Lessons we can learn from Luther
This Halloween marks 500 years since the priest and scholar Martin Luther nailed his 95 revolutionary opinions to the door of a German castle.
His action would begin the Protestant Reformation.
Luther’s document, known historically as his “95 Theses,” was politically incorrect in the extreme. It dared to question some new ideology coming down from the Catholic Church hierarchy.
At the time, the leadership of the church, with the support of the highest government authorities, was a “cultural hegemony” (that is, for the most part, they controlled what people said and thought).
Those, like Luther, who dared to break with the groupthink where given the stigmatizing label “heretic.”
On the 500th anniversary of Luther’s heretical act, I’m overwhelmed by the sense that half a millennium later, history is repeating itself and this time Canada, not Germany, is the site of the action.
Many of our politicians, academics and national journalists have joined together, sometimes informally, but increasingly by design, to enforce a cultural hegemony.
Theirs is a left-leaning hegemony informed by cultural Marxism.
Evidence of its Marxist pedigree is its total intolerance of dissenting views.
The college protester blowing an air horn to ensure a conservative speaker can’t be heard and the pundit in a debate who calls her adversary a racist rather than refute his facts are demonstrating a clear understanding of the cultural Marxist agenda.
It will be hard for anyone to argue against my observation that a large swath of our cultural elites and their minions are each day tightening the boundaries of what constitutes acceptable expression.
In addition to increased hostility toward some campus speakers, the wilful omission of facts from the reports of certain national news outlets, and several recent pieces of government legislation lend ample support to my claim.
However, for my allusion to truly resonate, it requires a Canadian public figure fulfilling the role of Luther. To my mind, Prof. Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto most closely fits the bill.
When Luther posted his theses, he didn’t envision a major controversy developing. His paper was a dispassionate criticism of the church’s fringe practice of selling indulgences (pieces of paper that promised to release a loved one from purgatory).
However, by identifying the “symptom” of indulgences, Luther brought attention to a larger disease that gripped the elites of his society and the issue snowballed.
Peterson’s experience has been similar.
The protest that brought him to the public eye was at first lowkey. When his university demanded that he use newly coined terms reflecting a wide range of gender identities, he refused, saying such descriptors were not supported by scientific evidence. But what should have amounted to a tempest in a teapot soon ballooned beyond the original issue.
Assailed ferociously by his adversaries, Peterson responded by unleashing a public, ongoing critique of Western society’s regressive move to the left.
His medium of choice has been YouTube. In Peterson’s use of YouTube, we again see parallels to Martin Luther.
Historians agree that Luther’s protest against the hegemony of his day succeeded where other earlier reform movements failed because he was able to harness the first means of mass communication, the printing press.
Like YouTube today, the printing press allowed individuals to bypass formal channels and publish what they wished, quickly and simply.
Using pamphlets, often in the language of the common people, Luther and other Protestant thinkers spread their ideas across Europe.
Pamphlets printed by Luther alone outnumbered Catholic writers five to three and made up 20 per cent of all pamphlets published by 1530.
Today, individual videos featuring Peterson’s commentary — some posted by Peterson himself but most edited and uploaded by “converts” — number in the thousands. The view counts on the videos collectively are in the millions and growing.
Brought before Emperor Charles V on the charge of heresy — punishable by death, had he not escaped — Luther said, “I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.”
In the same way, I believe our Canadian “Luthers” have recognized it’s more dangerous to remain silent than to speak up.
Perhaps their example will inspire more Canadians to join the new reformation.
Some may even want to be called “heretics.”
Despite its historical baggage, in its original Greek it simply means “one who is able to choose.”