PROTESTANTISM

Protestantism was one of the three varieties of Christianity in nineteenth-century Europe, along with Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. The name originally referred to the protest made by Lutheran leaders at the Diet of Speyer in 1529, and in central Europe the term Protestant was still used as a synonym for Lutherans, but in general usage the term had come to include all Christians who rejected the authority of the pope and insisted upon the primacy of the Bible.

Protestantism was the dominant religion of northern Europe in the nineteenth century. The states of northern Germany and Scandinavia plus England, Wales, and Scotland all reported on national censuses that more than 90 percent of the population was Protestant. A majority of the population in Switzerland and the Netherlands was also Protestant, although such figures counted nominal Protestants (by birth and baptism, but not by practice). In addition, large Protestant minorities (20 percent of the population or more) existed in some of the states of southern Germany (including Baden and Bavaria), plus Hungary and Ireland.

Across southern Europe (which was overwhelmingly Catholic) and in most of eastern Europe (where the dominant faith might be Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, or Islam in a few regions of the Balkans), Protestantism included but a tiny portion of society. It is also noteworthy that some countries with small Protestant minorities such as Catholic France (1.8 percent after the loss of Alsace and part of Lorraine to Germany in 1871) or Orthodox Russia (2.6 percent), the Protestant minority sometimes exercised a disproportionate

influence, as members of the Calvinist Église Reformée (Reformed Church) did in France and the Baltic Lutheran population did in imperial Russia. But in many Catholic countries, especially Portugal, Spain, and Italy, the Protestant community was especially tiny (0.01 percent of the population of Portugal) and exercised extremely little influence. The Spanish census of 1884 identified 32,435 priests and 14,592 nuns but only 6,654 Protestants. Indeed, the Spanish constitution of 1876 still restricted freedom of religion for Protestants, who were allowed to worship, but only in private; any public announcement of Protestant worship was illegal. And the Vatican still held, as Pope Pius IX underscored in the Syllabus of Errors (1864), that it was wrong to believe that "Protestantism is nothing more than another form of the same true Christian religion, in which form it is given to please God equally as in the Catholic Church."

The Protestant population of nineteenth-century Europe belonged to a large variety of different churches. The three principal varieties of Protestantism were (1) Lutheranism, concentrated in Germanic central Europe and Scandinavia, where more than 90 percent of the population was typically Lutheran; (2) the Reformed Churches, which derived chiefly from the teachings of John Calvin, notably the Dutch Reformed Church, the Église Reformée in France and Switzerland, and the Presbyterian Church in Scotland; and (3) the Anglican churches of the British Isles. Significant Calvinist minorities had been scattered around Europe by the Huguenot diaspora of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (in Piedmont, Prussia, and especially Hungary), but few Anglicans were found on the Continent.

Small minorities of other Protestant churches existed in many countries. Baptist Churches (which also dated back to the Reformation), for example, reported in 1905 that they had 200 members in Spain, 1,400 in Italy, 2,300 in France, 9,800 in Austria-Hungary, 24,000 in Russia, 32,500 in Germany, and 427,000 in the United Kingdom. Methodist Churches (founded in Britain in the eighteenth century as an Arminian-Calvinist derivative of Anglicanism aimed at the poorer classes) reported similar numbers in 1908 (1,700 in France, 3,700 in Italy, 24,900 in Germany, and 521,000 in Britain). Even smaller populations of other Protestant churches had local strengths.

theological and ecclesiastic protestantism

The existence of so many varieties of European Protestantism means that there was no single or simple Protestant theology, nor any universal ecclesiastic organization. Instead, many individual confessions (or professions) of the faith existed, and churches were often still identified by the name of their confession—such as the Augsburg Confession of Lutherans or the La Rochelle Confession of Calvinists. In general, however, Protestant churches stressed the centrality of the Bible (the doctrine of sola scriptura [by scripture alone]), which individuals were expected to read and study for themselves and in whose message they must have absolute faith. Faith was the basis of salvation (the doctrine of sola fide [by faith alone]), and this produced significant differences between Protestant and Catholic subcultures.

