Protestantism

"Protestant missions also received an early boost from Central American governments that promoted them as a way of making their countries more attractive to the “right” immigrants from the “right” countries. More recently, the U.S. government and various right-wing groups financed Protestant missions in the indigenous high-lands of Guatemala and in El Salvador as a way to undermine support for troublesome Catholic opponents of military regimes that were fighting insurgents and to create a support base for a more conservative political order (Stoll 1990; Crahan 1992; Garrard-Burnett 1998).Thus, the Catholic Church’s concern about the inroads made by other religious denominations and missions is not exaggerated or without foundation. But the “false prophets” and “rapacious wolves” of other religious denominations that came to feed on a vulnerable flock, as Pope John Paul referred to them,11 are not the only threat to the hegemony of Catholicism in society."

"While Protestantism in Europe and the United States has tended to be linked to an active support of political democracy, the same has not been universally true for Latin American Protestants."

"Protestants have grown from 15% of the population of Africa in 1970 (some 54m people) to 29% today (more than 340m). In Latin America, they have gone from 8% (23m) to 19% (121m) over the same period."

"As for Protestantism in Latin America, Latin American Protestant identity was forged strongly in opposition to the dominant Catholicism; and, therefore, the political operationalization of a specifically Protestant identity has been more marked there than in the rest of the world in recent decades. By the turn of the century, Protestantism had become the religion of perhaps 12 percent of all Latin Americans. In Brazil it’s over 15 percent; in Guatemala it’s over 20 percent. In countries like Uruguay, it’s probably still below 5 percent. Protestantism, and especially pentecostalism, is disproportionately associated with the poor, the less educated and the darker skinned."

"On the one hand, Protestantism attempted to recapture the ore of the Christian commitment by an appeal to the individual’s capacity in the Spirit to read the Scriptures, yet it did not provide the ascesis the praxis to develop noetic perception, so that the person could enter appropriately into the liturgical context within which the Scriptures could be opened for understanding. The individual outside of this context was drawn in different directions by different spirits leading to the diversity of contemporary Protestantism. On the other hand, Roman Catholicism attempted to secure a unity through discursive reasoning and papal authority. Discursive reasoning turned out not to be the support but the enemy of Tradition. Once disconnected from the ascetic life of true theology and noetic understanding, it brought into question all particular content that declared itself as canonical. As a consequence, Roman Catholic moral theology, as well as Roman Catholic bioethics, both brought traditional content into question and broke into a diversity of moral understandings as a discursive reason showed itself unable to establish one particular canonical moral understanding."

"Though Protestantism may fervently attempt to maintain its bonds to the original Christianity, it remains deeply ambivalent regarding the history of Christianity after the Apostlic Age. It does not find the Church as the Bride of Christ united to Him through and in history, so that as members of the Church we become members of His Body (Eph 5:30). As a consequence, fundamentalist Protestants are estranged from the Tradition that could sustain their fundamentals."

"In part, the character of Protestantism was shaped by its revolutionary character. Rather than reforming the established church of the West, it instigated a revolution that claimed to start Christianity anew, renewed, and reformed, a millennium and a half after its beginning. Because Protestantism developed as a revolt against an institution and a tradition it rightly recognized as corrupt, Protestantism had a natural critical regard of institutional religion and tradition. It was not able to take up the Tradition of the first millennium. Because of its critical stance towards Tradition, it found itself committed in the end to its own secularization, a point well made by the scholar of comparative religions, Rene Guenon (1886-1951). Actually, religion being essentially a form of tradition the anti-traditional spirit cannot help being anti-religious; it begins by denaturing religion nd ends by suppressing it altogether, wherever it is able to do so. Protestantism is illogical from the fact that, while doing its utmost to “humanize” religion, it nevertheless permits the survival, at least theoretically, of a supra-human element, namely revelation; it hesitates to drive negation to its logical conclusion, but, by exposing revelation to all the discussions which follow in the wake of purely human interpretations, it does in fact reduce it practically to nothing .. It is natural that Protestantism, animated as it is by a spirit of negation, should have given birth to that dissolving “criticism” which in the hand of so-called “historians of religion,” has become a weapon of offense against all religion; in this way, while affecting not to recognize any authority except that of the Scriptures, it has itself contributed in large measure to the destruction of the very same authority, of the minimum of tradition, that is to say, which is still affected to retain; once launched, the revolt against the traditional outlook could not be arrested in mid-course."

