The Protestant Reformation counterfactual that falls apart under scrutiny

The Protestant Reformation counterfactual that falls apart under scrutiny

What if Martin Luther had never existed? The question has been circulating online since an AI popularized the counterfactual of a Europe without the Protestant Reformation: a Pope as supreme arbiter, a consolidated Holy Roman Empire, science and capitalism delayed. It sounds appealing, but it quickly falls apart when checked against what is known about the sixteenth century.

The idea of the Pope as supreme arbiter clashes with French Gallicanism and Spanish regalismo, both of which eroded papal authority before Luther. The Holy Roman Empire, far from being a centralized state, was a mosaic of principalities and free cities. Those who defend the counterfactual forget that Rome had been losing power to monarchs for centuries.

Nor does the myth survive that Protestantism gave birth to modernity. Capitalism was already flourishing in the Italian republics, Flanders and southern Germany. The Enlightenment had both Catholic and Protestant roots, and the experimental method was systematized by a Catholic, Galileo, with others such as Cavalieri and the monk Mendel in genetics. Nietzsche, from a Lutheran family, was a fierce critic: he saw in Luther the gravedigger of the German Renaissance and the savior of a Christianity that was dying.

Calvinism was no club of freethinkers either. In Geneva he set up a theocracy that persecuted heretics such as Servetus, and he despised art, theater and pleasure. Newton himself, an icon of science, wrote more about theology and alchemy than about physics.

So the next counterfactual that crosses your feed, with its unstoppable Pope and its unified Empire, should come with a history manual. Because without Luther, Western Christendom would have kept looking for another way to fight: human beings do not need a schism to organize a good conflict.