Standing on the shoulders of giants

As we near Election Day, and celebrate the Halloween season, we should pause to remember some historical ghosts from the past. Oct. 31 is also the memorial day of the Protestant Reformation. This epochal event in Western cultural history has a direct link to the voting booth. Among the effects of the successful challenge to the power structures of its day and age, which Martin Luther initiated by tacking his 95 opinions on the cathedral door in Wittenberg, in modern day Germany, three stand out for our consideration.

The first is the status of the individual. Before the Reformation corporate paradigms dominated the human mind. The individual with “certain inalienable rights,” such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, did not exist pragmatically. The individual is a creation of the Reformation. The most concrete example of this is the fact that after the Reformation the individual could read the Bible and interpret it for him/herself; but only as a result of the Reformation. Individual opinion suddenly mattered.

Secondly, the legitimacy of any government before the Reformation was premised on the Divine Will. “We the people”, as the source from which a government could derive its powers, could not have existed without the Reformation. After the Reformation, governmental legitimacy had to be established somewheres other than in God.

Third, the Reformation created large blocks of dissenting minorities, Protestants, who could not practically be destroyed. Previously, European culture had shown no tolerance towards those who were substantially different from the norm. Diversity and dissent were seen as dangerous. The Reformation forced European culture to account for minorities among its midst. The Bill of Rights, the enshrinement of minority of status, could not have been imagined if it had not been for the Reformation. The fact that Martin Luther died of natural causes could be interpreted as the most significant event of the 16th century.

On Election Day we, as individuals, will enter booths and legitimize a government, without being penalized for our opinions. That could not have happened without the Protestant Reformation and its step children: the importance of the individual, government no longer deriving its legitimacy from God, and dissent and diversity as a fact of life that could no longer be ignored or destroyed.

When we enter the election booth we will be standing on the shoulders of giants who lived, died and often killed, for a different vision of society. We are the inheritors of this legacy. Our presence or absence on election day will honor or dishonor the memory of those ancestors. What was gained through the Reformation can be lost easily. Civic duty is not just something we owe our children; we owe it also to the past. Ghosts indeed!

Maurice R. Landry is the religious leader of the Unitarian Unversalist Congregation in Caribou.