"In 19th century sub-Saharan Africa, missions invested in numerous activities, amongst which were education, health care and printing. Protestant missionaries pioneered the development of a written tradition for sub-Saharan African languages. Wherever they went, Protestants quickly formalised indigenous languages and printed Bibles and educational material in these languages. They facilitated access to the printing press, acting as intermediaries for its diffusion. Therefore, most of the first indigenous newspapers were printed and sponsored at mission centres. The first newspaper intended for black readers, the Umshumayeli Wendaba (‘Publishers of the News’), written in Xhosa, was published as an irregular quarterly in 1837 and printed at the Wesleyan Missionary Society in Cape Colony. Isigidimi samaXhosa (‘The Xhosa Messenger’), the first African newspaper edited by Africans, was first released in 1876 and printed at the Lovedale Mission Press in South Africa. In 1884, the English/Xhosa weekly Imvo Zabantsundu (‘The African Opinion’), the first black-owned and controlled newspaper in South Africa, was published. On the contrary, in regions where Protestant missions were less active, the first newspapers appeared only at the beginning of the 20th century, and no indigenous newspapers were created before WWI. The first paper in Ivory Coast to be owned and edited by an African, the Éclaireur de la Cote d’Ivoire, only appeared in 1935."

"Latin America is still overwhelmingly Catholic. That being said, there has indeed been a very dramatic increase in religious pluralism over the past 20 years. Specifically, there has been a very rapid rise in Protestant conversions to the extent that some countries in Latin America, such as Brazil, Guatemala, Chile and Honduras, have very large Protestant minorities. Looking at the chart you can see Guatemala has about a third – well, close to a third – El Salvador, 25 percent. Belize is a British colony so it’s not surprising it’s 27 percent Protestant; Honduras is 22 percent. Notice – we’ll talk about his later – Mexico is only 6 percent Protestant. And the figures are more symbolic than actually correct, but they give you a sense. In the case of Central America, much of this conversion took place during the 1970s and 1980s during the era of the civil wars. I don’t want to put too fine a point on this or overstate it, but Protestant conversion was to some extent during this period a reaction to the violence and upheaval of the era."

"All protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion."

"The Christian ecumenical movement will have reached its limit, meaning that Catholicism will have turned into Protestantism and Protestantism into agnosticism....But Islam will not have lost any of its rigour....Supernature abhors a supervacuum. With the death of institutional Christianity will come the spread of Islam."

"The antithesis between the Christian life and the life of bourgeois respectability is at an end. The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being different from the world for the sake of grace. The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven. I need no longer try to follow Christ, for cheap grace, the bitterest foe of discipleship, which true discipleship must loathe and detest, has freed me from that."

"The outcome of the Reformation was the victory, not of Luther's perception of grace in all its purity and costliness, but of the vigilant religious instinct of man for the place where grace is to be obtained at the cheapest price."

"As a student of American religious history, I’d be hard pressed to dispute the conferees’ assessment of the state of mainline Protestantism. Like the Democratic Party, and for many of the same reasons, mainline Protestantism is virtually moribund at the turn of the twenty-first century. The reasons for its demise, however, should provide a cautionary tale to evangelicals in their quest for political and cultural influence. In the years following World War II, mainline Protestants-Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and northern Baptists-plunged head-long into a movement called ecumenism, which sought to elide the theological differences in the name of Christian unity. Protestant ecumenism in the 1950s was in part a cold war construct; we Americans felt that we had to show the world, particularly the Communists, that America was a godly nation. In the rush toward religious and theological consensus, however, mainline Protestantism aligned itself more-or-less uncritically with white, middle-class American culture in the 1950s and early 1960s. This fusion was nicely symbolized by Dwight Eisenhower’s laying the cornerstone for the Interchurch center in upper Manhattan on October 12, 1958. The presence of the president of the United States at this event lent a kind of legitimacy to mainline Protestantism and provided at least a veneer of validation to its attempts to embody American, patriotic values. This was the era when “under God” was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” was emblazoned on our currency. But the lessons of American history and the example of mainline Protestantism teach us that religious fervor and conviction function best on the margins of society and not in the councils of power and influence. One reading of the demise of mainline Protestantism, then, is that it sought to ally itself too closely with middle-class values and the pursuit of cultural respectability in the 1950s; in the process, it lost its prophetic edge."

