How Did Liberal Democracy Arise from Illiberal Soil?

How did liberal democracy arise from illiberal soil? In other words, how did Europe in the 16th century, when religious adherence was enforced and heretics were persecuted, produce a world in which freedom of thought and religious affiliation are now guaranteed? Answers to this question fall into two broad categories. The more common one, since Herbert Butterfield's “The Whig Interpretation of History” (1931), goes something like this: For a century and a half, Catholic traditionalists and Protestant reformers clung to premodern views of revelation and politics and assaulted each other over obscurantist doctrines; but then in the latter part of the 17th century statesmen of saner tendencies began steering Western nations toward greater toleration and openness. A second explanation, expressed forcefully in Alister McGrath's “Christianity's Dangerous Idea” (2007), suggests that liberal democracy is not a break from Christianity but, in important respects, a natural outgrowth of it.

In “Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism,” James Simpson, a professor of English at Harvard, claims to offer a third answer. Mr. Simpson thinks the 16th-century reformation precipitated a reign of terror and paranoia so twisted and regressive that it provoked the creation of “self-stabilising mechanisms.” So, for instance, the reformers' supposed denial of free will in the doctrine of predestination led to an inevitable embrace of political freedom; Calvinism's rejection of good works as a means to merit salvation led in time to the creation of meritocratic societies; and Protestantism's fixation on the Bible's inerrancy led to a tradition of antiliteralism in biblical interpretation. “The liberal tradition,” Mr. Simpson writes, “derives from Protestantism by repudiating it.”

Mr. Simpson's argument doesn't differ all that much from Butterfield's interpretation, but the book has far worse problems. One is that, although the author asserts his claims aggressively and fluently, he often doesn't deliver the goods. He contends, for example, that the “literalist” Bible-reading practices of “evangelicals,” as he anachronistically calls them, “often” led them to despair. Maybe. But how “often”? To support his contention Mr. Simpson would need to produce some significant array of primary sources: letters, journals, sermons or pamphlets from the period. All we get are some passages by the 16th-century poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and the 17th-century writer and preacher John Bunyan. The former was writing on the eve of his execution and the latter was a tortured literary genius. Only two cases—and not good ones.

The deeper problem is that Mr. Simpson is so profoundly out of sympathy with the Protestant figures he writes about that, for him, any adverse characterization of them will do. His argument on Calvinism's rejection of merit in salvation relies, without qualification, on Max Weber's “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1904), in which Weber argued that Calvinism's emphasis on election drove northern Europeans to prove their elect status by laboring for wealth and prosperity. Mr. Simpson shows no awareness that Weber's argument has been debunked in a thousand different ways—though surely he knows it. Weber's thesis aligns with the argument that early-modern Protestantism operated as a kind of psychic terrorism, so it's good enough.

A less ambitious but far more cogent work is Robert Louis Wilken's “Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom.” Mr. Wilken, a professor emeritus of Christian history at the University of Virginia, contends that the principle of religious freedom—that is, that religious believers may worship as they wish—arose chiefly from Christian sources, not secular or skeptical ones. By religious freedom Mr. Wilken doesn't mean the forbearance of repellent practices but “a natural right that belongs to all human beings.”