Protestantism

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PROTESTANTISM

Andrew Pettegree

Protestantism takes its name from the petition presented by certain German towns and princely states at the Imperial Diet of 1529. It signified their formal adherence to the doctrinal principles of the movement of evangelical protest that had raged in Germany surrounding the controversial teachings of the dissident Catholic monk Martin Luther (1483–1546). In 1529 the Imperial Diet attempted to bring an end to the controversy by reaffirming a strict prohibition of Luther's teaching, first banned by the Edict of Worms in 1521. The evangelical states entered their "protestation." This association was formalized by the presentation the following year of an evangelical confession of faith, the Confession of Augsburg (1530), and the formation in 1531 of a defensive alliance, the Schmalkaldic League, to guard the new faith.

The emergence of formal Protestant churches crowned a decade of evangelical ferment sparked by the teachings of Luther and attempts by the church to silence his followers. The Reformation is traditionally deemed to have begun in 1517, the year Luther published his Ninety-five Theses against indulgences. But the pressure for reform within the Catholic Church was of long standing. Luther, in this sense, followed a long line of distinguished churchmen and thinkers who criticized abuse within the church. Much of this criticism focused on the poor morals and low educational standards of the clergy and the venality and worldliness of the clerical hierarchy. But this dissatisfaction also reflected a fundamental long-term shift in the relationship between clergy and laypeople since the High Middle Ages. By the sixteenth century laypeople were eager to exercise more direct control over parts of civic culture that previously had been largely in the clerical domain, such as schools and hospitals. With the rise of lay literacy, education and even the skills of reading and writing were less wholly a clerical preserve, and laypeople judged their clergy by more demanding standards. The century around the Reformation witnessed a significant increase in the amount of money laypeople were channeling into the church through donations, the remodeling of their parish churches, and the founding of chantries, altars, and special masses.

Luther's teaching made such a powerful impact because it effectively provided an outlet for both of these strands of criticism. The first ten years of the Reformation movement were marked by the publication of a steady stream of Luther's writings denouncing clerical abuse and calling for reform. In the process he developed a radical theology of reform that found little place for the mediating role of the priesthood. Luther's criticisms initially found their strongest resonance among intellectuals and fellow members of the clerical orders. Humanists, who had their own criticisms of clerical laxity, were at first broadly supportive, as were many within the clerical estate who shared Luther's disillusionment with the clerical leadership. As his attack on the church broadened, Luther's views found increasing resonance in the German imperial cities, sophisticated communities that allowed a broad scope for the expression of lay opinion.

THEOLOGICAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL FOUNDATIONS

The core of Luther's new theological system was less a critique of clerical morals than a fundamental reevaluation of his understanding of grace and salvation. Justification by faith—by God's grace alone and not through works—was a liberating theological concept for those who, like Luther, had labored under an overwhelming burden of their own sinful natures and the impossibility of conciliating a pitiless God through propitiary works. But quite apart from the emotional release, evidently as powerful for many of Luther's followers as for the reformer himself, the doctrine of justification also had significant implications for the life of the church. If good works were of no effect, then many of the church's institutions and vocations, including memorial masses, monasteries, and purgatory, lost their purpose. Through justification Luther also placed new emphasis on the relationship between God and the individual Christian, and this, rather dangerously expressed as "the priesthood of all believers," did much to undermine the spiritual vocation of the priesthood. Luther's confidence in the laity may have been short-lived, but it provided the motivation for his greatest literary achievement, the German vernacular translation of the Bible (New Testament, 1522; complete Bible, 1534).

Vernacular scripture provided the crucial bridge between Luther the theologian and a wider popular movement. Many who could not comprehend the implications of justification could grasp the potency of the reformers' demand for "pure scripture," with its implicit criticism of late medieval theology and the authority of tradition. According to studies of the popular response to Luther, "pure scripture" (rein evangelium) became the slogan of the German urban Reformation in the years of its most rapid growth (1521–1524). From this point forward the commitment to vernacular scripture and to a generalized knowledge of the Bible among the Christian population was a leitmotiv of all Protestant churches.

Luther's preaching was characterized by a strong apocalyptical sense. Luther clearly believed that he was a preacher of the last days, and his struggle with the papacy was for him the final climactic battle with the Antichrist. In this respect it is hardly surprising that he at first gave little attention to church building. His whole being was bound up in the call to repentance, not the creation of a counterchurch. But as the new churches took shape, the need for order became obvious. In 1529 Luther responded to this pressure with two catechisms, one for adults (Large Catechism) and one for children (Small Catechism), which set the tone for the strong educational impulse that became a leading characteristic of the Protestant movement. Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), Luther's friend and disciple, provided a systematic theology for the new movement with his Loci communes (1521). Another follower, Johannes Bugenhagen (1485–1558), revealed a talent for church organization reflected in the drafting of published church orders for the new churches of north Germany and Scandinavia.

