- The story went something like this, in the time of Christ when
the first apostles fanned out across the known world to
preach their new gospel in the power of the Holy
Spirit, most of Europe was sunk in the darkness
of paganism bowing down before its false gods of wood and stone. And yet by God's astonishing providence out of this dauntingly unpromising soil, a Christian continent had slowly grown up. When you looked back at
this from your own time, from the time of the reformation, you remembered with wonder how
the miracles of the apostles and the peaceful witness of the martyrs and the brilliance of the apologist and the invincible virtues
of the early Christians, and at last, the decisive conversion of the Emperor Constantine had turned pagan Rome into Christian Rome, and you remembered the dying words of the last pagan emperor,
Julian 'the Apostate,' in the year 361-3, "Vicisti Galilaee," "You have triumphed Galilean." And even when the Roman
empire itself crumbled to the true faith you recalled, endured, and it prospered spreading
beyond Rome's old boundaries, the wild Irish, those ungovernable savages whose country Rome's legions
had never dared to invade were pacified by the
sweet milk of the gospel. And in the fifth century, they became [Inaudible] greatest monks. The Saxons were not so easily converted. Chalarmaine had to take Christ to them on the point of a spear,
but they too accepted the mild yoke in the end,
as did the Vikings even. The conversion of the last of the pagans was a drawn out business,
the Jewtonic knights and others slowly carried
the light north and east to the far coast of the
Baltic, but it was done. And so now in the 16th century,
you as a European Christian could look back with shame and with pride at your distant past. Shame, because you were descended
for idolaters and savages who had served demons and
lived in filth and ignorance, but pride because your forefathers
had accepted the gospel when it was preached to
them, that was who you were. But what does that story
mean for the people who came to be called Protestants? For the Christians who
accepted another new gospel or as they believe returned to the truth and purity of the gospel as
it had first been preached? Martin Luther and his
first followers were, they admitted, not unlike
those first apostles, a few preachers of truth in a
continent that had once again decayed into pagan idolatry, or as we would call it, Catholicism. As they started to preach,
they faced persecution just as the early church had done. And yet they also won supporters
in the same way up to, and including new Constantines like elector Frederick of
Saxony or King Gustav Vasa of Sweden, or slightly more dubiously, King Henry VIII of England. But unlike in the early church, these princes didn't or hadn't
yet swept all before them. King Henry IV of France
abandoned his Protestantism to keep his throne just
as Julian the Apostate had renounced his Christianity, but Henry IV didn't follow Julian's script and die accepting that the
Catholic cause died with him, indeed by the time of his
death, the counter reformation was in full state and the
old faiths was surging back. So what did these ancient lessons mean? Protestantism was from
its first beginnings a missionary religion. But its mission was, at least initially, almost single minded, to
defeat the false church of what they called the Romish antichrist, to win over the poor diluted people who'd been ensnared in that church's lies. When John Calvin in
Geneva began sending out hundreds of missionary
pastors in the late 1550s, that's the mission field which
almost all of them went to, the neighboring kingdom of France, almost all, will meet the
exceptions in the next lecture. But even in that first
generation of Protestants, they were well aware there's
a wider religious world out there. There are the people whom
European Christians usually called Turks or Saracens or
Muhammadans, that is Muslims against whom Christian kingdoms had been fighting for centuries. There was the perennially frustrating and complicating presence of the Jews whose impertinent insistence
on continuing to exist was so vexing to Christians. And there was a whole world
of non-Christians out there in the newly discovered
Americas and elsewhere, people whom Europeans effortlessly
categorized as pagans. That is the same as the peoples
of pre-Christian Europe. The same as they themselves had once been. It's inevitable that a
people as missionary minded as the early Protestants
would begin to ask themselves, surely we need to take our gospel, not only to those who call
themselves Christians, but yet have embraced Rome's religion, but also to those who've never
yet embraced Christ at all. Now, in this series of lectures on the hidden history of how
Protestantism went global, I'm telling the story of
how that thought first began to bear some fruit around the world in the 16th, 17th, 18th, centuries. We did a quick Roundup
of that effort last time and now we turn to looking
at how that story played out on four different continents. In the next three lectures,
we'll look at the Americas and the African diaspora and at Asia. But today, we're looking at the continent which is too easily overlooked
in the global story, that is Europe itself. This is where the global
spread of Protestantism had its roots, where
it learned the patterns that it would carry across the world. Because even in this period,
there were non-Christians a plenty here in Europe and
it was on those populations that would be Protestant missionaries cut their teeth for better or worse. At which point we come
up against a question that might sound almost too basic to ask, why would Protestants be
interested in converting others to their religion at all? In our pluralist age,
where we tend to assume that it's best to live and allow everyone to enjoy their own truth,
the effort can seem crass even oppressive. And that's obviously often be in the case, but we're never going to get
anywhere with this subject unless we have some sense
of the motivation here. Protestants like other
Christians before them set out to win converts for
a whole host of reasons. Simply trying to persuade other people that you are right about
