It's fashionable nowadays to use 'Protestant' as an insult. Protestantism is blamed for just about every modern malaise, esp by RC trad types. But I tell you one thing it gave us: widespread literacy & print culture, a legacy now in danger. And boy will you miss it when it's gone
I say this as someone who would describe himself as a reformed Catholic Anglican on the high end: I am no fire-breathing evangelical. But Protestant belief in the power of the written word has been so much the air we breathe in Anglo countries that we've forgotten its importance
For all the faults of the Reformation, for all its conflict and excesses, for all my ambivalences about some aspects of modernity that are probably downstream of it, I thank God for a culture based on the the great gift of widespread access to the Word, in every sense
Nothing improved the dignity and status of the common man and woman more than the idea that they were all owed access to the gift of being able to read God's word, and thereby be educated & if you think that was an inevitable development, I think you're dead wrong. It was not.
If you want an incentive for learning, then the promise of eternal salvation was just about the most powerful possible. We might come to see the period from the 16th century to today as a blip in history, a brief interlude in a story of otherwise near-universal human ignorance.
When Tyndale said, to some cleric who wondered why the Pope's laws were not good enough for him, 'I defy the pope and his laws! If God spares my life, in a few years a plow boy shall know more of the Scriptures than you do', it's hard to overstate the importance of the sentiment
I fear this legacy is being squandered. Our culture ends not with a bang but with a blizzard of TikTok videos, doom-scrolling, and Netflix. People who know no better than bare animal existence, a quagmire of mindless distraction and lowest-common-denominator pleasure seeking
I may not love Calvin, I may prefer people to interpret the Bible broadly in line with the common understanding of the universal catholic church, I have this qualm and that, I'm a High Churchman etc. But when all is said and done, I am still, unapologetically, a Protestant
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