A Populist History of Religious Disbelief

In his 1580 masterwork Essays, the French writer and statesman Michel de Montaigne drew a straight line between the Protestant Reformation and the “execrable atheism” that had begun to sweep through Europe. The problem, according to Montaigne, lay in the difficulty of preserving the average man’s religious faith in an age that had taught him to question long-established Church doctrines. “Once you have thrown into the balance of doubt and uncertainty any articles of [the common people’s] religion,” he wrote, “they soon cast all the rest of their beliefs into similar uncertainty,” having “no more authority for them, no more foundation, than for those [beliefs] you have just undermined.” That Montaigne, a Roman Catholic famously skeptical of the power of human reason, should lay unhappy consequences at the doorstep of Protestantism’s “priesthood of all believers” is perhaps to be expected. What is more surprising is that Alec Ryrie, a self-proclaimed “licensed lay minister in the Church of England,” wholly endorses Montaigne’s thesis.