The Protestant Man
Scripture and Commonwealth
Editor’s note: This speech was delivered as part of a panel, “The Bible and American Renewal,” at NatCon 2025.
As the study of wisdom consists in action and contemplation so that one part of it may be called active and the other contemplative—the active part having reference to the conduct of life, that is, to the regulation of morals, and the contemplative part to the investigation into the cause of nature and into pure truth—Socrates is said to have excelled in the active part of that study, while Pythagoras gave more attention to its contemplative part.—Augustine, City of God, 8.4.
Scripture and Commonwealth. That’s a good way to sum up the Protestant Reformation, indeed Protestantism itself, or at least Protestantism as it should be and could be again. And it’s not a bad way to sum up America either, but now I’m both repeating and getting ahead of myself.
I never need an excuse to express my Protestant chauvinism, but this past July marked the 500th anniversary of the Tyndale Bible—so it’s nice to have one. By 1525, of course, the European reformations were well underway; Luther had already been declared an outlaw and spent a year in hiding after the Diet of Worms; Leo X had issued his bull, Exsurge Domine (Arise, O Lord), five years prior. And even my papist friends—yes, I will insist on using early modern terms—know the rest. Charles Taylor and Brad Gregory have already told you: modernity!
And, indeed, for the comfort of our historians and the ease of periodization, this is fine to say. I, too, often ask myself why Luther would give us blue-haired lesbian Episcopalian bishops. Or was it Ockham? I lose track. I lament all this and, as a Protestant, of course, take full responsibility for all that ails us.
But I must insist on saying a bit more for the edification of my fellow Protestants (especially American Protestants), more so than any pontiff—who has no jurisdiction here anyway. If there is to be a viable Christian Right, there must be Protestants—indeed, as the Frenchman Emmanuel Todd has argued, if there is to be a viable Christian West, there must be Protestants. Joseph Bottum did not exaggerate when he said the most significant historical event of the past 150 years was the abdication of national leadership by Protestants with the collapse of the Mainline. Before that, there was a string of controversies, theological and political, that split American Protestantism down the middle.
Any recovery requires a renewed Protestant self-consciousness and self-confidence, or class consciousness, if you like. This awakening, in turn, requires Protestants knowing what they’re about, that is, what birthed them. And too often Protestants conceive of themselves through a thin, uninspiring story that is nearly as bad as blaming the ills of modernity on nominalism.
I want to briefly tell a more actionable story, one that maps onto much of what I see as the divide in conservatism, especially conservative Protestantism, a divide between the contemplative and active life. Conservatives love ideas, principles, and conferences. But most of them are thoroughly uncomfortable with wielding power. This is dissipating, I think, but not nearly fast enough.
Evangelical Protestants, in particular, cling to a story of themselves that is conducive to quietism and individual piety—perhaps personal evangelism—conversionism informs their understanding of not just salvation but of both Scripture and commonwealth. Only things that can be converted to faith in Christ are worth worrying about; the rest will burn. This is the best-case scenario. The worst case is people like David French, who baptize only slightly outdated leftist dogma and perform the role of prison functionary on behalf of the media.
Ironically, the perspective of the typical Protestant today has been that of a cloistered life, a contemplative life, to put it nicely. It is, again ironically (historically speaking), members of Roman ecclesial communities (to use some Vatican II language) who increasingly propel their members to worldly ambition and status, members who lead political institutions and produce actionable scholarship. The leading public theologian in America is the vice president, who will likely be the third-ever Roman president. And we must say that this would greatly improve the track record on this front.
But I must return to my corrective story. This quietist, me-and-my-Bible-in-my-prayer-closet Protestantism is an aberration. Protestants today surely love Scripture, but it is not clear they know what to do with it, at least not beyond self-edification. The impetus for the Reformation was not just getting doctrine and liturgy right. Sixteenth-century doctrinal disagreements were important, to be sure, but usually finer than the comic book versions tell us.
The more pressing cause of Protestantism was the decay of Christendom (multicausal, to be sure) and the desire to save it. It was Scripture and commonwealth. Protestants, I argue, need to conceive of themselves as saviors of Christendom once again—and to be clear, at this late hour, Romanists are in the trenches already. First, we save Christendom, then we’ll figure the rest out.
To tell our corrective story, we must begin with what Burkhardt called the Renaissance.[1. This section is indebted to Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (1987); James Hankins, Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (2019); Hankins, Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy (2023); John F. D’Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome (1983); and Jacob Burkhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).] In 14th- and 15th-century Italy, and then in northern Europe, the ideas of the contemplative and active life represented a dichotomy between the stereotypical monkish, cloistered, secluded existence, then prized as the highest way of life, and the public, political, active existence of the layman. The tension between religious and secular was, ideally, unnecessary, but had been birthed by medieval emphases and priorities, however artificial and narrowly defined, and then challenged in the Renaissance. Now, it is Evangelical Protestant emphases and priorities that maintain this tension for us.