Protestant emphasis upon reading the Bible in order to be saved led to noteworthy differences between Protestant and Catholic communities. In order to read, Protestants typically placed greater stress upon universal education and literacy. In France, for example, there had long been a tradition of excellent schools run by the Catholic Church, and both the French Revolution and Napoleon had done much to systematize these schools. But this school system served only a minority

of the population, and many Catholics opposed the creation of a public system of mandatory, universal education; consequently, the officials at the Ministry of Public Instruction who created the French school system under the Ferry laws of the 1879 and 1885 were predominantly Protestants. An important corollary to the Protestant insistence upon universal education was that Protestant communities were typically more insistent upon the education of girls, thereby contributing significantly (if unintentionally) to the rise of nineteenth-century feminism.

The Bible-based faith of Protestants produced other noteworthy differences. Many Protestants argued that Christian beliefs not found in the Bible were papal inventions with no true basis in the faith. Thus many Protestant churches rejected the cult of the saints that had evolved with Christianity, and many specifically rejected the centuries of Catholic Mariology (favoring a doctrine of solus Christus [Christ alone]). When Pope Pius IX promulgated, in the papal bull Ineffabilis Deus of 1854, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (that Mary was, from the moment of her conception, without the stain of original sin) and insisted that this must be "steadfastly believed by all the faithful," many Protestants scorned the doctrine. While Anglicans concluded that the Immaculate Conception was "a legitimate development of early church teaching," Calvinists flatly rejected it.

In matters of ecclesiastic structure, most Protestants rejected the hierarchical structure of Catholicism, starting with the authority of the pope; the

Protestant authority was the Bible, and it did not mention a pope. Protestants who most accepted hierarchical governance (such as Anglicans) adopted an episcopal system that recognized the authority of a bishop; more Protestants favored a presbyterian system governed by an elected church council (or consistory), in some cases supplemented by the periodic assembly of an elected synod; those Protestants least agreeable to hierarchical authority favored a congregational system, in which the members of a congregation essentially governed themselves.

The combination of Biblical authority and limited church authority created distinctive developments in nineteenth-century European Protestantism. Some Protestants concluded that individuals could find salvation through Bible study without the assistance a priesthood, such as the doctrine of libre examen held by many Continental Calvinists. Others, especially in Germany, turned this private study of the Bible into the scholarly field of Biblical criticism, producing some of the most controversial books of the century such as the French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus (1863). Protestants who were most resistant to ecclesiastic authority, such as the Calvinistic Methodists in England and Wales, put the control of the church pulpit in the hands of deacons, who engaged a preacher for a number of Sundays (often less than half of the year) and employed others on an individual basis. Some Methodists still preferred the itinerant preaching of the church's origins and hired no pastor.

The consequences of such distinctions between Protestantism and Catholicism have provoked a number of striking (and often controversial) interpretations of the historical impact of Protestantism. Scholars have linked Protestantism to the rise of European individualism, elective government, democracy, and feminism.

Two of the most debated arguments about Protestantism appeared in the early years of the twentieth century. Max Weber, a German sociologist, launched the "Weber thesis," asserting a strong correlation between Protestantism and the rise of capitalism, in a 1904 work titled Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist der Kapitalismus (The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism). Weber argued that the "intramundane asceticism" of Protestantism, which forbade luxury and material self-indulgence, plus a "Protestant ethic" that stressed the virtues of hard work, resulted in great accumulation of capital and hence the dawning of an age of capitalism, which Protestants in government and business encouraged by removing historic barriers to economic development.

Élie Halévy, a French political scientist, produced similar controversy with a 1906 essay, "La naissance du Méthodisme en Angleterre" (The birth of Methodism in England). Halévy argued that the evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant churches (especially the Methodist Church), which won significant popularity with the lower classes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, taught an ethic of the acceptance of the authority of the state and deference to the upper classes so effectively that it explains why Karl Marx's expectations of class warfare were not fulfilled by the British working class.

dechristianization and secularization

Analyses such as the Weber and Halévy theses underscore the continuing importance of Protestantism in European civilization in 1914. Nonetheless, Protestantism (and Christianity in general) became significantly less central to European society during the nineteenth century. This decline continued a trend that was already well-established in the eighteenth century and that accelerated dramatically during the twentieth century. Historians have used two terms (both controversial) to describe this trend: dechristianization and secularization. By any name, religion became less central in both private and public life during the nineteenth century. This trend was clear to religious leaders who spoke of a need to "rechristianize" Europe. Although the best illustration of this concern among Christian leaders came from a pope (Pope Pius X, in his 1907 decree condemning "modernism," Lamentabili Sane Exitu [On a deplorable outcome] lamenting that Europe "rejects the legacy of the human race"), there is no doubt that Protestant pastors shared this concern.