something and that they are wrong, has a certain appeal, as we
know in the age of Twitter. And when you're talking about God, this can very easily
become a matter of honor. There was a deep seated
instinct that said, that to fail to worship God correctly, to span His grace or spread lies about Him was offensive, indeed blasphemous. And that if Christians honored their God, they couldn't stand by and
let others do such things. You might reply that
God is perfectly capable of defending His own honor,
but that's part of the problem because it might be your
urgent duty to intervene now to stop such blasphemous
offenses before they bring down a terrible divine judgment, both on the blasphemous themselves and on you for standing idly
by and letting it happen. Maybe that doesn't persuade you. But there are more
nakedly political reasons. Religious minorities are very vulnerable. There's nothing like adding
a few people to your numbers to make yourself feel safer. Converting your enemies is
better than defeating them. And in a world where religious
and political allegiances tracked each other,
your converts are likely to be your allies. And there's no better way
of cementing an alliance than fostering religious unity. In North America, from
the 1690s to the 1750s, English Protestant
missionaries from New York and New England vied with
French Jesuits from Quebec, for the allegiance of various
native American groups with hard bit military
men urging that resources be poured into these competing missions. But all of these cultural
and political concerns in the end are secondary. The fundamental reason why Protestants, like other Christians before them, wanted to convert others was theological. They taught and they believed
that all human beings will after death face judgment. Some will have their names
written in the book of life. These people will have been
chosen from amongst humanity for salvation, for the eternity
of blissful union with God, which Christians call heaven. Others, very likely a
majority will not be found in the book of life. They are excluded from heaven. And this state of eternal misery, which Christians call hell, was also of course,
usually depicted as a state of active torment. Now, if you believe in
your gut that this daunting pair of alternatives lies
ahead for you and for everyone, it is hard to see how that does not become one of the most important
facts in your life. And let's be clear that this judgment is not about whether you
are a good or a bad person. We are all sinners to a
greater or lesser extent, so Christianity insists. If we are saved on this view, it's not by whatever dubious
virtues we might have, but by faith in Christ who redeems us from the eternal damnation
that everybody deserves. So on this perspective,
without faith in Christ, even if it's simply because
you've never heard the name, it's pretty much impossible to be saved. Such a person simply doesn't have a seat on the only boat that can
rescue souls from drowning in eternal misery. So the fundamental reason why
you might want to win converts is the same reason that if
you were on a sinking ship, you might want to go
and knock on cabin doors rather than simply making
for the lifeboats yourself. What could be more callous and inhuman than to have the secret of salvation and not to share it with others. This perspective has certain consequences. First of all, the moral
urgency of that task, if you look at it dead on,
overwhelms anything else. And that means that the
ends can justify the means. Non-Christian people by
definition don't know that they need the
salvation that Christians are offering them. But on this view, they are wrong. And so it may be your duty
to save them from themselves by any means necessary. A missionary on this view is offering something like a vaccine to a
wary and hostile population. What he has can save them if
they can only be persuaded or cajoled or bribed or
compelled to accept it. On the basis, you may be justified in, for example, arresting
or silencing individuals who are actively trying to oppose you or separating children from their parents in order to break the generational cycle, if that's what it takes to
be able to save their souls. So that's one problem. Another is that this
perspective leaves you with a big question, which is, what is this conversion anyway? It's not in fact as
simple as getting people into a life belt or injecting
them with a vaccine. If you're a Roman Catholic, then it's at least
relatively straightforward. The sacrament of baptism is
itself an efficacious channel of God's grace. So if you can simply persuade
people to accept baptism, even if their understanding of what they're doing is limited then that's a worthwhile beginning. It's a seed of grace
planted in their lives. But Protestants teach
that were saved by faith. And they usually assume that
that faith had two components. So knowledge, some basic facts
about Christian doctrine, according to your capacity,
to understand them and also trust, a profound
reorientation of your life to place Christ at its center, a transformation which
should reach the whole self. So just accepting baptism or
learning to recite a creed, that's not faith. And this means that
pursuing quick conversions would risk creating a continent
full of fake Christians who may think that they've been saved, would've in fact, merely
been dosed on snake oil. That's exactly what Protestants
thought had happened in post Roman Europe. The pagans hadn't truly been converted, just a thin veneer of Christianity had been layered over their pagan hearts. The trouble is that this
kind of deep transformation is difficult, not just because it implies painstaking patient work
with small numbers of people, rather than sweeping up
whole territories at a go but also 'cause it's hard to
know if you've ever succeeded. If somebody claims to have converted, are they just telling you
what you want to hear? Even if they're sincere,
are they fooling themselves? How can you be sure of their inner hearts? Now, the moral imperative
of heaven and hell would have you win converts
as urgently as you can, but true conversion can't be rushed. It's an elusive quarry, in fact, many Protestants