Petrarch (d. 1374), even as a Renaissance man, preached against worldly involvement; the solitary religious life was the ideal. But Petrarch didn’t exactly practice what he preached. Even as he held up a cloistered, contemplative existence as the highest perfection, he did otherwise—and advised otherwise—suggesting that time and station inside of Providence may dictate the extent to which perfection can be achieved. Or perhaps he simply could not dare to contradict Augustine.
Solitude, study, and contemplation of higher things—these had all been, of course, held up as aspirational for some time, at least as early as Cicero. Even if Petrarch and other Renaissance men exchanged a monkish expression of the contemplative life for one of aristocratic leisure, the final product was more or less the same “medieval posture.”
In the end, Petrarch’s esteem for the contemplative life contained a certain aloofness, but he recognized that studied ignorance of worldly affairs was not intrinsic to the contemplative life. It was Salutati (d. 1406), the sometime chancellor of Florence, who embodied the new civic humanism. Petrarch and Salutati appealed to the same sources for different ends (not unlike intra-Protestant hermeneutical conflicts today). Where the former would wield Cicero to encourage solitude (e.g., exile), the latter held out Cicero’s political career—the public man of ambition—as quintessential. Surely, Cicero’s meditations upon action were not disconnected from action itself; it was a question of ends and purpose according to the times. The study of wisdom is necessary for right action. The civic humanists simply elevated the second step, especially for laymen. Most men, after all, simply are thrust into a life of action; only a few are blessed enough to have some mixture of contemplation. And since duties to God and man are intertwined, neither mode of life can be wholly ignored, as so many pastors found out the hard way during COVID lockdowns.
In a sense, the contemplative life and the active life are stages of the interior life, and thus intermingled and not mutually exclusive. The problem for us is that for too long the contemplative stage has dominated American Protestantism, leading it into passivity—an imbalance between intellect and will. Hence, the nascent corrective on the New Right. Not all welcome this corrective. The monasteries have kept them fat and insulated. Virtue requires action. It is a vice to refuse action, however stark and disruptive said action may seem. This does not negate the taking of the cloth—Salutati evidently went to no such extreme, as his advice to his friend entering a monastery evinces. But it may alter the character or style of the one taking it.
The contemplative life is a glorious escape, but something inhuman plagues it insofar as it is capable of shutting out the concerns of the world. A disciplined mind must reach out beyond itself, both to God and fellow man. In terms of the sublime, the active life is inferior, but it is required, even to be preferred, this side of heaven. A contemplative man, “if he lives as a man, [cannot] be completely dead to secular matters.”
By the 16th century, Renaissance humanism had enveloped northern Europe and England. All the Magisterial Reformers save Luther were reared in the new learning of so-called civic humanism. The point is in the name. As Burkhardt put it, the Renaissance was about books and buildings. But whereas Petrarch was satisfied strolling amongst the ruins of Rome, a Greek text he couldn’t read under his arm, nostalgic and wistful, the subsequent generations of the movement he birthed were more desirous, more inspired to, shall we say, be the change they wanted to see. Unless modernity had altered the nature of both man and society, what was the point of studying the ancients and the fathers if not to emulate them, as Machiavelli asked in the opening of the Discourses?
The recovery of ancient wisdom was for the sake of reforming a fractured Christendom—men had to be reformed so society could be reformed. Especially in the north, humanism was social dogma, and a Christian one, exemplified by the inspiration of many a Reformer, including Erasmus of Rotterdam, who declared to a Christian knight that his intent was not to outline a course of study but a way of life.
The religious are too often found fleeing the world, he said, because of their pride—a false conviction of above-it-all holiness. So heavenly minded that they were no earthly good, to invoke another great humanist, Johnny Cash. Fairly or unfairly—and I think fairly—the declining opinion of clergy in the 15th and 16th centuries was owed to their sloth and luxury. Ironically, for Romanists, Augustine attributed the active life to the Apostle Peter and the contemplative to John. Clergy, the ones who claimed apostolic succession from the active apostle, were doing nothing to reverse the decline of Christendom; their main social function was to passively affirm prevailing dogma and social conditions—does this sound familiar, Evangelicals?
A new lay spirituality and overriding biblicism governed the expression of humanism in the part of the world where the Reformation would emerge. Cloistered existence was increasingly shunned, and the Bible, especially in the vernacular, became, as Margo Todd puts it, the preeminent guiding force behind this transformation of society: the dissemination of the “philosophy of Christ.” All men, not just those of religious orders, were responsible for self-reformation for the sake of societal reformation. The pagan classics encouraged certain moral reforms and inspirational examples, but these were servants of Christianity. The Protestants looked to the church fathers as much as Plutarch, but whereas the former was driven to literary retirement by encountering their wisdom and depth, the Magisterial Reformers were driven to righteous zeal by the contrast of primitive Christianity with papal innovations. Scripture, like the classics, featured inspirational figures as well, and for Protestants, models of political reform. Perhaps, the impulse for men to withdraw from society was perennial, as Petrarch claimed, but Aristotle had demonstrated the sociability of man, and Nehemiah had modeled civic duty to God and nation. Cincinnatus would not have been a hero if he had retired to his farm when his city needed saving. He was only an inspiration for republican virtue because he declined power only after he had wielded it to good ends.
