this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2025
108 points (100.0% liked)
Chapotraphouse
14163 readers
627 users here now
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's a reason Martin Luther is number three on my list of 'time travel assassinaition targets'
I kinda think it's more the printing press that did it than anything. If not him, at some point some other monk or theologian or whatever would have ended up airing their grievances via pamphlet and bam, ever-so-slightly- different-protestantism.
I largely subscribe to Patrick Wyman's theory that Luther was an indispensable element between the interactions of a latent reformist tendency and the printing press
Luther's decision to write in colloquial German, his doubling down at any challenge, his genuine skill at fiery rhetoric and sense of popular humor, his protection by the Prince-elector of Saxony, these are just too contingent and situational for us to make a claim of a locked-in historical outcome
The Printing Press absolutely made Luther, but he gave the reformation it's absolutist and totalizing nature and while a religious rupture in early modern Europe was inevitable, the shape, scale and nature it took definitely was not
We can compare Protestant to Old Believers in Russian Orthodox Church, who shared a lot of similarities, but lost (and remaining Old Believers were later at the same time pro-capitalist and pro-Bolshevik).
It's still ultimately true that any dominant religious ideology is going to be downstream of the interests of the ruling class, and the bourgeoisie were always going to overtake feudalism. Perhaps we would have gotten Catholic Work Ethic ideology instead or something, but regardless I don't think it's right to think he's meaningfully responsible for pro-capitalist ideology proliferating, it was the class struggle of the bourgeoisie that did that.
What did he do? Genuine question
Edit: just saw your other comment
He's the first dominoe that triggered the European Wars of Religion and birthed the disastrous proto-capitalist ideologies of the various early protestant sects, which form the social bedrock of many pro-capitalist ideologies later down the line
John Calvin has a lot to answer for
All my homies hate John Calvin
It's not like Catholicism was any good. Orthodoxy was dead in western and central Europe at that time.
Catholicism has all of about two decades working positively to its credit. But it has tended to play both sides of the colonial struggle, and so to many it is understandably a key piece of their liberationary understanding.
Yes, but also many early Protestants were proto-socialists as well. The Anabaptist rebellions come to mind, as do the Diggers, who were explicitly reacting to the enclosure of the Commons by bourgeois Protestants in England