doubted their ability to make it happen at all. The transformation of the
heart after all, is God's work. So you've got a moral
and political imperative to win converts, but you also
know that no human effort can achieve it. And those are only the general problems. The actual experiences that Protestants had with the non-Christian
peoples they encountered in Europe only made these
difficulties more acute. Let's begin with the
most fraught case of all. I said that most of ancient
Europe had been sunk in pagan darkness, most, but not all. One people as all Christians
knew had worshiped the true God and jealously
guarded His revelation. And yet most of these people,
the Jews they regretted had not recognized God's son
when He was born amongst them as Christian saw it. The continued existence of Jews, a pretty sizable minority
scattered through Christian Europe and beyond was a theological
affront to most Christians. Many Christian societies had decided to tolerate the continued
presence of Jews in their midst. Although this is tolerance in
all the graceless begrudging sense of that word, usually accompanied by some systematic legal discrimination and consistent resentment and hostility. The grounds for tolerance
were often pragmatic, Jews are often well
networked, well educated in practical arts like
medicine and their neighbors and rulers could derive various benefits from their presence. But that was a theological
side to this as well and that matters for us. This is an argument that
goes back to St. Paul, who back in the first century wrote about the already troubling
problem of why so many of his fellow Jews had not joined the fledgling Christian movement. The argument he made goes like this. God has chosen the Jews to be His people, but has also chosen to harden their hearts so that they will reject
the Christian gospel for the time being, at least. And this means that the Gentiles
who've become Christians will look at the Jews and take warning and think if we follow the Jews in becoming spiritually arrogant and obsessed with empty ritual, that was the Christian
stereotype of Judaism, if Gentile Christians fall
into the same pattern, then they too will
receive the same judgment. What's more, the Jews,
St. Augustine argued serve as an independent
witness to the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible, the texts, which Christians call the Old Testament. But on this view, the
situation is temporary because at the end of the
age, before Christ returns in glory, St. Paul for
tells that then the Jews will at last be converted
or mass and embrace Christ and take the rightful place as God's chosen people once again, that time will come, he says
not yet, but maybe soon. So all through the middle
ages and the reformation era, Christians are in two minds
about their Jewish neighbors. They should be allowed
to continue to exist and to practice Judaism
because it's God's will and His punishment for them
that they should be left to stew in their own errors
but they should also convert and embrace Christ. Now, maybe that mass conversion
won't happen until the end, but some first fruits, some
piecemeal conversions here and there that's possible
and it's desirable. And so throughout the medieval period, a lot of policy towards
Jews was constructed to pressure them to convert by imposing irksome legal restrictions, by propaganda, even by
threat of expulsion. The result is a trickle of conversions and sometimes when the
pressure became acute, as for example, in Spain,
in the late 15th century, more than a trickle. And that site, those
conversions, when they happened, quickened Christian pulses, not just to see those lost soul snatched from the fires of hell, but to sniff the fulfillment of prophecy. If the Jews will convert
at the end of the age, then maybe a wave of conversions
is a sign of the last days. And then along come the Protestants who bring a distinct perspective
to these age old issues. Protestants have from the start,
a complicated relationship with Judaism. On the one hand, they inherit all those old Christian
assumptions and prejudices and in some ways their core
theology doubles down on them because it is some of it is built around a caricature of Judaism as a religion of works righteousness, but Protestants also put
the Bible at the center of their religion and most of
the Bible is a Jewish book. It's not just that Protestant
students learn Hebrew and immerse themselves
in Jewish scholarship, although their regular
adoption of the Tetragrammaton, the Hebrew name of God as
their key visual representation of God as you see here,
that is not nothing. There's also a rediscovery of some of Christianity's Jewish roots. I mean, it's a small
thing, but Protestants start a new pattern of
giving their children names drawn from the Hebrew Bible. Medieval Christians were
almost never called names like David or Benjamin or Daniel, or Sarah, or Rachel, or Deborah. More substantially Protestants rediscovered Jewish opposition
to the use of images, painting, statues in worship, a practice which Catholic Europe, of course embraced
exuberating, but to Protestants and Jews alike and of
course also to Muslims looked like idolatry. You can see that double
edged view of Judaism most famously in Martin Luther himself. Early in his career in 1523,
he published this pamphlet, "That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew." And this book has a naivety, which we're going to learn to
recognize in other contexts. Luther argues that Jews certainly ought to embrace Christianity, but he blames their failure
to do so on the Christians. All those strong armed tactics only serve to discredit Christianity
and worse the specific errors of Catholicism, the veneration of saints, other practices, which Protestants now reject as superstitious. All of these things, Luther fears, have alienated good God fearing Jews. And so he reckons if Christians
renounce their superstitions and treat Jews with gentleness
instead of with force, well, then there'll be
nothing left to stop them converting in droves. It's not a coincidence that Luther, especially at this point of his career, suspect that the of the
world is almost imminent. The time for that mass