The new ideal social type, conditioned by classical moralism and biblicism, was a pious, self-controlled, industrious layman—a man of action in both civil and ecclesiastical affairs—a good citizen and a Christian soldier. (Self-improvement manuals to this end were bestsellers.) This is what would become the Protestant man—even the Protestant clergyman. Luther may have despised him, but Zwingli (a thoroughgoing humanist who believed for some reason that Hercules was in heaven) in many ways embodied this new social type as a clergyman. As Steven Ozment said, the effete, passive clergyman is a modern myth, unknown to the world of the Reformation.
Of course, Zwingli’s own sexual improprieties did not quite live up to the reformation of manners that captivated England in the 16th century, with its emphasis on educating the youth and producing a godly society. We see this emphasis still in Benjamin Rush’s defense of the Bible being taught in schools centuries later—the demands on the republican citizen are greater than that of the monarchical citizen; those who do not produce a thoroughly indoctrinated child, a future citizen, are committing a crime against the whole.
Now you know why the left worked so hard to replace Christ with Kendi in the schools, and why public monuments to the improvement manual of the Protestant man must be removed from public view—it is not that they care what you believe privately; they care how you might act politically.
Christian agency, the active life—lay, populist, iconoclastic, working class, political, practical—for the sake of Christendom, that was the Protestant ideal that, in his own way, Weber picked up on 120 years ago. It possessed a positive vision and was aggressive in its pursuit. Indeed, it is in the active life, as Aristotle taught, that virtues are perfected. Prudence, for example, requires the life of the polis; the internal life of the solitary cannot mimic it. The active virtues require the active life.
The doctrine of vocation was not meant to make everyone feel better about their low station, but to excite active, ambitious laymen, especially the chief layman, the Christian prince, unto reform of Christendom in its piety and practice. Aristotle might have supplied the notion that man was naturally a political being and that this was therefore inescapable and good, but it was the Old Testament that supplied models of kingship and governance. It was the political Hebraism of the Protestants that revived the image of David, Josiah, Hezekiah, Asa, and the rest as standards of good rule. What was the standard for good kings? Those ambitious men who worked to restore godly society—even the pagan ones—were praised when they befriended God’s people.
I often wonder why Evangelical Protestants who plead so much attachment to the marketplace of religion and ideas don’t at least compete aggressively. Where is the drive for acquisition? Evangelicals are Machiavellian about the place of religion in politics, that is, its decentralization. Why are they not Machiavellian about the drive for acquisition? It seems market participation is really about propping up market controls and monopolies designed for your own marginalization. A civic humanist would question whether these comfortable clergy actually believe what they profess.
The Protestant pursuit concerned the whole man, the contemplative in service of the active life; the internal and external; Scripture and commonwealth. The Protestant man was not an enemy of Christendom, of Christian nations, but a champion of them—as he conceived of himself, at least, he was out to cleanse both church and state of corruptions. Where is this Protestant man today? There are signs of life, much of it at this conference. To invoke the Florentine again, I trust the ancient valor of Protestant hearts is not yet dead, or at least is not beyond resuscitation.
Petrarch once compared the moral decay of cities with those infested by the Black Death in 1347-1349, the context of Boccaccio’s writing as well. Fleeing such places was the only remedy. But the Protestant man does not flee. Answering the question, repeatedly raised by humanists, of whether or not a good man can participate in a corrupt polity, the Protestant answers that they are all already corrupt. He is like a plague doctor, sifting through corpses in search of life to nurse back to health and risking body and soul for the soul and body of the nation. He is not disgusted by the vulgus but wants to elevate them; rather than “unlearn humanity,” he wants humanity to learn.
This is his lot, the lot of the active man, the Protestant man, without the luxury of solitary contemplation this side of heaven. Here, his duty to God and nation demands his action. The Protestant man does not demote learning or study, to be clear. But it is true education the Protestant wants: not the expertise of scholasticism, but the moral formation of the humanists. And this moralism is directed in its expression by necessity and duty—self-denial—inside of Providence. It might be John Adams who best captured the Protestant sentiment when he wrote to his wife in 1780, “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy.”
Even Petrarch, who preferred solitude to crowds, had to admit that the active life in service of progeny and country had divine sanction and, indeed, often called moral men out of solitude to service when their fatherland needed them. In other words, the Renaissance man, the Protestant man, knows what time it is. Perhaps contradicting himself, Petrarch once chastised the princes (church and state) for ceding Christendom to Islam. If the Romans could “dare such great enterprises” for earthly kingdoms, how much more should the princes of Christendom pursue it? Would Caesar have permitted such passivity? Likewise, the question for the Protestant man today is whether he will embrace the active life for the glory of Christ or succumb to the passivity of modernity.