These developments were a recognition that the movement of reform had become an independent church. Beginning in 1525 a wave of important cities, including Nuremberg, Strasbourg, and Augsburg, formally adhered to the Reformation and were followed by a number of the most important German princely states, including Hesse, Saxony, and Brandenburg. In 1357 Denmark adopted a Protestant church order, followed by Sweden in 1539. In a parallel process, the last efforts at a formal reconciliation with the Catholic Church, the Colloquy of Regensburg in 1540, failed. The establishment of Protestantism was complete.

With the establishment of formal Protestant churches, reformers acknowledged that the gulf between Protestantism and the Catholic hierarchy was now unbridgeable. But church building was also a defense of Protestant orthodoxy against challenge from within. Luther's movement was characterized from the beginning by an emotional contradiction. On the one hand, the movement in its early years was fueled by an enormous sense of release. Liberation from the weight of traditional Catholic devotional practice was the emotional heart of Luther's doctrine of grace. In addition the incautious formulation of the priesthood of all believers seemed to validate a large lay role in the interpretation of scripture but in fact revealed more starkly a fundamental problem of authority. If the power of the church hierarchy to arbitrate on matters of doctrine was denied, who then was to exercise this authority? Luther's response, that scripture was the final source of authority, invited a mass of conflicting interpretations, particularly in a movement that eagerly promoted free access to the words of scripture through vernacular translation.

It was soon apparent that these fundamental problems would not easily be resolved. Luther was alarmed by evidence of radicalism in the Wittenberg movement on the part of colleagues, such as Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (1480–1541), and the self-taught laymen known as the Zwickau prophets. Luther's personal authority was enough to crush these local critics, but he could only watch, powerless, when in 1525 a wide swath of south Germany rose in revolt, claiming Luther's gospel as its inspiration for its program of social reform. The reaction to the Peasants' War (1524–1525) revealed the conservatism of the magisterial reformers. Luther urged the German princes to crush the rebels, and obedience to the established secular authority was henceforth a fundamental cornerstone of the creed of Lutheran churches. But the ending of the Peasants' War did not lead to the destruction of the sectarian instinct. The radical wing of the Reformation reconfigured as Anabaptism, a broad-ranging movement that encompassed a wealth of congregations and prophetic leaders, many of them self-educated laypeople from outside the normal clerical structure. The movement reached its first apogee in their "kingdom of a thousand years" in Münster, a north German city that fell into radical hands through the normal political process. Once in control the Anabaptist leadership declared Münster the new Jerusalem, where the saints might await the imminent end time. The incident attracted huge publicity among both the adepts, who flocked to Münster, and the increasingly appalled mainstream church leaders. In 1535 an army supported by both Catholics and Protestants suppressed the kingdom with great barbarity, a first indication that the established churches might have more in common than divisions over doctrine implied. Anabaptism, in fact, proved surprisingly resilient, particularly in the Netherlands, where the Friesian priest Menno Simons (1496–1561) revived a movement shorn of its more violent apocalypticism. Other groups, such as the Antitrinitarians, found refuge in the more confessionally diverse lands of eastern Europe.

The horror of sectarianism was only one aspect of the disappointment that confronted leaders of the evangelical movement in the decades after the establishment of Protestant churches. Luther endured the progressive alienation of many who had initially welcomed his call for reform. The Peasants' War signaled the limits of the movement's appeal to the rural population, and 1525 also witnessed a decisive break with the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), though many of the younger humanists remained faithful to Luther. By the end of the decade Luther was also embroiled in a damaging dispute with the leader of the Swiss Reformation, Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531). In the longer term reformers also were forced to contemplate disappointment on a more fundamental level, a recognition that the Reformation had not achieved the wholesale reform of morals and that the effort to bring laypeople to an informed understanding of faith would be long and arduous. Surveys of the condition of the churches, or visitations, conducted in the Lutheran lands found that in the 1580s most inhabitants lacked even the most rudimentary understanding of the essentials of doctrine. Consideration of this evidence has led some historians to talk of the failure of the Reformation, though this seems overdrawn. The movement for renewal within the Catholic Church experienced similar problems in overcoming ingrained habits of belief and practice.