Jewish conversion is now. And the book's a hit. A dozen editions in several languages, including in Spanish and
it's received fairly warmly by Jewish readers. A rabbi gathering
information from Germany, although he himself was
living in Jerusalem, writing soon after the book was published called Luther, this noble man. And he wrote, "Whereas
before there were lands where in any wayfaring
Jew would be put to death, now they invite him to
their worship joyously and with a pleasant countenance." You'll notice that the point
of all this joyful exultation is to invite Jews to Christian worship. And it's true that a string
of other early Protestants wrote conversionary treatises
aimed at Jewish readers, debated with Jews and
made a point of talking about the Jews as God's chosen people. There was only one problem, Jews might have been pleased
to be treated more gently, but they did not rush to
convert to Protestantism. Jewish opposition to Christianity, it turned out was more than
a matter of a few statues. As Protestants actually
engaged with real Jews, not the ones they'd imagined, they made the same discovery
that generations of Christians had made before them,
which is that Jews actually believe in Judaism. That they had heard all
the Christian arguments, heard nasium and they were not
about to change their minds and had no particular interest in playing supporting roles in
someone else's apocalypse. Luther himself, notoriously
took this rejection very badly. By 1538, he seems to have come to the view that converting Jews was
impossible for the time being. It would only come at the end. His eruption on the subject
came in 1543 in this book of which the best that can be said is that he does not explicitly
and openly call for genocide. Converting Jews to Christianity was, he now believed impossible. He seems even to have abandoned the hope that it would happen
at the end of the age. And with that Mirage gone,
he could see no reason left to tolerate them. The book, it should be said,
wasn't nearly as popular as his first one. Some German territories banned it, but it had a long afterlife, editions kept appearing at moments of heightened antisemitic panic over the following centuries. Naturally it was celebrated
at the Nuremberg Rallies and fed into the Nazi cult
of Luther as a national hero. It is fair to say though, that on this, as on much else, Luther himself
is something of an outlier. If initial naive hopes of
a flood of Jewish converts were disappointed, most later Protestants continue to believe that Jewish conversion was possible now and
inevitable in the end. And so they generally kept
to a somewhat tolerant policy in both senses of that double edged word. When individuals did
convert, considerable fuss was made over them. But the broad pattern that Luther had set is repeated over and over again, initial naive optimism
that a particular preacher or a particular sect has found
the secret, the key idea, the key reform that will
unlock Jewish obstinacy and bring them over to the truth, may be drawing down
the curtain on the age, only to lapse into muted or
embittered disappointment. Oliver Cromwell, England's
Puritan military dictator, who has at least a streak
of apocalyptisism about him allows Jewish settlement
in England in 1656 in large part because he
hoped it might trigger a mass conversion in the end of days, which as you may have noticed it didn't. The early Quakers made a
point of publishing books in Hebrew, which praised
the Jews as the seed of God, to whom the promise belongs but the underwhelming
results had them lapsing back all too quickly into
the familiar diatribes against unbelieving Jews. The Christian encounter with
Jews was singular obviously, but it does set two particular patterns for the wider encounters
with the non-Christian world. First, that pattern of
naive hope disappointed at the risk of stating the obvious, Protestants believed that
their own beliefs were correct, they generally believed
that their own beliefs were demonstrably obviously,
and self evidently correct, I mean, that's what we all tend to think about our own core convictions. Again and again, across the world, they approached people in the same way that Luther had approached
the Jews in 1523, that is, they thought if they were clear in their explanations,
gentle in their manner and appealing in their morals,
then the self-evident truth of their message would
sweep everything before it. The truth seemed so clear to them that they genuinely
struggled to understand why others couldn't see it. And so when inevitably those
hopes were disappointed, they quickly swung to
the opposite extreme. They rapidly concluded that these people, whether we're talking about European Jews or any of the many non-Christian peoples whom they met around the world, that these people are
stubborn, stiff necked, resistant to the truth maybe
even in league with the devil. We tried gentle reasonableness. We gave them every opportunity to convert. They've had their chance. We won't cast pearls before swine again. So in this way, that very
idealism and gentleness with which they first try
to approach conversion cuddles into hostility,
contempt, and indifference. That's one bitter lesson that
the Jewish experience taught. The others more specific. And that is that missionary projects always take place within
an apocalyptic frame. That is within an understanding
that God has a plan for the whole of history. And that it's that plan that determines whether a missionary project
is going to succeed or fail. Most Protestants were
convinced that the Jews would be converted at the end of the age or just before it, but not now, or at least only in ones and twos. A mass effort to convert the Jews would therefore be
premature unless you suspect that the end of the age is really imminent in which case that might
suddenly become urgent and that would also mean
at that long history of missionary failure would be irrelevant because God's about to do something new. That kind of suspicion could have real and unexpected consequences as we'll see in the next lecture. But most of the time Protestants tended to put Jewish conversion
safely into the future as a not yet problem. And that had bigger consequences than you might think because