The dechristianization of a significant portion of the educated upper classes of Europe during the Enlightenment—many of whom adopted a "modern paganism," choosing deism, theism, and open religious skepticism or agnosticism—was the prelude to trends accelerated by the French Revolution and industrialization. The term dechristianization (more widely used in French than in English) has been adopted to analyze the "revolution against the church" during the 1790s, an experience that had profound effects on the Protestant communities of Languedoc, Alsace, and the Franche-Comté in France, but was also transported by French armies to the Protestant populations of Holland, western Germany, and Switzerland.

The vast social transformations that accompanied Europe's industrialization during the nineteenth century led to another form of dechristianization, in which a significant portion of the urban working class—uprooted from the bonds of traditional rural society and often living in demoralizing conditions of poverty—abandoned religious participation. These populations were most concentrated (as Weber observed) in predominantly Protestant societies such as Britain and Germany.

Those who abandoned Christian practice and church participation are often seen as lapsed, or nominal, Christians who retained some degree of belief within a secular life, and it is important to recall that Protestant theology generally understood salvation to be contingent upon faith and the Bible, not church attendance. Yet something startling was happening within Protestant communities in nineteenth-century Europe. Whereas church attendance had once been virtually mandatory in many societies, a majority of the population no longer attended (or contributed to) churches.

This startling fact received dramatic public proof in 1851 when the British conducted a survey of church attendance in England, Wales, and Scotland—all societies understood to be more than 90 percent Protestant. The data collected by the churches on Sunday, 31 March 1851, were controversial at the time, and remain so in scholarly debate in the early twenty-first century—only 24.2 percent of the population of England and Wales attended any religious service that morning. Total participating Protestants, from Quakers (14,016) and Unitarians (27,612) to the Church of England (2,371,732), represented just 22.9 percent of the population of England and Wales (not the 95.6 percent claimed). Even if one combined attendance at all church sittings during the day (many churches had three sittings), assuming that no one attended both morning and evening services, only 35 percent of the population participated (34 percent Protestant, 1 percent Catholic).

Church attendance in Scotland was higher (32.7 percent of the population), but still less than one-third of the population. The Scots repeated this survey across the remainder of the century with more alarming results: attendance at religious worship declined steadily, hitting 19.2 percent in 1891 (for all denominations combined); Protestant attendance represented 17.8 percent of the population. Although churches did not sort attendance data by gender, it was also becoming clear that the nonparticipation of large portions of the working

class was disproportionately nonparticipation by men. The churches, despite their notoriously patriarchal structure, leadership, and teachings, were steadily becoming feminized.

A third aspect of the nineteenth-century pattern of dechristianization was the gradual secularization of the rites of passage in life, from civil marriages to unbaptized children and then to civil burial. The entire culture of these life stages was changing, leading even to "the dechristianization of death" (in historian Thomas Kselman's provocative phrase). In 1844 only 2.6 percent of the marriages in England and Wales were civil ceremonies; but the popularity of civil marriage increased sharply in every decade of the century, and by 1901 there were four times as many civil marriages as Catholic marriages, with civil marriages accounting for 15.8 percent of all unions. As late as 1855, there were only nine civil marriages in Scotland during the year; by 1901, the number stood at 1,952 and was doubling every decade. At the other end of life, the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body long blocked the adoption of cremation of the deceased, but by the first years of the twentieth century there were active cremation societies in most of the nominally Protestant societies—Britain, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. (There were also important cremation societies in France and Italy.)

