Entirely wrong
The roots of liberalism are not nearly so simple as this book claims, argues Jonathan Wright
4 April 2008

In this bold, passionate and almost entirely wrong-headed book, James Simpson seeks to convince us that "evangelical reading practice looks, in short, pretty bad". There is, Simpson avers, an abiding image of the Protestant Reformation opening up new intellectual vistas. The Bible was offered to the whole community of believers, to be pored over without the interference of meddling clerical elites. It was, so the theory goes, a process of democratisation and emancipation - one that the modern liberal constituency claims as one of its founding moments.

Nonsense, says Simpson. In fact, he suggests, Protestantism's literalist biblical interpretation and obsession with Scripture actually laid the groundwork for liberalism's polar opposite: religious fundamentalism. Simpson sets about exposing the darker paradoxes of Protestant approaches to Bible-reading. The true believer was encouraged to read Scripture but, given Protestant ideas about salvation, he was also reminded that his own efforts had no impact on his chances of securing eternal bliss. This, Simpson suggests, could only result in panic, paranoia, doubt and self-loathing. This represented, in Simpson's account, the worst kind of "psychological violence... against readers themselves". Worse yet, if you read all those bullish, uncompromising biblical texts literally - without being able to fall back on mollifying allegorical strategies - then it became far easier to legitimise violence against both your confessional opponents and competing factions within the Protestant fraternity.

Some of this is unobjectionable, although it is hard to fathom why Simpson writes as if he is revealing the inherent paradoxes of Protestantism for the first time. The trouble is, when confronted with such paradoxes, there is a need for far more nuance than Simpson exhibits. One gets the distinct impression from these pages that every 16th-century Protestant approached Scriptural exegesis in exactly the same way. Simpson also writes about England between 1520 and 1547 - the central focus of his book - as if bleak Calvinistic approaches to salvation and predestination already held sway, which palpably was not the case.

The larger problem, however, is with Simpson's overarching theory. His attack on the recruitment of Protestantism as the harbinger of liberalism is really just an attack on a straw man. "The liberal tradition," Simpson writes, "grounds itself in Luther's defiance as an individual against the power and threat of an institution." Really? Are historically informed liberals really quite that unsubtle and reductive? Or are they not perfectly well aware that Luther (along with almost all other 16th-century Protestant leaders) was deeply concerned with maintaining order, imposing authority and stamping out dissent? Very few people - liberal or otherwise - would still subscribe to a straightforward, Whiggish historical narrative, in which the glorious freedoms of the Reformation paved the way for latter-day ethical proclivities.

The Reformation was not nearly so cosy, and the roots of liberalism were far more complex and diverse. As for Simpson's alternative interpretation of the Reformation - that "what was achieved in the 16th century is better characterised as the origin of fundamentalism" - well, one would dearly like to see some evidence. All Simpson really establishes is that Protestants read the Bible literally (which isn't always true) and that this unleashed religious violence (which was hardly a Protestant monopoly). This is precisely how modern-day religious fundamentalists behave, so it stands to reason that there is some link between the two. Again: not really, not necessarily. Conflating the hermeneutic strategies of the 16th and 21st centuries is deeply anachronistic, but if you are going to do it then you are surely obliged to trace (in great detail) the supposed historical process that links two disparate eras. Simpson simply doesn't do this. He floats an idea and offers no evidence to support it.

There are always dangers in writing a book that uses the past to teach lessons to the present - Simpson's openly avowed aim. "Biblical Fundamentalism," Simpson observes, "holds the institutions of liberal society and liberal scholarship in contempt." All the more important, then, to find out where Fundamentalism came from, to "connect 16th-century debates with contemporary issues".

The trouble is, the 16th and 21st centuries are very different places, any connections between them are far more convoluted than Simpson suggests, and - if you attempt to make them - then you need to do a much better job of getting your history and your theology right.


Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents by James Simpson, Belknap Press £14.20