Travelogue: An Infidel’s Journey
Speaking of reminders that history didn’t begin when we were born: Germany.
Twentieth-century Berlin is the obvious story, but I want to focus instead on the little town of Wittenberg, a 35-minute train ride from central Berlin through flat, wooded terrain. Haven’t heard of it? Wittenberg didn’t fully register on my brain either until a month before our trip, when we were reminded that in 1517 (more than half a millennium ago now!) it’s where Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church — which, in history’s ultimate example of how a butterfly’s flight can lead to a hurricane, triggered the Protestant Reformation.
And I do mean triggered. In the sixteenth century way, Luther’s challenge to Roman Catholic hierarchy and practice went viral: it was printed in German, widely distributed, and eagerly read. Within weeks the doctrinal struggle began. The Church accused Luther of heresy in 1518 and excommunicated him in 1521, but couldn’t squelch his message. In 1524, German peasants inspired by Lutheranism rebelled against the Catholic aristocracy (a chastened Luther sided with the aristocrats). The violence gradually spread and escalated. A low estimate of the death toll from Catholic-Protestant violence in Europe during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries is seven million. Virtually all survivors, even monarchs and nobles, were worse off for the fighting. When Thomas Hobbes described existence as “nasty, brutish, and short,” it was against this backdrop of constant warfare over Christian dogma.
Luther is buried in the Castle Church, which you’d think would create a security problem. But for a mere three euros you can go in, walk one flight down, and see his tomb, which is guarded only by a fresh bouquet of flowers. Makes you wonder whether the Europeans have truly become that much more peaceable, and whether we might all be better off if historical quarrels were largely forgotten.
Riffing off said wondering helped me realize that in an indirect way, I owe my great good fortune to the strife Martin Luther started.
Europe’s centuries of religious savagery caused its best philosophers to ponder how people of different faiths might live together peaceably. Their treatises crossed the Atlantic to the North American colonies, whose elite read them enthusiastically and created the United States of America based on their values. In turn the French, then other Europeans took inspiration from the American model and installed governments that recognized the rights of all and maintained neutrality in matters of religion, speech, assembly, protest, and the press.
Hell yeah, neither we nor the Europeans have perfect governments. But A, perfect isn’t a thing. B, perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good. C, consider the alternative, which is what happened in Europe after Luther’s challenge from little Wittenberg plunged the continent into war for ten generations. And D, consider me, an incarnate miracle of Enlightenment values: an infidel who strolled through Wittenberg’s Castle Church — as he once did through Notre Dame in Paris during Easter services — and beheld their pomp without fearing for his life.
It’s a terrible shame that so many Europeans had to die for me — all of us — to enjoy such basic freedoms. And that so many living Europeans — and Americans — have never learned this brutal historical lesson, and think the answer to our current problems is to impose their religious convictions on everyone else.