The real shortcoming of Luther's movement was its failure to put down deep roots outside of the German Empire or neighboring lands susceptible to German cultural influences, such as Scandinavia and parts of eastern Europe like Hungary and Bohemia. Promising beginnings in the lands of western Europe, such as France and the Netherlands, had by the 1540s been erased by determined opposition from the local lay powers, and even in England the Protestant settlement introduced under Henry VIII and Edward VI seemed successfully reversed in the reign of Mary Tudor. By the time of Luther's death in 1546 it was clear that Protestantism would not, as had once seemed possible, carry all before it.

Zwingli was an independent thinker of the first rank. Appointed to the position of people's priest in Zurich in 1518, Zwingli seized the opportunity to introduce root and branch reform. By 1525 Zurich had carried through a civic Reformation, the first city to do so, expelling Catholic priests and abolishing the Mass. The impact of Zurich's radical Reformation was initially profound in Germany as well as in the Swiss Confederation, but it was limited by a damaging

THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF PROTESTANTISM

The question of which groups within society were most attracted to Protestantism and why has long divided scholars. Undoubtedly Luther's movement initially found its most profound resonance among the populations of towns, though precisely which groups embraced the new movement varied according to local circumstances. The urban elites, sensible to the wider political implications of confronting conservative political neighbors or superiors, were not normally the prime movers, though often, when pressure for reform became irresistible, they would assert control of the movement to preserve their own authority. In some German towns the Reformation became a vehicle for prosperous but politically excluded groups within the citizenry to break the power of an entrenched oligarchy.

Much research on different case studies has sought to establish whether the Reformation appealed disproportionately to different trade groups. In aggregate this work has hardly improved on the contemporary verdict of the shrewd sixteenth-century Catholic writer Florimond de Raemond. The first "victims" of the new faith were in his observation "painters, clock-makers, draughtsmen, jewellers, booksellers, printers—all those whose crafts demand a certain degree of superior discernment" (Duke, Lewis, and Pettegree, 1992, p. 35) Printers and booksellers were especially important early converts to Protestantism, and in general the evangelical doctrines made deeper inroads among trades characterized by a high degree of literacy or mobility. Trade groups whose skills were relatively portable, such as goldsmiths or weavers, provided a disproportionate number of converts, whereas those with a low degree of product innovation, such as butchers and others in the food production process or coopers, proved disproportionately resistant to the new doctrines. In this sense the venerable "Weber thesis" may have expressed an essential truth. Max Weber (1864–1920) argued that an essential aspect of Calvinism that he called the Protestant work ethic created a climate particularly conducive to the growth of capitalism. In its purest sense the Weber thesis failed to command support. It may be that Weber indeed identified a real connection but inverted the causal relationship. The Reformation, and perhaps especially Calvinism, proved most alluring to groups that were already socially and economically mobile.

The importance of highly skilled members of new trades in the movement also explains why so many towns and cities were willing to open their gates to large groups of religious refugees and protect them against the resentment of indigenous guilds and tradesmen. The value of such newcomers to the local economy, particularly in towns experiencing stagnation, was widely recognized at the time. Indeed the Reformation, by stimulating an enormous movement of peoples between European lands of different confessions, played as important a role in stimulating protoindustrial development as any other aspect of economic change during the early modern period.

The Reformation also played an important role in recasting social relationships within the community. The role of women in society was drastically reordered, many have argued to their disadvantage. The denigration of the female religious vocation certainly cut independent career opportunities, and the end of the cult of saints removed many female role models. Against these outcomes Protestant societies often successfully articulated a new vision of the dignity of female roles within the family and tenaciously defended the rights of women within this context. Calvinist consistories, for instance, devoted considerable attention to upholding the dignity of marriage and protecting women from brutality, abandonment, or ill-treatment. Many women benefited from the legitimation of clerical marriage, which gave clerical families for the first time the legal protections of a legitimate relationship. Indeed, clergy families became a powerful new social force in most Protestant cultures, a phenomenon linked to the increased professionalization of the Protestant ministry. By the end of the sixteenth century an increasing proportion, in many areas a majority, of clergy in post were university educated, and the increased desirability and social prestige attached to their work was reflected in the emergence of recognizable clerical dynasties.

