Reformation Myths Quotes

“It is not the poor who are joining – persons of all income levels are equally likely to join. Men are almost as likely as women to become Protestants and the unmarried are not different from the married. Young people are slightly more likely than those over 50 to convert.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Liberation Theology led nowhere because it was neither a revolutionary nor a religious movement, but involved a weak, self-cancelling mixture of each.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“In 2004 there were only 5,116.19 Why? Because they have been replaced by Latin Americans! In many Latin American nations today, native-born evangelical Protestant clergy far outnumber both foreign missionaries as well as local Catholic priests.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Until well into the twentieth century there even were legal bans on the sale of Bibles in most nations of Latin America, which led to the widespread belief that only Protestants accepted the Bible.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Although for several centuries the Roman Catholic Church was the only legal religion in Latin America, its popular support was neither wide nor deep.5 Many huge rural areas were without churches or priests, a vacuum in which indigenous faiths persisted.6 Even in the large cities with their splendid cathedrals, mass attendance was very low – as recently as the 1950s perhaps only 10 to, at most, 20 per cent of Latin Americans were active participants in the faith.7 Reflective of the superficiality of Latin Catholicism, so few men entered the priesthood that all across the continent most of the priests had always been imported from abroad.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Nevertheless, this too is a myth. The Catholic Church actually thrives on Protestant competition and is far more successful and effective when forced to confront it.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Given the American example, it should always have been obvious that the sacred canopy claims are silly. In the United States, in the most fully pluralistic nation that probably has ever existed, religion is thriving. And it is absolutely clear that it is competition among religious groups, each needing to effectively recruit members or fade away, that has produced these results.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“This partly reflects the Balkanization of history – that scholars attend only to their special time and place. But, for the most part, it reflects that far too many scholars rely on the received wisdom, even on matters central to their subject.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“As Reinhard Bendix (1916–91) summed up Weber’s view: ‘the Puritan divines brought about a profound depersonalization of the family and neighborhood life’ which was linked to a ‘decline in kinship loyalties and a separation of business affairs from family affairs’ which led to the ‘isolation of the individual’.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“What is a peasant society? It can be defined many ways, such as when most people live in rural areas and farm for a living. But that’s not what Marx, Weber and the others had in mind. For them, peasant society referred to family structure.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) was among the first to express deep regrets over the rise of individualism, which he traced back to the Protestant Reformation. Tocqueville is, of course, famous for his two-volume work Democracy in America, based on his perceptive nine-month tour of the nation in 1831. He had much praise for the young republic, but he feared it suffered from excessive individualism. Among his concerns was that individualism leads to selfishness and this can result in people not working for the common good, but for each to remain ‘shut up in the solitude of his own heart’. Against this, Tocqueville urged that Americans spurn individualism and follow instead ‘habits of the heart’.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“It is a commonplace to identify Martin Luther as the ‘father of individualism’.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“As is obvious, the English scientific stars were overwhelmingly from the bourgeois, while more than half of the European stars were from the ‘leisure class’, gentry and the nobility – only 16 per cent were from the bourgeois.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“My explanation is that England led the way in science for the same reasons that it led the way in the Industrial Revolution31 – its substantially greater political and economic liberty had produced a relatively open class system that enabled the emergence of an ambitious and creative upper middle class, sometimes called the bourgeoisie. While the rise of the bourgeoisie occurred all across western Europe, it did so earlier and to a far greater degree in England.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“As for Islam, the orthodox conception of Allah is hostile to the scientific quest. There is no suggestion in the Qur’an that Allah set his creation in motion and then let it run. Rather, it is assumed that he often intrudes in the world and changes things as it pleases him. Thus, through the centuries many of the most influential Muslim scholars have held that all efforts to formulate natural laws are blasphemy in that they would seem to deny Allah’s freedom to act. Thus did people’s images of God and the universe deflect scientific efforts in China, ancient Greece, and Islam.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“that there was no scientific revolution, only the culmination of normal scientific progress over several centuries and, moreover, that science arose only in Christian Europe because only medieval Europeans believed that science was possible and desirable.