Religion Turns on Who Is Allowed to Supply It

By 1514 the twenty-four-year-old Albrecht of Brandenburg already held two sees and was angling for Mainz, an archbishopric that carried an elector's vote. Canon law barred pluralism; Rome priced a dispensation at over twenty thousand ducats. Albrecht borrowed from the Fugger bank to pay it, and Rome licensed him to sell indulgences in his territories to service the debt: half the proceeds to Rome for the new St Peter's, half straight back to the Fuggers. The Dominican Johann Tetzel was the sales end of that cash flow.

On 31 October 1517 Luther posted his Disputation on the Power of Indulgences to Albrecht himself — not knowing that his addressee was the debtor. The theses were Latin, a set of academic debating points; within weeks they had been translated into German and reprinted in several cities. The real amplifier was the format Luther then perfected: the eight-page quarto pamphlet — cheap, readable in one sitting, and short enough to be read aloud to the illiterate. His To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (August 1520) sold out a first run of four thousand in days. Andrew Pettegree's Brand Luther (2015) notes that even the industrial geography shifted: German printing's center of gravity moved from Cologne and Leipzig to the small town of Wittenberg.

When distribution costs collapse, the same channel amplifies the crudest version fastest — the "Luther" quoted at length in the Peasants' War of 1524 was not the Luther who did the writing.

In 1784 the Virginia assembly debated a General Assessment: a tax on every ratepayer, with each taxpayer naming the Christian denomination his share would go to. Its sponsor was Patrick Henry, the Revolution's foremost orator; Washington and Marshall leaned in favor. This was not a restored establishment — it treated all denominations alike and was read at the time as the tolerant option. Madison could not count the votes to stop it.

In November 1784 Henry was elected governor and left the floor, stripping the bill of its strongest advocate; Madison, writing to Jefferson, made no effort to hide his satisfaction. The following summer he wrote his anonymous Memorial and Remonstrance, arguing that religion is a duty owed to the Creator and therefore outside civil jurisdiction. It gathered roughly fifteen hundred signatures. But that is not what broke the bill: Baptist and Presbyterian petitions drew more than three times as many names, and their reasoning owed nothing to the Enlightenment — state money corrupts a church, and a subsidized faith is no longer faith. On 16 January 1786 the assembly instead enacted Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom, drafted in 1777.

The fiercest advocates of neutral rules are usually not the most disinterested party but the one most afraid of being excluded — a pattern that holds in platform governance and standards-setting almost every time.

The colonial unit of religion was the parish: your address decided which congregation you belonged to, the minister was paid from public rates, and members could not simply leave. George Whitefield, who reached America in 1739 at twenty-four, had stage training and an extraordinary voice, and preached in the open air.

In Philadelphia in 1739 Franklin walked backwards until he could no longer hear, and from the distance calculated that tens of thousands could be within earshot; he then became Whitefield's publisher. In the autumn of 1740 Whitefield crossed New England in forty-five days and preached well over a hundred and seventy times, with his itinerary advertised in the newspapers in advance — Frank Lambert's "Pedlar in Divinity" (1994) reads this as commercial advertising imported wholesale into religion. The consequence that mattered was institutional, not emotional: hearers could choose a minister for the first time. Sitting clergy were publicly graded as converted or unconverted, and congregations split into New Lights and Old Lights. Connecticut legislated in 1742 to bar preaching in another minister's parish without his consent, on pain of forfeiting one's public salary — a counterattack that failed and pushed the penalized toward demanding disestablishment outright.

Once creators reach audiences without the institution, the institution's first move is usually to mark territory and write rules rather than improve what it supplies — which tends to push people further away.

Peter Berger's The Sacred Canopy (1967) was the most influential statement of secularization theory: modernization brings differentiation and rationalization, and must erode religion. In 1968 he predicted publicly that by the twenty-first century believers would survive only in small sects huddled against a worldwide secular culture.

In 1999 Berger edited The Desecularization of the World and opened by stating that the assumption had been wrong: the world today is "as furiously religious as it ever was". He kept two exceptions — Western Europe, and the university-educated cultural elite everywhere. Why is Europe exceptional? Callum Brown's The Death of Christian Britain (2001) gives a counterintuitive answer: Britain's rupture came neither with industrialization nor with Darwin, but in the handful of years around 1963 — baptisms, Sunday-school enrolment and church weddings fell off a cliff at once, and the first to leave were women, who were precisely the link that passed religious practice to the next generation. This is not a slow decline; it is a phase transition.

Using "modernization necessarily produces X" as a law mistakes one phase transition, in one place and period, for a universal linear trend. Most predictions that a given technology must produce a given social outcome are built on that same sentence.