The Unintended Reformation: Contents and discontents of (post)modernity

By Brad S. Gregory

The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion and Public Sphere 
February 27, 2014

The Unintended Reformation is an unusual work of history in deliberately focusing as much on the present as on the past, and in emphasizing the ongoing importance of the Reformation era for understanding the Western world today. Having considered issues related to the book’s genre, method, and assumptions in the first part of my response and others related to its historical arguments and omissions in the second part, the principal focus of the final part of my response will be the reactions of the forum participants to my description and assessment of the present. I will also take up speculation about my supposed agenda, and the book’s lack of ideas for solving contemporary problems.

As I noted briefly in the first part, it is quite possible that someone could agree with my description of our contemporary hegemonic institutions and ideological hyperpluralism but evaluate them differently than I do in my book. In that case we would simply disagree about what is desirable and what is not, presumably as a function of more basic beliefs, as different evaluative expressions within our current hyperpluralism. On this point, I will first simply repeat what is also apparent in the book, namely that its argument is neither a blanket condemnation of modernity nor a thoroughgoing lament about the contemporary Western world (James Chappel’s “Weltschmerz”). Second, the three contemporary practical concerns I mention in the Introduction—a conspicuously uncivil public sphere and political life (especially in the U.S.), global climate change, and a frequently nonchalant attitude in the academy about the alleged lack of non-subjective moral norms—are an attempt to appeal to readers’ moral awareness. I hope that many readers share my (and many others’) view that these are serious problems. Those who do not will obviously be unmoved by my appeal to them and will instead view their invocation as oddly alarmist or exaggerated, as will others who find unproblematic the conditions endured by millions of factory workers in poor countries, for example, or the incoherence of undergraduate education in research universities. In that case we disagree about what is good and bad—which reinforces my point about the subjectivization of morality as a sociological reality but vitiates the force of my moral appeal. I happen to think (and imply in the book) that those who are unperturbed by the subjectivization of morality are naïve, doubly so given the ever more astonishing biotechnological possibilities that may well be around the corner, a concern also expressed by Jürgen Habermas and others. But if someone relishes the prospects of a transhumanistic future, for example, in which individual choice is extended limitlessly via a liberal eugenics to embrace whatever cybernetic innovation and genetic engineering can facilitate, I am afraid I do not know how to reach such a person from my own moral vantage point. But I do not think this describes most readers.

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