Discussions of this nineteenth-century pattern of the secularization and dechristianization of daily life often stress the decline of church-based sociability. The urban civilization emerging in Europe provided many competing centers of sociability (such as cafés and music halls); industrial society led many to choose occupational alternatives at the center of their lives, notably trade unions; an age of mass culture produced new enthusiasms in competition with churches for Sunday time, from spectator sports to weekend excursions; the age of representative governments replaced the historic alliance of throne and altar with a world of secular schools, secular daily newspapers, and passionate secular politics (in which the churches were often considered an opponent rather than an ally).

protestant vitality: the awakening

Signs of the secularization of society reveal only part of the past, however, and a balanced understanding must recognize contrary indications of Protestant vitality. Perhaps the most important sign of the vigor of Protestantism in nineteenth-century Europe was the phenomenon known as "the awakening" (le réveil in French-speaking lands and der Erweckung to Germans). There had been several "awakenings" in the eighteenth century (such as the Baptist "Great Awakening" in England, 1740–1743). The awakening of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, like its predecessors, was a period of earnest Evangelicalism, stressing personal piety, Bible study, campaigns for public morality, and dedicated internal missions to convince others of this program.

The foremost examples of the Protestant awakening were Pietism, which originated in Germany and spread to neighboring countries, and Methodism, which began in England and crossed the channel to western Europe. Pietism (c. 1770–1850) began as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism (especially within the church, in opposition to university-trained enlightened theologians) and freethinking individualism; it gained further momentum in reaction to the dechristianization of the revolutionary age. The lay preachers who spread Pietism (and the similar Moravianism) did not seek to create new Protestant churches, but to create a new Lutheranism of Evangelical enthusiasm and Christian revival. By the 1850s, thousands of people (chiefly Protestants, but not exclusively) had converted to the faith of the awakening, reinvigorating churches across Germany and Scandinavia.

Similarly, Methodism began within the Anglican faith, among students at Oxford University led by John Wesley (1703–1791). Wesley, who remained closely attached to the doctrines of Anglicanism (although the churches were closed to his preaching), sought a revival of personal religion based on scripture. He spread this evangelistic faith through meetings in the open and traveling lay preachers. (As late as 1909, British Methodist churches employed 2,454 ministers while relying on 19,826 lay preachers.) Several varieties of the Methodist awakening emerged, some more Episcopal, others more deeply Calvinist, and others blending their Calvinist austerity with Arminianism (rejecting the Calvinist doctrine of predestination). In the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Methodist missionaries spread the awakening to western Europe, especially among French and Swiss Protestants.

Missionary zeal became one of the hallmarks of the Protestant awakening. At the height of the French Revolution's campaign of dechristianization, Protestant missionary societies were being founded across western Europe. In Britain, the Methodist Missionary Society (founded 1786), the Baptist Missionary Society (1792), the London (Congregationalist) Missionary Society (1795), and the Anglican Church Missionary Society (1799) were all active during the first French Republic, as was the Netherlands Missionary Society (1797). The transformation of the Wesleyan awakening into the French réveil after the battle of Waterloo (1815) led to the creation of the Société Biblique at Paris (1818) and the Société des Missions Evangélique (1822), both authorized by King Louis XVIII.

protestantism and the state

In 1789 Protestant churches in northern Europe were typically closely linked to the state as the established state religion. Although Britain adopted acts of toleration in 1689, 1778, and 1791, the law required that the monarch be Anglican, forbidden to marry outside the faith. By the Test Acts (reformed in 1829), Nonconformist Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and nonbelievers could not take a seat in parliament, attend Oxford or Cambridge University (until 1871), nor hold public office. Twenty-six Anglican bishoprics and archbishoprics bore ex officio membership in the House of Lords. The British extended the same principle to Ireland, establishing a Church of Ireland and thereby excluding Irish Catholics from most aspects of public life. The Roman Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (1869, with enforcement beginning in 1871) changed this intimate bond between church and state, but the Church of England remained the established church throughout the century.

In northern Germany and Scandinavia, the Lutheran Church similarly remained the established state church in 1789. Prussia adopted a program of religious toleration in the eighteenth century, but Lutheranism remained an established religion across the region. In one famous illustration of the importance of established religion, Karl Marx's father (the descendant of a rabbinical Jewish family) was obliged to convert to Lutheranism in order to be admitted to the practice of law. An especially strict Lutheran establishmentarianism was maintained in Denmark and Sweden until the disestablishments of 1848 and 1860.