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Merton was given an unusual amount of space in the American Journal of Sociology to argue on behalf of his thesis that to reject it on the basis of the evidence against it would be to commit what he called the ‘Fallacy of the Latest Word’. This ‘fallacy’ involves abandoning a theory ‘as soon as it appears to have been empirically falsified’. He then asked, ‘When are we to retain a hypothesis or theoretical conception in the face of facts that seem to refute it?’12 In answer, Merton quoted Imre Lakatos that ‘There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory’.13 Thus, Merton proposed that a false explanation of some phenomenon is better than none. How absurd.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Bishops and cardinals were among the very best clients of ‘usurers’. That is not surprising since nearly everyone holding an elite Church position had purchased his office as an investment, anticipating a substantial return from Church revenues.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Thus, by no later than the thirteenth century, the leading Christian theologians had fully debated the primary aspects of emerging capitalism – profits, property rights, credit, lending and the like. As Lester K. Little summed up: ‘In each case they came up with generally favorable, approving views, in sharp contrast to the attitudes that had prevailed for six or seven centuries right up to the previous generation.’60 Capitalism was fully and finally freed from all fetters of faith.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Echoing his teacher, but using many more words, St Thomas Aquinas began his analysis of just prices by posing the question ‘Whether a man may lawfully sell a thing for more than it is worth’.53 He answered by first quoting Augustine that it is natural and lawful, for ‘you wish to buy cheap, and sell dear’. Next, Aquinas excluded fraud from legitimate transactions. Finally, he recognized that worth is not really an objective value – ‘the just price of things is not absolutely definite’ – but is a function of the buyer’s desire for the thing purchased and the seller’s willingness or reluctance to sell, so long as the buyer was not misled, or under duress.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“The need for loans often was so great and so widespread that Italian banks opened branches all across the Continent. Although many bishops, monastic orders and even the Roman hierarchy ignored the ban on usury, opposition to interest lingered. As late as the Second Lateran Council in 1139, the Church ‘declared the unrepentant usurer condemned by the Old and New Testaments alike and, therefore, unworthy of ecclesiastical consolations and Christian burial’.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Charging interest on loans was thus defined as the ‘sin of usury’, and widely condemned in principle while pretty much ignored in actual practice. In fact, as already noted, by late in the ninth century some of the great religious houses ventured into banking and bishops were second only to the nobility in their reliance on borrowed money. In addition to borrowing from monastic orders, many bishops secured loans from private Italian banks that enjoyed the full approval of the Vatican.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Thus it was that, beginning in about the ninth century, the growing monastic estates came to resemble well-organized and stable firms that pursued complex commercial activities within a relatively free market, investing in productive activities involving a hired workforce, guided by anticipated and actual returns.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Belief in the virtues of work and of simple living did accompany the rise of capitalism, but this was centuries before Martin Luther was born.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“39 It was the same in the other great houses. And all of this was possible because the great monasteries began to utilize a hired labour force, who not only were more productive than the monks had been,40 but also more productive than tenants required to provide periods of compulsory labour. Indeed, these tenants had long since been satisfying their labour obligations by money payments.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Then they calculated the relationship between Protestantism and these measures of industrial capitalism. The results were zero: Catholic and Protestant nations did not differ!”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Lujo Brentano (1844–1931), who correctly noted that industrial capitalism originated in southern Europe long before the German Reformation and was taken north mainly by Catholic banking firms.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“Weber’s thesis is now more than a century old and nearly all of the introductory sociology textbooks (but not mine) take it to be a settled fact that the rise of industrial capitalism took place initially in predominantly Protestant countries and that within nations having both Protestants and Catholics, the Protestants dominated the capitalist economy. Moreover, a number of sociologists have attempted to account for the modernization of various non-Western societies by ‘finding’ an equivalent of the Protestant Ethic in their local religions12 – Robert Bellah claimed that such an ethic existed in Japan’s forms of Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto during the Tokugawa era.13 Nevertheless, it’s all a myth!”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“It all began with the French Revolution. Prior to that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries European warfare had involved very small professional armies, fighting very circumscribed campaigns having almost no impact on civilian life. In 1643, the entire Prussian army consisted of 5,500 professional soldiers. A century later the fierce Prussian army commanded by Frederick the Great numbered only 90,000 and still triumphed in the Seven Years War (1756–63) against France, Austria and Russia.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes

“As suggested by this definition, not all nations are states and not all states are nations.”
― Rodney Stark, Reformation Myths: Five Centuries Of Misconceptions And (Some) Misfortunes