Identity Divisions:
A View of the Reformation

December 31, 2008

We might think of ourselves in terms such as American, Jewish, and working class.. but these are not words that distinguish anything actual in our world, they represent the boundaries created by humans to form group identities. Benedict Anderson makes this point when he defines nations as "imagined communities" and then goes on to note how every form of community, whether based on religion or kinship, is similarly imagined or created (5-6). This being the case our interest will be drawn to examinations of how human beings define and press home these boundaries.. or of the mechanisms used to create identity.

We tend to attribute conflict in our world to "long memories".. and maybe even throw in some Faulkner to boot: "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past." Underneath this kind of talk is the notion that groups have some form of deep memory that pushes them to hold onto antagonism and hatred. When we see violence in Ireland between Protestant and Catholic or in Iraq between Shi'a and Sunni this is the kind of thinking that gets trotted out. It's more helpful, I would argue, to see this as a case of the contemporary use of history.. rather than anything like a memory.

Here's an example. Say you live in a suburban neighborhood.. and maybe like me you don't pay a lot of attention to the cars people drive. The neighborhood gets along fine and everyone shares a sense of being American. Then one day a radio announcer starts to call attention to the essential differences between people who own different colors of cars. People with bright colored cars are haughty and arrogant! People who own cars with a neutral color are good citizens and kind neighbors! Even if you found this ridiculous, your would begin to notice the colors of the cars in neighboring driveways as never before. You would start to think about differences. And perhaps if other shared identities (national, regional) had grown weak, some people might even start to see their world in this way.. if the radio messaging was insistent enough. It would be an essentially random way to break up and define a group.. but that is the point: an identity draws a line that is not really there around a group of people.

This is the basic story of the Reformation era as told by Benjamin Kaplan in Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. His description of the rise of confessionalism is I think a close parallel to my car-color example:

In medieval Europe, ordinary laypeople knew little church doctrine. They received no formal religious instruction, and their pastors rarely preached... Such ignorance did not matter greatly in a world where everyone was by default catholic. It did after Europe split into competing "confessions," each propounding a rival truth. As each church began to define its identity in terms of its unique teachings, doctrine took on an unprecedented importance... [30]

So we move from a time in which the population is more or less indifferent to fine religious differences. Then because of some weakness in accepted identity categories there is an opening for a new way of drawing social divisions, and various groups impress on the population a new way of understanding the world that expresses itself through finely defined religious differences.

Learning to see the world in terms of doctrinal differences takes time.. and the Reformation era saw an immense amount of effort: "The churches had to undertake massive pedagogic campaigns, which they conducted via preaching, education, printed propaganda, church discipline, and revamped rituals" (31). We could lose ourselves examining the doctrinal details of the various camps (Calvinism, Lutheranism, Counter-Reformation Catholicism), but that would miss the sociological point: we are witnessing in all this talk the rise of new community boundaries, which break along lines that could not have been predicted beforehand.

Having established these new identity groups, the real possibility of religious conflict arose.. and the necessity of finding paths to tolerance. And this is what Divided by Faith is mostly about. One of the most effective means of limiting conflict turned out to be physical separation of the communities, and during the Reformation era there was a surprising (to me at least) amount of emigration. Kaplan notes that over the course of some decades about 300,000 Huguenots fled France.. 150,000 Protestants fled at the Spanish conquest part of the Netherlands.. perhaps 100,000 from Austria during the Counter-Reformation.. and more examples could be listed (158-9).

At the end of this sorting of religious communities (which took many wars), we get something like confessional nation-states.. and this is an important point to grasp:

...the resulting confessional allegiance eventually became a defining aspect of political identity. Whether or not it initially had wide support, the allegiance was institutionalized and sank popular roots. In some essential and irreversible way, England became a Protestant country, Poland a Catholic one, Sweden Lutheran, the Dutch Republic Calvinist, and so forth. [102]

The result of this consolidation of religious (and linguistic) traditions is something like the modern nation state.. a form of identity that is "modular" (according to Benedict Anderson) and thus transferable to new social situations.

As I wrote those last sentences I could hear the firecrackers going off to mark the new year: 2009.

Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1983.

Benjamin J. Kaplan. Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe. Harvard University Press, 2007.