Conversely, in countries where the Protestant population was a minority and faced similar discrimination (especially Spain and Italy), Protestants typically became leading proponents of the principle of separation of church and state. The Swiss Protestant theologian Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847) became the leading advocate of this principle. Many French Protestants, often influenced by Vinet, founded new churches (the églises libres, or "free churches") outside of the national system of churches linked to the state that Napoleon had founded. Pastors from the églises libres, such as Edmond de Pressensé (1824–1891), became champions of the separation of church and state; de Pressensé's son, Francis, subsequently became one of the principal authors of the 1905 law separating church and state in France.

Protestant concerns about the relationship between churches and the state intensified after the papal bull Pastor Aeternus (1870) proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility. Liberal and conservative Protestants alike worried that citizens of the state would have conflicting loyalties. William E. Gladstone, the British prime minister, published a critical pamphlet in 1874 titled The Vatican Decrees in Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance, arguing that followers of a religion who must obey their spiritual leader rather than the government had put their loyalty in doubt. Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, carried the issue of a conflict between church and state much further. During the Kulturkampf of the 1870s, Bismarck won the adoption of three sets of May Laws (1873–1875), which put churches under strict state supervision.

It was in this climate of opinion that much of the secularization of the nineteenth century occurred. Governments took over historic church roles, creating state-run systems of public schools (often closing church schools) and beginning staterun welfare systems, from public hospitals to state-funded poor relief. Protestants were prominent leaders of these campaigns. In Britain, the Dissenters (non-Anglican Protestants) championed secular schools instead of schools run by the established church. In Germany, Bismarck pioneered the welfare state in the late 1880s. In both France and Germany, one of the most influential voices advocating a welfare system was the Alsatian pastor Johann Friedrich Oberlin (1740–1826).

protestants and reform campaigns

Protestants, especially evangelical Protestants of the awakening, played noteworthy political roles in nineteenth-century Europe by providing a large portion of the leadership and membership of the morality campaigns in European politics. The antislavery, antiprostitution, and antialcohol movements each owed much to evangelical fervor. While noteworthy members of these campaigns certainly came from Catholic, Jewish, and freethinking Europe, a striking characteristic of each campaign was the role of Protestants.

The campaign against the European slave trade had no leader more ardent and influential than William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was drawn to Methodism in his youth and used his family wealth to help found an evangelical newspaper, the Church Missionary Society, and the Bible Society. His greatest effort, however, came as a founder of the antislavery movement and the member of Parliament (1780–1825) who led the struggle in the House of Commons to abolish the slave trade. Wilberforce's friendship with his Cambridge classmate, William Pitt the Younger, put the antislavery program on the government agenda, and Wilberforce's bill was adopted in 1807 by a vote of 283 to 16.

Similarly, the campaign against legal and regulated prostitution in nineteenth-century Europe had no more effective leader than Josephine Butler. Butler was raised in evangelicalism by her mother and subsequently married an Anglican clergyman. After several years of social work among prostitutes in Liverpool, Butler assumed the leadership of the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (the laws regulating prostitution) in 1869. Five years later, she toured continental Europe, forming the International Society Against State Regulated Vice to expand her campaign to all countries that legalized prostitution. Butler finally won repeal in Britain in 1886.

A third morality campaign to which many Protestants devoted themselves with exceptional fervor was that against alcohol, whether the campaign was called antialcoholism, temperance, or teetotalism. Many prominent Catholics supported this campaign, such as Cardinal Manning, but Protestants were drawn to the battle in dramatic numbers. Many churches (especially Methodists and Baptists) adopted temperance as church doctrine. And when the National Temperance League in Britain (founded 1842) organized to demand that Parliament act, 13,584 Protestant clergymen signed the petition to Parliament.

Protestants in other countries organized parallel campaigns. Protestants founded temperance societies in Norway in 1836 and in Sweden in 1837. The Swiss Croix bleue (Blue Cross) became a model for Protestant temperance movements in French-speaking Europe. By the eve of World War I, there were five temperance societies in Denmark, six each in Holland and Sweden, and twelve in Germany.

See alsoCatholicism; Jews and Judaism; Secularization.

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Steven C. Hause