The Protestant emphasis on the family as the natural unit of social organization had a profound and persistent impact on the social culture of Protestant lands. In the first Reformation century Protestantism placed an obligation on the family to function as a sort of small church community, the head of the family instructing both children and servants in the rudiments of the faith. Such an emphasis gave full rein to the puritan instinct, by which families and groups of households dissatisfied with the morals of society practiced a culture of reinforcement and greater austerity within the privacy of their own homes. At its best this was a support to the wider community; applied with too critical an eye to the failings of others, it easily reinforced the sectarian instinct.

quarrel between Zwingli and Luther. The more conservative Luther was appalled by Zurich's radical "cleansing" of the local churches to remove all physical vestiges of Catholicism. The two men soon clashed over eucharistic doctrine, Zwingli again favoring a more radical solution, and after a failed attempt at reconciliation at the Colloquy of Marburg (1529), the gap between the two was unbridgeable. Inside the Swiss Confederation the appeal of the reform movement was retarded by suspicion of Zurich's motives. Although the two most powerful German-speaking urban cantons, Bern and Basel, eventually adopted the reform, the rural mountain cantons decisively rejected Protestantism and with it Zurich's imperial pretensions. Open confrontation in the Battle of Kappel wars left Zurich defeated and Zwingli dead on the field of battle. The Zurich Reformation was ultimately rescued by the leadership of Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575), but its capacity for expansion was decisively checked.

As Zurich retreated into introspection, a new leadership force emerged from the unlikely quarter of French-speaking Geneva. The small independent city was a late convert to reform, but in the 1530s it was a beacon for evangelical refugees from France, among them the young scholar John Calvin (1509–1564). After an uncertain beginning to a ministry that led to his expulsion and exile from 1538 to 1541, Calvin gradually imposed his personal stamp on the Geneva Reformation. By the time of his death Geneva had become a model Christian commonwealth and the center of a growing international movement.

Even more than Luther, Calvin was the spirit that underpinned the long-term survival of Protestantism. Calvin was a writer and thinker of exceptional clarity. Sharing Luther's gift for excoriating polemic, he also synthesized Reformation thought into a coherent systematic theology. His Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; final expanded version 1560) was a work of genius that functioned equally effectively as a handbook for the individual Christian and for the Christian community. Along with Luther's vernacular translation of the Bible, it was among the most important literary products of the Reformation.

Guided by Calvin's preaching and supervised by the consistory, a joint morals commission staffed by clergy and lay elders, Geneva became the archetypal godly community. In the process the Reformation shed much of the apocalypticism that characterized the first generation. Calvinism, the least apocalyptic of the major Protestant schools, gave much greater attention to building the church in the community.

THE AGE OF RELIGIOUS WAR

The peaceful construction of the church in Geneva contrasted strongly with Calvinism's disruptive influence elsewhere in Europe. Calvin's strong emphasis on the sanctity of suffering together with the movement's sophisticated organizational structure provided the basis for church building even where the state power remained hostile. Calvin's followers (if not Calvin himself ) were also far more willing than Luther to contemplate defiance of the state power. Early Calvinist congregations in France and the Netherlands were characterized above all by a remarkable sense of providentialism, which allowed them to survive and even grow despite intense persecution.

A midcentury crisis in the affairs of several northern European states allowed Calvinist congregations the chance to seize power. While a Calvinist church swiftly established supremacy in Scotland—the consequence of a political revolution of which the Calvinist congregations were the beneficiaries rather than the cause—the emergence of churches in France and the Netherlands led to prolonged conflict. The French Wars of Religion (1562–1598) were a sustained struggle to prevent the Calvinist insurrection from undermining the Catholic character of the kingdom. Although Calvinists remained a decided minority, the Edict of Nantes in 1598 nevertheless guaranteed French Calvinist (Huguenot) churches important freedoms. In the Netherlands the Dutch revolt (1566–1609) led to the creation of a free Calvinist state in the northern provinces with the Union of Utrecht in 1579. In England the restoration of a Protestant settlement under Elizabeth I, who ruled from 1558 to 1603, completed a decisive shift in the balance of religious power in northern Europe.

