The International Protestant Cabal

Samuel Huntington is still unpopular due to his proposals in “The Clash of Civilizations”; “Who Are We?” certainly didn’t help anything. And yet there is something fascinating about his suggestions. The fertility of Huntington’s ideas aroused me as I read George Marsden’s “Jonathan Edwards” last summer. Marsden commented on the peculiarity and ubiquity of international Protestantism in the 18th century: Protestants in both Europe and North America were keen observers and active participants in a trans-Atlantic effort that incorporated religious and political aspects into an ostensibly unified strategy to promote Calvinistic polity and politics across the West. Jonathan Edwards was a typical example of a prominent Protestant who did his part to track and assist the international Protestant agenda. What struck me was the similarity of the efforts of Edwards and his cohorts to Huntington’s proposal: there was an informed attempt to unite nations, based on their religious and political stances, in international action.

Of course, the West is now post-Christian, and we have long since watched the Protestant vs. Catholic dispute lose its urgency. But I think that, in light of the fervent Christian profession still extant in the United States and its confrontation with the newly-discovered (!) enthusiasm of the Islamic East, we may have an opportunity to consider Huntington’s proposal. I say this in light of the emergence of the Religious New Right (as Richard John Neuhaus would have us term it) in the United States. The Christian Right tends to have its foreign policy dictated to it by the Republican party, with all of the corporate and Zionist commitments that that entails. But what if the Christian Right were to re-think its policy based on Huntington’s vision and the previous commitments of their Protestant forbears? If it were conceivably advantageous to all concerned parties to ally themselves based upon shared civilizational (previously religious) heritage, could that provide a coherent foreign policy?

It is far beyond my competence to answer that question, but it fascinates me. What if Israel were no longer a foreign policy priority due to its lack of a common heritage with the United States? What if there an intentional cultivation of international relationships with those countries most congenial to Christianity?

But if there is to be anything distinctly Protestant about this vision, what could it be? The Christian affiliation of most countries so inclined is generally Roman Catholic. The importance of Roman Catholic nations to an international Christian vision is no less real than the pragmatic necessity of the co-belligerency alliance that has developed between Protestants and Roman Catholics in the U.S. I do not see any way to escape the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic that has developed in the American Culture Wars. But I do think that Protestants would be wise to adopt a similar position to the one propounded by such Catholic thinkers as Richard John Neuhaus: we plan to both work with you in the present and assimilate you in the future. We’re a long, long, way from even being able to consider dumping the Papists, domestically or internationally; but that must be our ultimate goal if we are to remain recognizably Protestant.

Was Miguel de Cervantes a Closet Theologian?

“I now repeat,” replied Don Quixote, “what I have said many times before, that the majority of people in this world believe that knights-errant have never existed, and I hold that unless Heaven miraculously convinces them of the truth—that there were and that there are—any labor that I may undertake for that purpose must be in vain, as experience has so often shown me. So, I shall not stop now to deliver you from the error that you hold in common with the multitude. What I intend to do is pray to Heaven to deliver you from it and to make you see how beneficial and necessary knights-errant were to the world in past ages and how useful they would be today if they were in fashion. But now the sins of mankind—sloth, idleness, gluttony, and luxury—are triumphant.”

-Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote II.18

It comes as no surprise to anyone to hear that Cervantes’ masterful Don Quixote is a multi-layered work. At once a parody of chivalrous romances and a critique of the emerging bourgeois world, Don Quixote is so stratified as to provoke wonder. However, to my own very limited knowledge, no-one has so far pointed out the parallels between the Manchegan knight’s delusions and the doctrines of the Calvinistic churches—which, by 1615, were well known, even in Spain.

Consider the passage above, with its obvious similarities to Calvin’s observations on total depravity and irresistible grace. For Calvin, there could be no reception of the Gospel without a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. This doctrine was propounded in marked contrast to the Thomistic model of naturally available knowledge of God. Interestingly, in context the above statement of Don Quixote serves as evidence of his insanity. As Don Lorenzo observes after having heard this comment, “[H]e is a gallant madman.” Could it be that one aspect of Don Quixote is an assessment of early Calvinism? I should like to think so, and I suspect that no-one will bother to stop me.

Obviously Cervantes’ greatest novel is a fascinating work; how much more intricate does it become, though, if a satire of Calvinism is thrown in gratis? Consider, for example, that the Calvinists posited presbyterianism as the original Christianity, a hypothesis which many would consider akin to Don Quixote’s insistent belief in the literal existence of the knights-errant. Additionally, there is the devotion of Don Quixote to his books of chivalry: books which he accepts at face value, books which he considers imbued with an absolute authority which trumps all others.

And then there is the episode of the windmills. Ah, how tantalizing it is to imagine a seventeenth-century Roman Catholic author lampooning Calvinism with this scene! But the most touching aspect of the whole portrayal is the wistfulness with which Cervantes regards his knight’s illusions.

Cynics, Windmills, and Ex-Lutherans

“There have been many writers who have not known how to mingle the useful with the pleasant, and in consequence their work has come to nought, in spite of all their toil. As they are unable to imitate Diogenes as philosopher or scholar, they go to the opposite extreme and blindly and licentiously try to imitate him as cynic.”

-Francisco Marquez Torres, state censor of Spain, in his official approbation of Don Quixote, Book II, published 1615

“Unable to imitate Diogenes”; of how many people could that be said? In fact, who has ever been able to imitate Diogenes? Diogenes was precisely that prototypical man whom one remembers particularly for those traits which no-one could ever meaningfully mimic. (By the way, the Jesus seminar should get a clue from this: if Jesus of Nazareth was a Cynic, he was hopelessly uninteresting when compared to his forbear.)

Be that as it may, Marquez Torres has a point. However futile it may be to attempt building Diogenes’ platform, there have been multitudes who have tried to speak from it. But perhaps I have spoken rashly of Diogenes’ inimitability; perhaps there are those who can manage both his radical critique as well as his capture of the public imagination. Marquez Torres seems to be saying that whoever would assay one successfully must assay both simultaneously. And he is not far wrong in remarking that Miguel de Cervantes achieved both with his monumental Don Quixote. But he is also correct in his condemnation of those throngs who obnoxiously seize on one trait without grasping the other.

Marquez Torres has, I believe, hit upon an explanation for the unrelenting tediousness of our age. There are legions of opinionators today, but how many of them will be memorable in a later age? How many of them, once the urgencies of the moment have passed, will scorch their marks upon the mind the way Diogenes still does? How many of these anointed sages can do, for example, what Richard John Neuhaus has done with his idea of “the naked public square”? Neuhaus is an uncommonly good opinionator, but what truly distinguishes him is the fact that he has produced an enervating metaphor that continues to captivate the imaginations of many.

What Marquez Torres says to our opinion-guzzling age is this: If, in your search for the good, you’re not capable of taking a lantern with you to the marketplace in the daytime, stay at home.