their apocalyptic framework, their understanding of
the shape of history wasn't just about the Jews. Along with mass conversion of the Jews, Protestants assumed that the end of days would involve two other dramatic events. First, the overthrow of antichrist, antichrist was usually
taken to mean the Pope, but might also mean the Turkish Sultan. And second, as St. Paul
put it, the conversion of the fullness of the Gentiles, that is all of the world's
remaining non-Christian peoples. Most Protestants agree these
three things were coming. There's not quite such general
agreement about the sequence, but there is a reasonable consensus. For example, here's the in
influential English commentator, Thomas Draxe writing in 1608, he asks, "When is likely to be the
time of the Jews conversion, before the sacking and
burning of Rome or afterwards? Answer, in all probability,
it's likely to follow the burning and destruction of Rome." And he gives various
logical and biblical reasons why he thinks this must be so. And then goes on to say, "The conversion of the nation of the Jews
shall be the world restoration and shall wonderfully confirm
the faith of the Gentiles." So you get the sequence, the
overthrow of Catholicism, and maybe also Islam comes first, then the Jews will convert
and then, and only then will the heathen peoples of
the world embrace the truth. So by this logic, if you are a Protestant burning with missionary zeal, longing to spread the
saving word to all nations, then your duty's clear, instead
of getting ahead of yourself and trying to bring the new
age to a premature birth, you should focus your zeal on what the English radical Roger Williams called, "God's great
business between Christ and antichrist," that is
the struggle with Rome. The root to all other victories
lies through that one. The great lesson that Protestants learned from their failure to
convert Europe's Jews was that they should
turn their hearts away from such projects altogether. Only the struggle against the
Romish antichrist mattered, and as we'll see, that's
a theme which echoes across the planet. There's a similar, although simpler story to be told about the second
big category of non-Christians whom Protestants had on their
doorstep, namely Muslims. In an era when the Ottoman
empire ruled most of Hungary and all of Europe,
south and east of there, Islam was as indeed, it's
always been a European religion. Christians recognized Islam
as a distinct religion, as something that was neither
Jewish, nor Christian, nor pagan, but their knowledge
and understanding of it, at least till the 18th century is generally very superficial. Most anti-Islamic tracts argued
with caricatured versions of the faith. There's no real dialogue going on. In reality, there are
plenty of conversions between Christianity and
Islam in both directions, but they're largely about
social and political power. Christians who fell under Islamic rule were quite likely to
convert and vice versa. Protestants celebrated these
converts when they got them. The most common sources
would be prisoners of war, but sometimes merchants
or others who'd settled voluntarily in Protestant
countries made the jump. That sort of thing led to persistent, sometimes well-founded suspicion that these were conversions of convenience and in some cases of, which
were made nearly under duress, some Muslim consciousness were clearly put under unbearable pressure. That seems the best way
to read, for example, the case of the Turkish woman
and baby, prisoners of war, who were taken to the German
city of Bitstock in 1687 where she was provailed
on to allow her baby to be baptized, soon
afterwards, she drowned herself and the child in the city's river. The official accounts of
these sorts of conversions go out of their way to emphasize
that they were genuine, that the converts understood
Christian doctrine, embodied Christian virtues better than most of the native born population. They emphasized it so
much that it makes it look as if these accounts had a
credibility barrier to overcome. Most readers found it implausible that a Muslim might
sincerely and freely convert. Indeed, if there's one
lesson that Protestants learned from their encounters
with Muslims in Europe, it's one which Catholics
had accepted for centuries, which is that converting
Muslims to Christianity is very difficult. This doesn't mean that Protestants
any more than Catholics before them stopped
dreaming about overthrowing the Turkish antichrist and
bringing formerly Christian lands back to the faith. But they generally park that hope again in the apocalyptic future. And when Protestants encountered
Muslims around the world, which of course they do as
far a field as Indonesia, they begin from the
assumption that conversion is off the menu, not
least because they knew that Muslim authorities
general responded aggressively to missionary efforts. Protestants tended to confine themselves to a sly and pious hope that
Muslims might somehow perceive the reasonableness and the
virtues of Christianity. That leaves us with just one
category of non-Christians in Europe, people whom
Christians classed as pagans. There weren't many of
these left in this era, but there were a few, chiefly in the far reaches of Scandinavia. And as luck would have
it after the reformation, most of them fell under Protestant rule. The two Lutheran monarchies of the region, the Danish Norwegian state,
and its Swedish Finnish rival were engaged and erased to
the north during this period, the Swedish moving inland
from the Baltic Coast, the Norwegians from the Atlantic side, control over the Sami people, many of whom migrated seasonally across the emerging frontier. That's a crucial part of this race. Both states begin expanding
their network of churches in large part as a way of
establishing this kind of control. The Sweeds take the lead with
this in the late 16th century, their effort is led by an enterprising Sami speaking parish priest [Inaudible] who was also a Swedish border commissioner and a savvy merchant. In other words, his
ministry was self-funding. And as a trusted trader with Sami, he does more than anybody else
to ensure smooth relations [Inaudible] Nelson's his name. The Danish Norwegian state