The century of conflict unleashed by Luther's teachings achieved some sort of resolution in the first half of the seventeenth century. In Germany the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) permitted local autonomy for Catholic and Protestant principalities and bought the empire a half-century of uneasy peace. But tensions always simmered beneath the surface, not least because Calvinism, which had begun to make inroads into the German lands in the 1560s, was not included in the terms of the peace. A particular element of unpredictability was provided by successive electors of the Rhineland Palatinate, who after converting their lands to Calvinism in 1562 aspired to an aggressive leadership role. Toward the end of the century the Habsburg imperial family embarked upon a more active policy of recatholicization in their patrimony, and conflict loomed. The spark was provided by a rebellion in 1618 in Bohemia, one of the most integral yet most thoroughly protestantized parts of the Habsburg dominions. Fearing that the accession of the new emperor, Ferdinand II, would spell the end of Protestant liberties, Bohemians in 1619 offered their crown instead to the elector palatine, Frederick V. He foolishly accepted, preparing the way for the Habsburg reconquest of Bohemia and the investiture of his own territories. These events initiated the Thirty Years' War, a conflict that gradually involved most of the powers of Europe. Although the religious configuration was not straightforward—the German Lutheran princes initially refused to support the Palatinate, and France later joined the anti-Habsburg struggle for straightforward political reasons—religious issues underpinned the conflict and made it more bitter, more destructive, and more difficult to resolve. In particular the intervention of the Lutheran king of Sweden, Gustavus II Adolph, was essential in turning back the tide of Habsburg success and preserving the Protestant cause in central Europe.

In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia finally permitted the warring parties to extricate themselves from the conflict and brought to an end the period of European relations primarily governed by religious loyalties. The peace also effectively confirmed the de facto division of Europe between Protestant and Catholic. Henceforth Protestantism was the majority creed of Germany, Scandinavia, Britain, the Dutch Republic, and more isolated outposts in eastern Europe, such as Hungary. Missionary efforts by Protestants and Catholics alike concentrated more on sustaining isolated minorities than on attempts to upset this balance. The focus of conversion also shifted to the non-Christian world opened up by colonial expansion and, nearer home, to the Christianization of populations still mired in ignorance and unbelief among the numerically dominant rural populations and the newly emerging urban proletariat. The challenge these groups posed to formal religion was a constant theme of religious life during the next two hundred years, stimulating repeated attempts to revive the original evangelical fervor of the Reformation era.

THE CHURCH IN THE AGE OF REASON

The move away from religious warfare reinforced other social changes that gradually over the next century would have a profound impact on attitudes toward religion and the place of the church in society. This profound shift in attitudes toward intellectual and scientific questions led historians to dub this period the Age of Reason, though the effect of questioning historic certainties was often uncomfortable for official religion. This was an age characterized above all by new developments in the world of ideas. With the scientific revolution, experimental science came of age as a discipline and seized the imaginations

THE CULTURAL WORLD OF PROTESTANTISM

It is easy to assume that the relationship between Protestantism and artistic culture was antagonistic. Protestants certainly took a highly critical view of the artistic manifestations of Catholic devotional culture. Although Luther reproved the violent removal of images, hostility to pictures and sculptures of saints, particularly when they were the focus of devotion, often led to destruction. Such iconoclastic episodes characterized the first wave of the Reformation in many Lutheran and Swiss cities, such as Wittenberg in 1521 and Basel, with its Kirchensturm (church storm), in 1527. Churches influenced by Calvin took a still more radical position. Iconoclasm was a feature of the early stages of the religious conflict in France and the Netherlands, and England and Scotland experienced the violent, unauthorized removal of images.

The cleansing of the churches did allow for the preservation of some masterpieces, such as Jan van Eyck's Lamb of God altar in Ghent, which was removed to safety elsewhere. The collapse of the Catholic devotional tradition did not spell the end of religious art in Protestant countries. In Germany Lucas Cranach (1472–1553) gave artistic expression to the new Reformation doctrines. Cranach and his followers designed and produced highly influential images expressing both the polemical and antipapal rhetoric of the Reformation, such as Passional Christi und Antichristi (1521), and its new core doctrines, such as Law and the Gospel (1529). In the process they developed a wholly new artistic medium, the didactic woodcut, which played an important public role both as a means of book illustration and as single-page broadsheets. Mature Lutheran art also developed a distinctive pictorial form, the memorial picture (fine examples may be seen in the Wittenberg Stadtkirche).

In Calvinist cultures artistic hostility to religious pictorial art was more intense and enduring. Artistic energies were therefore often redeployed into other media, notably music. Calvin himself quickly grasped the value of music. Communal singing became a crucial part of the German service, specifically versions of the psalms set to music and sung unaccompanied in unison. These metrical psalms quickly became an identifying characteristic of Calvinist communities and were sung wherever congregations gathered, in church, in the fields, or even, during the religious wars, as armies went into battle. In more settled times distinguished composers provided harmonized versions for domestic entertainment, and it is in this form that they have continued to be most frequently performed.

