recognize today the decline of small, family farms (though they appear to be making a come back—let us wish them our best!) as corporations acquire more farmland.
At any rate, later Belloc sums up what I have quoted above by claiming “Protestantism has produced free competition permitting the usury and destroying the old safeguards of the small man’s property—the guild and the village association.”
Such statements perhaps read too much of one’s political/economic bent into history; doing so is all too easy and I’ll confidently wager that we are all guilty to at least some degree. But it does hint toward the economic theory Belloc championed himself known as Distributism (renamed Localism by Dale Alquist to better reflect the tenets of the idea in modern language) while acknowledging the flaws of capitalism that the Marxist exploits.
Hence, I am left wonder, if only in a-butterfly-flaps-its-wings manner until I explore this further, how great, if any at all, the unintended reach of the Reformation had on the evil of Stalin’s USSR. Additionally, if anything, we can, in a shoutout to Richard Weaver, acknowledge that ideas certainly do have consequences.