MARTIN LUTHER'S "CULTURAL CONVERSION"

Martin Luther’s personal entry Tischreden Over Substantiation belongs in the Significant Others section of this book, which is of course one of several Philosophy sections. The present very short entry is designed to make a point regarding Religion, and particularly the question of religious conversions, continued from the sequence of several entries before.

Luther was a “religion founder,” and this is a good place to find out how a religion is founded, in terms of its obvious break with the culture of the former religion, which, in this case, was Roman Catholicism. To begin with, Luther was originally not a breaker, but a reformer, or rather, a religious cleaner. The reason why his initially peaceable family quarrel ended up in a bitter and violent divorce was that Luther’s mission became a godsend for Northern German royalty, who were only too eager themselves to break away from the Papal religious and political control. It was because of their radical embrace of Luther’s dissent that Luther went farther than he had intended to go in the beginning. As for the culture element, he never broke from the old “Catholic” culture, as that culture no longer existed in that part of Europe anyway. Thus Luther, Calvin, and all other leaders of the Reformation were by no means some kind of cultural iconoclasts. In their adoption of Protestantism, they rather discarded an obsolete religious shell, to give way to a new religion that would properly reflect the already flourishing culture of Northern and Central Europe, formed in pronounced opposition to the culture of Southern Europe, where Catholicism would always remain the predominant religious force.

As for the bloody religious wars that were to follow, they were all political wars for political power, and the countless victims of these supposedly religious wars were in reality dying not for the greater glory of God, but in a clash of profoundly secular, distinctly different cultural entities, with religion being only a pretext, rather than the essence.

Now, by the same token as Luther’s royal sponsors were using him to achieve political independence from the Roman Catholic world, today’s Islamic revolutionaries are being used by local nationalists to achieve a similar goal: their independence from the West. National pride overrules financial gain, especially when the latter falls into the pockets of the corrupt few, whereas nationalism is broadly spread, and habitually hard-pressed, in terms of its own financial situation. (Independence has no rich uncles, or generous benefactors from abroad, sending you money simply out of the goodness of their heart.) Like the Marxian proletarian, today’s third-world nationalists have nothing to lose but their neocolonial chains. For which reason, they are more eager than under natural circumstances to join forces with religious radicals. They must understand it better than the West does that secular nationalism and religion make an unbeatable combination. They must feel that the future belongs to them, and they are not much bothered by what may happen next. The hidden agenda of every revolution is Carpe Diem.