I've had a writing day today, and the first draft of an introduction is now finished. It's posted below, and a pretty version is at this site.
I am writing these words on September 7th, 2004.
Four hundred and eighty-six years, 312 days ago, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, and the Reformation 'happened'. It was a Saturday.
It would be interesting to know what sort of Saturday it was. Was it raining? Sunny? Did anyone see Luther banging the theses onto the door, and think "what's he doing?". Was he mistaken for a carpenter? Or a lunatic? Did he bang his thumb as he drove the nail in?
And what of the people who were passing by - where were they going? Work? Visiting? Perhaps one of them was on the way to meet a new baby for the first time, or to bury an old friend. Would they remember 31 October for that birth, that death, or for 95 dry, academic arguments pinned on a door?
I am not being frivolous about Luther's achievement, although it might seem so. I am trying to pull back from the image of a tormented priest hammering at the door, and focus on the unimportant people around, the people who are never going to be remembered, and whose small joys and sadnesses have passed away as surely as Nineveh, Tyre, and all the people in them.
The people in that street, and in the rest of Europe, were the real cause of the Reformation. Luther was a central figure not for revealing or creating a truth, but for channelling social and religious changes that had been slowly transforming Europe for decades. Those societal shifts are hard to see, but they are the real cause of that day in Wittenberg as much as they are of 4 July 1776, 14 July 1787, and all of 1848. When you are a child, you learn that earthquakes happen because the earth shakes. When you are an adult, you learn that earthquakes happen because pressure builds up on a fault.
I believe that a similar build up of pressure is happening in the western democracies. The causes are better education, better communication, individualism and consumerism, and the fault line is the line between politicians and their electorates. I believe that what is needed is a reformation which, like Luther's, will reconnect the laity and the clergy, and which in turn will require us to recommit ourselves to playing our part in the democratic process. I think the alternative is either political stagnation, which could last for a long time, or the rise of populist anti-political parties that will drive political debate to the extremes.
This manifesto proposes an organisation to act as the vehicle for that change, called the Athenian Society. The next chapter is a deeper consideration of why it is needed.