The success of the metrical psalms opened the way for the Protestant rediscovery of religious music. Deprived of the Mass, Protestant composers developed the chorale, a musical form that reached its apogee in the music of the German Lutheran Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750). Protestantism found its most characteristic musical expression in congregational singing, not least the tradition of hymnody bequeathed by Luther to the German churches. Luther himself wrote hymns and firmly believed in their capacity to instruct and inspire. The tradition was renewed and continued by the English Nonconformist churches, notably the Methodist movement of the Wesleys. Hymn-singing has remained one of the most fondly maintained aspects of the Protestant tradition.

Protestantism also left its mark on the physical appearance of the church. In countries where it was not possible to appropriate former Catholic churches, Protestants erected new structures that reflected architecturally their greater emphasis on preaching and participation. Round, oblong, or hexagonal structures made the pulpit the focal point and eliminated the long choir leading to the high altar. Such structures were common in France, though few survived the destruction that followed the ban on Huguenot churches in 1685. Examples survived in Leiden, in the Netherlands, and Burtisland, Scotland. The rise of Nonconformist churches in the eighteenth century led to a new wave of building that followed these Protestant architectural principles even more rigidly, providing many of the best examples of church structures that make an elevated pulpit the focal point.

One cultural field in which the influence of Protestantism was profound is the novel. Protestants played a significant part in the development of the narrative form. The influence of the puritan conscience, obvious in the religious allegories of John Bunyan (1628–1688) and the poetry and prose works of John Milton (1608–1674), is equally present in Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), whose hero, in the context of an adventure story of enduring appeal, struggles in the thrall of an all-powerful Providence. The power and appeal of nineteenth-century Nonconformity were echoed in the Victorian "industrial novels," notably Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and the works of George Eliot (1819–1880). Finally, Samuel Butler (1835–1902), in The Way of All Flesh (1903), draws an enormously powerful vision of the suffocating respectability of clerical life in the last era during which the church provided a unique path to respectability. Butler's work is infinitely more acute in its psychological perceptions than Anthony Trollope's popular novels of ecclesiastical politics and cathedral life.

of the thinkers of all nations. The world of ideas found a newly confident philosophy, leading to the pleasing rational certainties of the Enlightenment.

The effects of these developments on organized religion were not straightforward. Most leading figures in the world of science strongly affirmed the existence of a divine being. Indeed many affirmed that science "proved" the existence of God. In this period the new science, the discoveries of the German Lutheran Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and of Isaac Newton (1642–1727), was widely regarded as a bulwark against atheism. According to John Locke (1632–1704), the most influential thinker of the day, the conviction that there is a God "is the most obvious truth that reason discovers"; its evidence is "equal to mathematical certainty." The effect on belief was more subtle. The growing understanding of natural phenomena as capable of scientific explanation restricted the areas of the unknown in which God's power was seen to be at work. In the medical field this period experienced a sea change in attitudes toward epidemics from the conviction that plague was a heaven-sent punishment (in Dutch it was known as de gave Gods, God's gift) to a search for medical causes. The trial and execution of witches, still ferocious in the early seventeenth century, dwindled away by the end of the century. While most humans continued to believe in God, the belief in the Devil as a ceaselessly active force receded. The growing fixity in religious boundaries in Europe also led to a gradual increase in religious toleration. This was more a matter of fact than principle, a weary acceptance that differences between the religious confessions were too deep-seated to be eliminated. But toleration was also assisted by a more profound revulsion against persecution for religious belief.

This development was certainly halting and not without setbacks. During this period formal toleration was revoked in Hungary, and in Poland the Roman Catholic minority found relief from the frustrations of the country's endemic political turmoil by treating both Lutheran and Orthodox minorities with increasing severity. In England the resolution of the bitter legacy of the Civil War led, after the Restoration in 1660, to a switchback of vindictiveness interspersed by self-serving partial toleration until coexistence was finally embedded in the Toleration Act of 1689. In France, Louis XIV repudiated the privileges formerly granted the Huguenot minority. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 ordered the forcible closure of all Protestant churches and provoked the last major religious emigration of the Reformation era. But Louis's policy was widely perceived by contemporaries as anachronistic, and those countries that opened their doors to the refugees benefited greatly from the injection of the new economic skills brought by the Huguenots.

