Knightly Apologetics #6 -- The Reformation Destroyed Christendom

Sola Fide is cancer.

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

This is a bold headline, I know. As far as I know, I am the only one who is regularly saying it. Even my fellow Catholics don’t talk about it much. Why did I start saying it? What do I mean by it? And what has the reaction been? Read on to find out.

Let’s start with a typical social media post that perfectly encapsulates the current zeitgeist on the subject. Take this Substack post as an example, from a user named “Unskool” and his publication “Deskooled.”

He asks the question “What caused this decline in education?” but really we should want to know what caused the overall decline in our Western Culture?

“Unskool” is representative of the side that says that the last 100 years we have gone off course, and we simply have to stop doing whatever the Progressives of the 1910s & 1920s started and which continued in successive waves in the 1960s and 1990s and 2010s and 2020s.

If you look at some of the responses to the question “what caused this?” you will find replies that fall into these broad categories:

• We lowered our standards / DEI

• A government agency, like the Dept of Ed / Indoctrination

• A physical cause like fluoridation of drinking water or vaccines

• Globalism / WEF / Agenda 21 etc

• Marxist infiltration

• Participation awards

• the occasional blaming it on a certain race or the Jews

Note that none of these answers include “religious persecution” because history shows that religious persecution has always resulted in the growth of Christianity. Persecution creates martyrs, and martyrs inspire, and martyrs work saintly miracles from Heaven. Even direct attacks from Islam could not destroy Christendom.

Sometimes you will see an answer that says “we abandoned God” which is on the right track but the answerer usually fails to explain why we abandoned God. What caused the decline in religious affiliations?

Why, it was the watering down of religion itself, which started with the “Reformation” of Luther, Calvin, et al. The biggest pillar of that is Sola Fide, which means “Faith Alone” and intends to distill “Faith” down to simple intellectual assent or acknowledgement, apart from any works or actions whatsoever.

Once this separation of faith from works occurs, every pillar of Western Civilization (Christendom) unravels. Sure, it did not all collapse immediately in the 1500s, because culture and traditions persist, but it allowed new culture and new traditions to chip away and infiltrate and subvert.

As mentioned in an article that I linked to in a previous note, “All Protestants Are Progressives,” not only is Faith separated from Works, but the definition of the “fruits” of faith is even further watered down because of the lack of central authority to define what faith is! Fruits of faith now comes down to one’s own personal interpretation, which is why the so-called Westminster Confession of Faith (which a non-Catholic responder cited to me) holds very little clout anymore (it still holds popularity and reverence but it has no enforcement mechanism).

This responder wrote, “Sola Fide is a statement of justification, and all Protestant confessions speak to the necessity of Good works as a matter of faith and obedience.”

Yes, they may speak to the necessity of Good works, but that all becomes moot because they have the definition of “Good works” is ever changing and ever slouching towards whatever the edgy mainstream culture finds acceptable.

This is why moral standards keep declining, such as when Protestantism widely accepted birth control in the 1930s and onward, which lead to more affairs, less marriage, worse marriages, more divorce, more aborticide, more gender confusion and everything else we see today. And non-woke Protestants look at it today and say, “Somebody broke our Protestantism! Let’s restore it back to original Protestantism!”

No! You don’t get it, do you? Protestantism broke Christendom, and therefore Protestantism cannot fix Christendom.

And one cannot cite, as this responder did, the fact that the church still has “its official ability to comment on doctrine or to bind or lose” because the whole point is that THERE IS NO “THE CHURCH” ANYMORE! With Protestantism, there is only a bunch of little churches! There is no one Protestant ship, not even a conference of “The Big Five” or something. No, the Protestant ship is split into thousands of small ships, or life jackets really, and none of them are going in the same direction, and all of them are taking on water.

The Catholic ship is big and stubborn and sometimes has a drunk captain and sometimes has a few leaks that need repairs, but the ship is going in the right direction and steering in a different direction is near impossible, and there are no life boats.

And yes, I already know that all analogies are problematic, so don’t bother pointing that out.

A Protestant responder cited the Inquisition as an example of how bad the Catholic Church was and supposedly still is. When I asked him to explain his understanding of the Inquisition, he responded, “We all know what happened. It’s well documented. Why would you ask unless you intend to gaslight, twist the information, or place the blame on someone else (most likely the victims themselves) or indicate it was a good thing and somehow glorified God?”

Of course I do not intend to gaslight or blame someone else. Here is how one should describe the Inquisition. From the book “How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization” by Thomas Woods,

No serious Catholic would contend that churchmen were right in every decision they made. While Catholics believe that the Church will maintain the faith in its integrity until the end of time, that spiritual guarantee in no way implies that every action of the popes and the episcopate is beyond reproach. To the contrary, Catholics distinguish between the holiness of the Church as an institution guided by the Holy Spirit and the inevitable sinful nature of men, including the men who serve the Church.

Still, recent scholarship has definitively revised in the Church’s favor some historical episodes traditionally cited as evidence of the Church’s wickedness. For example, we now know that the Inquisition was not nearly as harsh as previously portrayed, and that the number of people brought before it was far smaller—by orders of magnitude—than the exaggerated accounts that were once accepted. This is not merely special pleading on the author’s part, but the clearly stated conclusion of the best and most recent scholarship.

So I answered the question, “Why do you think caused this?” with a simple response:

Sola Fide.

Faith Alone waters down Christendom into something unmanageable and unrecognizable. It does not inspire the hard work, virtues and martyrdom that builds up successful civilizations. Even pagan civilizations have recognized and valued hard work and virtue, because they know that without them, society collapses. But Protestantism, in practice, resents hard work and virtues (despite what is claimed about the “Protestant work ethic”) because, according to their doctrine, it diverts the credit away from God and the person’s individual faith. They claim that faith cannot and should not be measured by works, so why worry about works at all? The only thing to worry about is winning more souls, so they tell their ministers, “Go out there and convert, convert, convert! Get them all to say the words of accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior. Never mind the details! Never mind the follow-through of requiring a life of repentance and carrying the cross!”

I exaggerate (a little). It is not ALL Protestants who do this, but it is a ruling plurality. Not because the faith of the Protestants is lacking. No, I admire the passion and zeal of many Protestants. But because Protestantism is a dead faith, and it cannot be restored.

Certainly some Protestants do good works, but they do this through their own volition, not from impetus of their church. Because whenever their church tries to impose these kinds of requirements, there is disagreement and the response is to split their church into further factions.

When I post this on social media, I get very little response. Hardly a word in rebuttal. Perhaps because it is too bold. Perhaps because it punches them right in the gut and they would rather ignore it than contemplate that it might actually be true.

Why is this important? Because the United States of America is founded by Protestants, for Protestants and under a Protestant worldview & constitution. If we are going to fix America, and go back to a previous set of values, we might as well think about making it more of a Catholic worldview, otherwise we will end up right back where we started.

On the Steve Deace Show, co-host Todd Erzen is known for saying “Progressivism is cancer.”

I will one-up with my own saying,

“Sola Fide is cancer.”

And in Judges 21:25, there is this line, “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.”

I will one-up this by amending it for the modern day,

“In those days there was no Church; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.”

Non nobis.

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Note on the above photo: I found it while searching up “Reformation” but I don’t know who those statue guys are. They look like Calvin or Calvinists, so I went with it.