The Reformation Was Extremely Complicated

Martin Luther Throwing Gang Signs

The 500th anniversary of Luther's 95 Theses was yesterday. There are countless articles on it. So I'll throw one more into the  mix.

People like to have a nice tidy comic book story to explain huge events like the Reformation. Reality, of course, isn't really even amenable to condensing into a narrative with characters and cause-and-effect explanations. The christian's religion is this type of story. "The world used to be evil, Jesus was born, now it's cool."

First off, Christianity is not native to Europe. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europeans belonged to a bunch of different tribal societies and each had a  shamanic religion with roots that were possibly thousands of years old. Christianity was imposed on them in an attempt to form the next Empire. (Islam is identical in this regard.) Tribal religions persisted in Europe until at least 900 AD.

Catholic Christianity was never the sole brand of Christianity even in Western Europe. The Arians and the Catholics had "how many angels can fit on a pin" debates at the very beginning, then throughout the history of the Catholic Church there were "heresies". There was a proto reformation around 1100 AD. There were various strains of gnostic Christianity (e.g. the Bogomils or the Cathars).

By the 1500s, the western European medieval system was pretty long in the tooth and its entrenched political and religious institutions were holding people back. The Catholic Church was embedded in every aspect of life, and the institutions of life, e.g. the Guild System, relied on the Catholic Church. A good parallel today is how Hollywood--what looks to be a bunch of Jewish Mobsters--are connected to the government, the democratic party, and east coast finance. There's really no rational reason for it, but there it is.

The Renaissance and the re-emergence of classical learning in the West is the start of the fracture and breakup of the medieval world (which persisted into the 20th century!).

In retrospect Martin Luther looks like a Deray figure, that is, an agent of corporate forces with really banal goals, rather than an organic revolutionary. Entities like Henry VIII's  England were at odds with the Catholic Church for a long list of reasons, e.g. a desire to get in on the Age of Sail games (games like Rape Murder Pillage for Opium, Coffee, Tobacco, or Spices). Rival Banking families were pinched by the Church's cronies.

Just as it was expedient for Clovis I to be baptized as a Catholic, and for the Catholic Church to  baptize Clovis, it was expedient for the emerging powers of Europe to support the Reformation.