"You say you want a revolution, well, you know, we all want to change the world"
Social change is like the waves of the ocean. The trends
have been building in volume, intensity and speed for hundreds of years, like
the waves have for hundreds of miles. You can bide your time, choose a wave you
like, and "ride the wave," or you can drop anchor and try to ride
them out. What you cannot do, is to try to stop the waves or reverse them.
Individuals, institutions and specific social movements can
only very rarely bring about significant social change. Apparently Gandhi said “if
you want to change the world, begin with changing yourself.” Most of us can
hardly change our own bad habits or lifestyle. When we live with the
expectation that we should be able to change the world around us, or, to put it
another way, when we live in a high level of tension with society (as is the
case with almost all religious sects), it generates feelings of frustration and
even rage.
The only way a religious sect or a partisan ideological movement can
hope to bring about significant social change is if the it happens to “catch
a wave” of economic, social or cultural change. I will provide two historical
examples.
The Protestant
Reformation.
Most of the reformers who came before Martin Luther (1483-1546) had the
misfortune to end up being burned alive at the stake, condemned by the Holy
Inquisition. What was different about Martin Luther? Why did he become the
father of the reformation rather than meeting an untimely end at the stake? (by-the-way, this year, 2017, is the 500-year anniversary of the Protestant Reformation)
Luther and the other reformers who came after him had the good fortune of
riding a cultural and economic wave of change that was washing over Europe at
the same time as their principled objections to the abuses of the sale of indulgences in Roman
Catholic Church.
First, the Church had been seriously weakened by the Black
Death and a series of crises of corruption including The Western Schism which brought
about a split within the Catholic Church which lasted from 1378 to 1417.This
was only resolved barely a hundred years before Luther nailed his 95 theses to
the church door. In most of Europe, but especially in Germany, the Roman Church
had a serious problem of credibility.
Second, Luther began writing his protests at just the time
that a new technology, the printing press, made possible the mass distribution
of his writings in colloquial German. This also made possible the wide
distribution of his translation of the New Testament in German, along with a
German dictionary, establishing a standard German language, and feeding into
the rising tide of German nationalism.
Third, The Protestant Reformers caught a tide of rising
nationalism. This was the era of the beginning of nation-states, especially in
England, Holland and France (Germany would not succeed in becoming a
unified nation-state until the nineteenth century). Although France was not a
Protestant nation, it was becoming a powerful and unified nation-state,
pursuing its own empire and national interests, with a large Protestant
minority. You might say that Luther and the other reformers were lucky, or
perhaps their timing was impeccable.
The movement to end
slavery
Slavery had existed in Western Civilization from the time of
the Roman Empire and the letters of Paul in the New Testament (it also existed
pretty much everywhere else in the world). Throughout the history of Christendom,
it might be argued that Christianity (at its best) occasionally ameliorated the condition of slaves, but
it never tried to abolish slavery.
Once slavery become lucrative and powerful engine of economic
growth with the establishment of sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations in the
Americas, it also became associated with race or color, and was justified as a
natural condition by Aristotle, and ordained by the God of the Old Testament
who had cursed Ham and his son Canaan. The
theory was that Canaan had migrated into Africa with the mark of slavery and
that it was therefore justifiable and God-ordained to enslave Africans. Even
more, by capturing Africans, or purchasing them from other Africans, and forcibly
baptizing them as they were brought on board Portuguese ships bound for the New
World, the thought was that Catholic slave traders were “saving their souls”
while destroying their lives.
The first “Christians” to begin to challenge the slave trade
on moral grounds were the early Moravians and Quakers (although admittedly,
there were also Quakers and Moravians who owned slaves in the Caribbean). Gradually,
Quakers insisted that their own members be disfellowshipped if they refused to
give up their slaves. The Moravians and
eventually the Methodists joined the abolitionist movement and began to
agitate, criticize and oppose the Atlantic slave trade. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (1984)[1]
points out the astounding phenomenon of the abolitionist movement, almost
entirely composed of evangelical activists, which in a scant one hundred years
was able to completely change the sentiment of Christendom, and turn
complacency and rationalization of the slave trade on its head. From the early
1700s to the early 1800s, the overwhelming consensus of Christians changed 180
degrees regarding slavery.
However, it is important to note that a number of scholars,
such as Eric Williams[2]
of Jamaica and historian Erick Wolf have shown that it was propitious timing.
The early phase of economic capitalism, which depended on plantation slavery
and the slave trade for the vast accumulation of capital, had run its course.
The capitalist system now needed consumers, and consumers needed to be able to
earn wages for their labor in order to “buy stuff.” Slave economies, such as
existed in the American South, Brazil and Cuba, were now part of the problem,
not part of the capitalist solution. Thank God for the evangelical movement
which placed itself on the right-side of history to oppose slavery. But it is
important to note, that they were not the only cause of the end of slavery.
There were many variables involved, of which perhaps the most powerful was
economic.
Finally, in both of these examples, even with a hundred years
of constant activism and agitation, and powerful cultural and market forces
favoring change, the eventual changes did not come without great violence. The
Protestant Reformation engendered almost continual violence for over a century,
culminating in the brutal Thirty-Years War and the Peace of Westphalia (1648). The end of the slave trade came
with the deaths of nearly an entire generation of men in the United States’
Civil War.
One might not like secularism, pluralism or modernity. One
may not like the changes in gender identity, marriage equality or the value of
personal and individual liberties in Europe and North America. However, pause
and think long and hard before signing up for some quixotic crusade to “take
back America” or to turn back the tides of history. Discern and learn to sail on the waves of
social change, don’t fight them or you will, at the very least wear yourself
out, and, more ominously, find yourself at the center of a vortex of anger,
rage and violence
I think it appropriate to close with the immortal words of
John Lennon:
[1]
Davis, David
Brion. Slavery and Human Progress.
New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
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