is slower off the mark, but during 17th century,
successive bishops of Trondheim begin attending to their
pastoral provision, the energetic Peder Krog who was Bishop for the extraordinarily
long period oversees the building of 48 new
churches in his huge diocese, which goes right up to the Arctic circle and indeed he travels to
the Arctic circle himself. The consistent theme of
all these efforts is ritual and liturgical conformity,
including suppressing the indigenous Sami religion. Krog insists on the importance of teaching the Norwegian language to them. A particular focus for both governments becomes finding and
destroying the drums used by Sami shamans, and
sealing up the sacred holes in Sami tents, where the drums were kept. And in their own terms, these
campaigns were successful. there's a high profile
witchcraft case in 1692, in which an elderly man
is arrested in Venango for the use of a shaman's drum. And that arises because
he's reported by other Sami. He was apparently an incomer from the east and his pagan ways shocked
to the Christianized people of the coast. But the veneer of conformity
doesn't run very deep. There's a scathing early
18th century account of what it calls the
delusions and superstitions of the lapse. And this describes a people
who by now are all baptized and who attend worship when
itinerant clergy passed through, but who's lived religion
is a mixture of Catholicism and shamanism. The author of this text
obviously found it deplorable and during the 18th century,
there's a real change of tempo with attempts being made to build networks of Sami language schools
and to stop practices like the use of these churches to sell state sponsored alcohol. But as viewed from
Stockholm or Copenhagen, this kind of Christianization
is satisfactory. The lesson is that as
long as church structures and firm governance are
put in place and held there for long enough, then a pagan
population can be brought into a possible semblance
of Christian civility at low risk and at low cost. And if it's only in Scandinavia that you'd find actual pagans, there are other Protestant
states with barbarians within their borders, the
Welsh, the Scottish Highlanders, the Gaelic speaking
Irish, all of these people have been Christians for
a thousand years or more, but the elites in London
and Edinburgh and Dublin saw them as being as savage
as any native American. British Protestants learned
most of what they thought they knew about how to convert
heathens and barbarians from their experience
with the Celtic peoples. Wales points the way. In the wake of the called "Acts of Union" which merge Wales into the English state, William Barlow, who's an
enthusiastic Protestant and a firmly English clergymen parachuted in to be Bishop of St. Davids sets himself to remedy what he
calls the barbarous ignorance and inveteratic customed
superstition of his people and his solution is education. He hopes that once his new
schools are up and running, the Welsh rudeness would soon be framed to English civility and that
the Welsh rudeness decreasing, Christian civility may be
introduced plainly English and Christian are almost synonyms. Doesn't quite work out out that way. The Welsh language
stubbornly refuses to die out and is treated as
evidence of the barbarism of the people for centuries. But still from London, Wales
looks like a success of sorts. The population conformed
the Protestant settlement obediently, maybe not enthusiastically. The gentry are brought
into the governing class. Looks as if civility,
Englishness, and Protestantism can be forcibly imposed
on a barbaric people and if they're held in place long enough, the plaster will set and
the job will be done. Scotland shows that there's
a tantalizing alternative. When the Protestant
reformation comes to Scotland in 1559-60, the Highlanders
were participants in the drama, not bystanders or victims,
Archibald Campbell, whose Earl of Gael and
also head of Clan Campbell is woven into both lowland
and highland power structures. And he is at the heart
of the Protestant cause from the beginning and brings
large parts of the highlands into the new religious world with him starting to produce Protestant
books printed in Gaelic. The reformation in the
highlands is a homegrown affair, not really a missionary project at all. And that gives it an energy
in cultural suppleness that wouldn't appear in Welsh
Protestantism for 200 years. So there's two models and it's no surprise that Protestant states
choose the low risk, low reward option offered
by the Welsh Sami example rather than this dangerous path. And that option, the
low risk, low reward one is tested to destruction
and beyond in Ireland. It's often been pointed out that Ireland is an exceptional case. The only really substantial
territory of this era in Europe, whose people don't conform to
the religion of their rulers. There's been a lively
debate about why that is, and I don't want to shortcut it, but a large part of the answer must be the people don't convert to Protestantism because Protestants
make very little efforts to convert them. There were occasional and
tantalizing exceptions like William Bedell, who's an Englishman made an Irish Bishop in the late 1620s who takes it on himself to learn Irish, to sponsor preaching in Irish and to stand up against the
predatory financial exploitation practiced by many of his own clergy. He apparently won respect from
the Gaelic Irish population and not a few converts, but he
also met a wall of opposition from the Anglo Irish
Protestant establishment who regarded his attempt to
legitimate the Irish language as bordering on treason and
who mocked his accommodation to the Gaelic Irish as degeneracy and the project died with him. Well, one of his legacies
was an unfinished translation of the Bible into Irish, which
was picked up decades later by another idealists, the
Irish Protestants, scientist, and missionary enthusiast, Robert Boyle. It's his advocacy and
not least over 700 pounds of his own money that gets
the Irish Bible published at last, in the 1680s. But Boyle in his allies also
met ferocious opposition and indeed threats. One warned him that if he succeeded in making the Gaelic Irish Protestants, then the Anglo Irish would