With the eighteenth century the Protestant churches of Europe were generally entering calmer waters—but at a price. Some of the established churches had reached too comfortable an accommodation with the state. In England the power of preferment created a subservient and venal clerical class, eager for advancement, uncritical of the status quo, while bitterly divided over inequalities of wealth. With curates existing on as little as £20 per year, pluralism was rife. Yet few protested against a system in which the only hope of advancement lay in dutiful and patient obedience to lay patrons. In Germany, too, Lutheran churches had drifted into a relationship of easy and unreflective obedience to the state, initiating a tradition of Erastian complacency that had disastrous results in later centuries.

This increasing ossification of established Protestant churches inevitably provoked a reaction. Within the churches there arose new and challenging movements of spiritual renewal. The frustration of hopes of reform led in turn to the rise of nonconformity and dissent.

Within the Protestant establishment the most serious spiritual challenge was posed by Pietism, which sought to supplement the emphasis on institutions and dogma by promoting the practice of piety. It found its chief inspiration in the writings of Johann Arnd (1555–1621), a Lutheran theologian in whose work mysticism played a profound role. In Pietism the emphasis on inner experience and the life of the spirit was balanced by the insistence that belief should be reflected by a deeper and active commitment to the Christian life. In this respect Pietism drew heavily on the inspiration of the English Puritan movement, many of whose leading writings were at this point translated into other European vernaculars, including German and Hungarian. English Puritans, weary of the partial Reformation of the English church, were also the original inspiration behind a tradition of dissent that had a profound impact on the development of Protestantism in North America. From the time of the first settlers in Massachusetts, the Pilgrims in 1620, a succession of nonconformist groups sought sanctity in separation in the virgin lands of the New World. Among the most successful were the Quakers, who like the German Pietists dedicated themselves to living in accordance with the inner light. Inspired by the preaching of George Fox (1624 – 1691), the Quakers believed that ordained ministers and consecrated buildings were unnecessary for a church, teachings that brought them into conflict with successive seventeenth-century English governments. In 1682 William Penn (1644–1718) founded Pennsylvania as a holy experiment based on Quaker principles.

THE CHURCH IN THE INDUSTRIAL AGE

The greatest of the dissenting traditions was the Methodist movement founded by John Wesley (1703–1791). Methodism to some extent grew from the same impatience with established churches that had spawned earlier dissenting movements, but it also tapped into the new frustrations that were a consequence of industrial growth. In particular the English parochial system was slow to adapt to the rapid growth of urban populations that followed the birth of industrialization. As a result large swaths of the urban population were effectively unchurched. Wesley's ministry attempted to reverse what he saw as the inexorable growth of ignorance and atheism.

Wesley, the product of both a conventional Anglican education and a failed colonial venture in Georgia in 1735, began his preaching ministry after a conversion experience led him to embrace practical religion. As the churches were closed to him, Wesley took to the fields, where in an astonishing fifty-year ministry he attracted huge crowds and a growing following. Wesley always opposed separation from the Church of England, which had denied him a pulpit, but the real distinctiveness of his movement was formally recognized soon after his death in the Plan of Pacification of 1795. Methodism was by then a distinct and vital force in English life characterized by a lack of hierarchy and devotion to the inspirational hymns of John Wesley and his brother Charles Wesley (1707–1788). Evangelical Christianity also made itself felt in the established church and in secular politics through the twenty-year campaign, from 1787 to 1807, led by William Wilberforce for the abolition of the slave trade.

The growth of an industrial proletariat was only one of a number of related challenges posed to Protestantism during the nineteenth century. New systems of belief of a secular nature posed an implicit challenge to organized religion that became a direct challenge with socialism and marxism. The rise of secular concepts of social organization, influenced by the teachings of Voltaire (1694–1778) and Rousseau (1712–1778), was often directly hostile to the power of the church in government. These ideas found their purest echo in the U.S. Constitution and their most violent expression in the French Revolution. Even though the Protestant nations of Europe avoided the worst excesses of revolutionary France, the spirit of the age proved increasingly impatient with the established churches' pretensions to a monopoly of religious truth. In a gradual process governments across Europe enacted formal toleration and thus extended full civil rights to previously marginal groups, including Roman Catholics, Jews, and finally even atheists. The rise of the secular urge in politics also led to considerable conflict in areas where church-state relations had previously been essentially harmonious, such as education and ecclesiastical patronage.

European Protestant churches reacted to these diverse challenges in different ways. In several of the dominant Protestant confessions, state encroachment or the rise of Liberalism—the political insistence on individual freedom and constitutional government and the economic doctrine of laissez-faire—led to painful divisions within the church. In 1843 almost half the ministers of the established Presbyterian Church of Scotland left the church to found a new Free Church in a dispute over ecclesiastical patronage known as the Great Disruption. The new political circumstances prompted two major splits in the dominant Dutch Reformed Church, the Afscheiding of 1834 and the Doleantie of 1887. In England the Oxford movement (1833–1845) was also largely inspired by a sense of the moral corrosiveness of Liberalism, although there the leading figures eschewed separation, at least until their spokesman John Henry Newman (1801–1890) defected to Roman Catholicism.

