How can celebrating a date in history, that led to so much disunity, unite Christians?
The United States celebrates the Fourth of July. India celebrates independence from England, and both of those are celebrations of the breakup of a pretty mighty global empire.
And some Protestants (not all) celebrate Reformation Day.
Let’s go back to the English Empire thing for a second. One- even if the English Empire was a fairly good thing overall and not all that brutal compared to some other forms of colonialism, there were some things that both Indians and Americans did not particularly like or enjoy when it came to being English subjects. They were being ruled by force and were not permitted the freedom to be independent, but they fought for a variety of rights, privileges, and freedoms, and they won.
How can celebrating a date in history, that led to so much disunity, unite Christians? It probably doesn’t do much for the cause of unity, but the Reformers did have some pretty good reasons to initially try and change Catholicism, and then leave it once that didn’t work. They weren’t permitted to do so, they should have been able to but they were not permitted. So there was a lot of fighting and it opened the way for religious freedom. That is worth celebrating, is it not?
Let me ask you something. Suppose you lived in a country that’s mostly Muslim, ruled by Sharia law, you as a Christian are not allowed to evangelize or openly practice your faith and the penalty for leaving Islam (or switching to a different sect of Islam) is some form of death or dismemberment. Many other laws concerning public conduct are based on the Koran, and everyone must abide by them even if they’re not Muslim. As a Christian minority in this sort of situation, does your mind immediately begin to assess the situation based on the degree of unity that your countrymen have on the basis of shared religious belief? Or, as an alternate possibility, do you think about how much better it would be if your country could have secular laws and religious freedom while preserving peace and order?
I’ll give you one guess as to which way the Protestant mind goes with this thought experiment.
For the record- and this goes double for the relationship between church and state- even if Protestants do pray for unity with Christians in general or with the Catholic Church in particular, we absolutely do not want to return to the way things were pre-Reformation, and there’s a mountain of reasons why that, at a minimum, should be something that all Catholics can agree with.
So since that is off the table and we’re completely satisfied with the conclusion that the Reformation caused the world to be a much better place than it was previously, some Protestants will continue to celebrate Reformation Day. Most of the Protestants who do celebrate it will be more likely to stop if they can be shown a convincing and highly visible idea for a new way forward that significantly improves unity while bearing none of the negative markings of pre-Reformation Christendom. To this point, however, I don’t think we’ve seen that idea.
