Reformation Redux
28 October 2004
Diarmaid MacCullough, an Oxford historian who’s one of the preeminent scholars of the Reformation, warns that those who ignore Martin Luther’s legacy may be doomed to live through the bloody wars like those of his times: “Donald Rumsfeld talked darkly of ‘old Europe’. If he had wanted to find the real old Europe, he should have looked to the mid-West of the United States. There the Reformation lives. If we begin to understand that, we will see why Europeans find it hugely difficult to understand what is going on in American politics, and why our two cultures are now so dangerously far apart.”