abandon the faith themselves. One of Boyle's allies told
him, "Our own apparent but very false brethren aren't ashamed to profess a dislike of
our endeavors to convert the natives of this country. Upon maxims like those of
the American like those of the American planters
and hindering the conversion of their slaves." That's an important comparison and a hint of what lies ahead of us in this story. But for now it shows that the Irish story had reached a point where civilizing the wild Irish seemed impossible and therefore converting
them seemed undesirable. In which case what's the alternative? The Protestant establishment
saw these people as heathen, as a spiritual wilderness,
waste, desolate. How was Ireland to be turned
into a flourishing garden if its native strings turned
out to be thorns and thistles, impossible to cultivate? Well, the principle policy
which English governments turned to was called
revealingly enough, plantation. If working with the native
strains of Christianity was too difficult or too dangerous, better to replace them
with imported cultivars, which were known to be safe and fruitful. The result as were one Irish observer put it with bitter humor in the 1690s was that, "Our zealous
reformers went into Ireland to propagate their gospel,
where they took more pains to make the land turn
Protestant than the people, their great zeal for
converting those Popish Acres made them stick at
nothing that might forward so holy a design." Ulster, Ireland's Northern quadrant, which had in the 16th century
been the Heartland of Galden and of Catholic resistance was recolored as a Protestant province
without having to convert a single recalcitrant Catholic. The process wasn't pretty, but it was possible to tell
yourself that it worked. So as Protestants began
to spread across the world and encounter more and more
varied non-Christian peoples from the later 16th century onwards, these are the lessons they took with them. Yes, it was both spiritually
and politically desirable for the heathen to embrace gospel. But Protestant European
experience told them to lower their expectations. Jews and Muslims were most
unlikely to convert at all. So there was little point
in treating them gently in the hope of enticing
them to the true faith, it's been tried before. As of pagans, that capacious
category that Europeans apply by defaults to
almost every alien religion or culture that they meet. Hopes for them are
distinctly muted as well. If they're going to be Christianized, then the Welsh Sami model
of top down enforcement of conformity is the most obvious and the least dangerous model. And over generations, it might work as long as firm political
control is established first. And if it seems to be
proceeding painfully slowly, if the sudden hopes of a
harvest of the heathen souls, that periodically do flare up
routinely are disappointed, well, what else did you expect? Perhaps a few souls could
be snatched from the flames, but it's not yet time for anything more. The popish antichrist
has to be overthrown. The long sanded Jews have to come home. Until then, it might not
make sense even to treat these people as heathen, that is as wild, uncultivated people deserving
of pity waiting to receive the plow, ready to be watered
and sown with good seed. Instead for now, at least
they might be savages, reprobate, a crooked
generation, a desert of thorns fit only for burning,
so that true Christians might spring up in their place. So when in the next three lectures, we follow stories of
Protestants across the world actually negotiating these
cross-cultural encounters, remember the baggage
that they were carrying, the weight of the assumptions that they were struggling against because as we'll see, the remarkable truth is that their hopes and their ideals were not entirely crushed, that many of them continued to work at these apparently fruitless tasks, and even that slowly
amidst their many failures and cruelties, some of them began to learn that there might be
other ways of doing it. Thank you all. (audience clap) - I'm going to start with
one of our online questions. This is someone who
wants to ask a question about con converts from Judaism. They say that you say that a fuss was made of converts from Judaism. Do you mean fuss as
continued discrimination, social ostracism, and discrimination to the point of persecution? And this person suggests
that Spanish converts were forbidden to take office and prevent it from fully assimilating. - Thank you, that's a really
useful point to clarify. That Spanish experience of
the large numbers of Jews in Spain, Portugal, and
some in some other countries who are converted under either
actual forcible conversions or under considerable degrees of duress in the 14th, 15th centuries chiefly leads to generations of
people who are identified in the Spanish context as Conversos, as descendants of converts
whose status as Christians is never entirely settled. They're known in Spain as new Christians and there's generations of
discrimination against them and deep blood purity statutes brought in to mark that discrimination. Protestants explicitly
denounce that sort of thing, and are very, very keen,
this becomes part of, a smaller part of their
legend of the cruelties of the Spanish that they want
no part of that sort of thing in a very keen today demonstrate
that they're different. So when there are Jewish
converts to Protestantism, the most famous of them
would be Emmanuel Tremelus who's an Italian Jew who
converts briefly to Catholicism and then to Protestantism in the 1540s and becomes renowned as a scholar, as a Hebrew scholar amongst Protestants, produces the most widely used
Protestant Latin translation of the Bible. Calvin tries to appoint him
to his academy in Geneva, isn't able to make it work. He is properly fated, he is
made a fuss of in that sense of being much treasured and celebrated. That's again, a little exceptional. Other cases, when I say
that they're made of fuss of in the sense that they
are held up as exemplars, what they're not allowed to
do is simply to disappear into the Christian
population and be normal. That sense of, oh, look,