In Germany the major challenge was posed by the rise of biblical criticism in an age in which scholarly discoveries for the first time called into question the literal truth of parts of the biblical canon. German universities found an impressively dispassionate response, arguing that reasoned criticism should be met by refutation rather than authority. With the German example, the Protestant churches of the mainstream adapted themselves relatively easily to the advance of science. In time churchmen learned to live with and even embrace the new climate of an age of mass political activism. In the Netherlands the towering figure of Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920) presided over an explicitly confessional political party, the first mass membership party of the Netherlands, committed to upholding orthodox Calvinist values against the secular tide. This, indeed, was the era that saw the emergence of several explicitly religious parties in Europe, usually broadly in the conservative, Christian Democratic tradition.

The nineteenth century also saw a rapid expansion of Protestant missionary activity in Africa and Asia. This was a relatively new interest (compared to Catholicism's), and it had a complex relationship with the problems encountered in Europe itself.

THE CHURCH IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The twentieth century was a period of almost unprecedented political turmoil in Europe. Coupled with social changes of bewildering rapidity, the turmoil confronted Protestant churches with challenges that they struggled, often unsuccessfully, to meet. For the first time large sections of the population repudiated any formal belief. Protestant countries also for the first time faced the challenge of absorbing significant immigrant communities strongly committed to non-Christian belief systems. Even the Protestant confessions in the modern era shifted the balance of influence from Europe to the New World, which accurately reflected the shifting political and economic balance. To some extent this was anticipated in the nineteenth century by the proliferation of new religious movements rooted in a tradition of American revivalism. The Mormons (1830), Seventh-Day Adventists (1863), and Christian Scientists (1879) are the three most prominent examples. The American Great Awakening also transformed the Baptists from a small, rather marginal group into a huge church that by the end of the twentieth century had over 35 million members worldwide (mostly in the United States). In the twentieth century the most important movements of revivalism—Pentecostalism (1901), Fundamentalism, and (closely related to Fundamentalism) Evangelicalism—emerged from an American, conservative tradition.

For the more staid and decidedly uncharismatic European Protestant churches, the twentieth century threw up difficult challenges that often found them wanting. Faced with the discordant but powerful forces of nationalism, socialism, and class conflict, the churches were sometimes driven into positions that left an enduring stain on their reputations. During World War I (1914–1918), established Protestant churches on both sides enrolled as cheerleaders for a rampant militarism that at war's end left millions dead. Twenty years later the German Lutheran Church willingly embraced the nationalism and racial policies of the Nazi movement. The small dissident group that left the church over the issue of Nazi racial policies, the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), has too often served as a fig leaf for the complacency or enthusiasm of the vast majority. Two centuries of Erastian subservience to the power of the state left the German church with few intellectual weapons to resist the lure of a regime antithetical to Christian principles.

The horrors of World War II accelerated the church's retreat from the front line in public affairs. Scarred by the experiences of the war era, European Protestant churches withdrew increasingly from any politically sensitive role in an age when church membership continued on an apparently inexorable decline. The postwar period also saw a significant detachment of Christian values, still generally regarded as a touchstone of decent behavior in most countries of the Protestant tradition, from formal church membership. In this curiously ambivalent yet not unaffectionate relationship, Protestant churches were valued still as a social institution, primarily as a purveyor of the sacraments of passage, such as baptism, marriage, and burial, by a far wider community than those who regularly attended church. The churches were for the most part happy to subsist in this curious netherworld between habit and redundancy. In the parts of Protestant Europe where the faith was still passionately upheld, such as Northern Ireland, sectarian passion was often seen more as an embarrassment than as a vindication of faith.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, most European Protestant traditions had rejected such a distortion of their role as much as they had by then repulsed the wilder excesses of American Protestant evangelism, a rejection all the more striking given the otherwise all-pervasive influence of American culture on Europe. This movement depended heavily on the new media of television evangelism and on charismatic fundamentalism. These developments find their most significant echo in the nondenominational "house churches," which emerged at the end of the twentieth century as a significant force alongside the mainstream Protestant denominations.

See alsoSecularization (volume 2); and other articles in this section.