it's a converted Jew. Isn't that a special thing? Is the sense that you have around them. And there are sufficiently few of them that that kind of
response becomes possible. - [Audience Member] Just wondered
if you could say something about France and how the
conversion of Catholics in France, am I even thinking
it was quite a regional thing, or it still is quite a regional thing? - Yes, indeed, there's wave of, so you're talking about
conversion of Catholics in France to Protestantism. Yeah, I mean, this happens
quite quickly in the, most of it is happening in the late 1550s and very early 1560s. French Protestantism goes from
being a pretty small movement to being upwards of 10% of the population. Our actual members of a Protestant church by the time of the first war
of religion breaks out in 1562. And that is, well, it certainly
happens at the same time as a very substantial missionary effort which is being led from Calvin's Geneva, just over the boarder and one of the things
that effort certainly does is organize these
disparate Protestant groups into a network of cell churches
who actually even managed to hold a national senate in Paris at the height of the
persecution against them. They're scattered, although as you say, there's a regional pattern,
the south becomes an area of particular strength, [Inaudible], it's very often tied
to noble sponsorships. So many of the most prominent converts are from the high nobility, nearly half of the high
nobility become Protestants at the height of it. And many of them bring
their estates with them. So that's what makes that sort of large
social rollout possible. And there's of course, a degree of tension between what Calvin and his ministers think ought to be done,
and the noble leadership who regarded as their birth right to take charge of this movement. So I mean, this cuts across
the issues of how you deal with the non-Christian population in an interesting set of ways. There are even some Jewish observers who look at this wave of
converts in a region of France, which had seen quite a
lot of forced conversions and say, ah, all these people
are becoming Protestants are actually former Jews who
are now taking this opportunity to throw off Catholic. That's probably not true,
but it's interesting that that that idea is even conceivable. - [Audience Member] Thank you so much. You tell a story of what must
be sort of a total conviction of the Protestants of the
truth, of their belief. Because for as I understand it for Jews certain theological issues
such as the idea of Son of God is a anathema because it takes
on the oneness unity of God. And if God is omnipotent and omnipresent and has all these other attributes then God cannot be a father. This language nowadays would be a kind of theological dialogue about metaphorical in symbolic language. But presumably none of that was the case. - It is one of the striking features of the way that the
Protestants talk about Judaism. And indeed you find this in the, there's something similar in the way that they talk about Islam, that the imaginative leap
of really understanding what a different world view looks like, the different priorities it has, the different categories that it uses is one that they really struggle to make. By the end of my period,
in the 18th century, you do find some people
making real attempts at it. But when I say that
there's a certain naivety to many of these approaches,
it does seem to be based on the assumption from
many of these Protestants, that these second order issues, things like the use of statues in worship, I mean, things that Jews
clearly do find offensive and repugnant about
Christianity, no doubt about that and when Protestants start
turning on these things, a lot of Jewish observers
are clearly delighted by it. But Protestants appear to think
that that's going to be enough that it really will be possible
if they can remove these, as I say, second order issues
that the more fundamental, the more profound objections
that the Jews have to Christian doctrine, as you say, are going to be over kind
that they'd simply be able to sweep away. And it's when they discover
that Jewish objections to Catholicism are
different from their own, the Jews really do approach
this from their own perspective with their own priorities, that's a discovery that
they find quite difficult to handle again and again. - [Audience Member] With
modern Protestant churches, like Jews for the Jews
and what they often do is that they Jews to
recognize the Jewish ancestry when they convert to
Protestant Christianity. In the early years, did they do that, or would they encourage ex
Jews to change their surnames and forget about their ancestry? - Somewhere between the two. There's not the kind of
pattern that you have seen in some Christian eras of wanting to eface people's Jewish roots. They do take the idea of the Jews as God's chosen people seriously, what they do not do, the path
they don't go anywhere near is the route that some
modern messianic Jewish, sorry to use that
slightly problematic term, groups have done of creating
a form of Christianity, which is strongly informed
by Jewish practice. And going back to the
patterns of Jewish Christians of the first couple of centuries, they're very clear that Jewish
converts to Christianity need to renounce circumcision
or, and Jewish dietary laws and so forth. They do not need to renounce, and in fact, they should embrace and
celebrate their membership of the Jewish people, that
they descent from Abraham. But in terms of any ritual
or markers of practice of their lives as Christians,
which might separate them from Gentile Christians,
that that's somewhere they absolutely don't want to go. Partly because they've got
their own theological problems with some Protestant
radicals who keep trying to introduce elements of Jewish practice into Christian practice and
Protestant establishment don't like that and partly
of course, just because we're still operating in a
world where anti-Semitism is the sea that people are swimming in and the deep prejudices there
make that sort of embrace of aspects of Judaism simply unacceptable, unthinkable, really for Christians. - Professor Ryrie, thank
you very, very much. (audience applaud)