"By the mid-seventeenth century, this myth of the anti-Protestant origins of the Society of Jesus seemed to have been well established, with the Flemish Jesuit editors of the Imago primi saeculi (An image of the first century; Antwerp: Moretus, 1640), for instance, explaining that one of the reasons the Jesuits were founded was to defeat heretics, just as Francis (d.1226) and Dominic (d.1221) had defeated the Albigensian heresy in the thirteenth century. This myth traveled with European Jesuits and Protestants to all the colonies they established around the world, including Africa."

"Together with Ludger Woessmann, professor of economics at Munich, he started by looking at data from 19th-century Prussia, the society that Weber was born into. The region was split into 450 counties, around two thirds of them predominantly Protestant and the other third Catholic. "Religiosity was more pervasive at that time than it is today," he says, "and it seems that religion was the main driver behind education differences. Protestants were more likely to be encouraged to go to school. And this higher level of education translated into jobs in manufacturing and services rather than agriculture. Accordingly, they earned higher incomes than their Catholic neighbours.""

"Protestantism is traditionally understood to designate the churches and denominations that have received their inspiration from the Reformation, including the whole unfolding of that history from the sixteenth century down to the present day. This understanding of the notion informs this ‘’Companion’’, which aims to explore the many facets of this development, especially within Western culture. Yet it must be conceded that ‘Protestantism’ remains obstinately resistant to more precise definition. As by far the most diverse form of contemporary Christianity, it is more susceptible to description rather than definition. Its intrinsic resistance to any concept of centralized authority corresponding to the Roman Catholic magisterium had led to a remarkable degree of diversification at both the theological and sociological levels. Even though certain important patterns of commonality may be discerned, contemporary Protestantism is perhaps at least as notable for its divergences as for its shared historical roots and theological agendas. The rapid growth of Protestant denominations in the twentieth century, given further impetus through the remarkable development of charismatic and Pentecostal groupings, has made it increasingly difficult to speak convincingly to the ‘essence of Protestantism’. While there are important debates within the movement over what its core identity and values might be, empirical observation of the movement suggests that the self-understandings of the movement have become increasingly fluid since the Second World War. The rapid expansion of the movement in its Pentecostal and charismatic forms, particularly when set against the backdrop of the decline of traditional Protestant denominations in the West, suggests that the profile of Protestantism is likely to undergo highly significant changes in the twenty-first century. In recent times, ‘Protestant’ has increasingly become a shorthand term for a number of seemingly disparate Christian denominations and general cultural attitudes, which need to be parsed carefully. Even its more notorious and disparaged nonreligious caricatures contain at least some trusts about the nature of the movement. Thus Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber and H. Rich Niebuhr argued that ‘Protestantism’ designates an ethos that has certain specific political and economic overtones, namely those associated with Western European capitalism and politics and present-day American-style democracy. All argue with differing stresses that there are specific ideas, disguised and given authority as specific doctrines, inherent in the mainline or ‘magisterial’ Reformation that were and are catalytic to forms of the modern Western world and which have also contributed much of the woes of that culture. The commonality is the stress of the ideological penetration, usually thought of as negative, embedded in its theology, of Protestantism in the nontheological (or seemingly so) areas of politics, culture and economics."

"In its strictest sense, the term ‘Protestant’ refers to the group of German princes and cities who ‘protested’ in April 1529 against the re-entrenchment by the Diet of Speyer of the Diet of Worms’s active policy of persecution of Lutheranism and Zwinglism (1521). Prior to the diet of Speyer, those church groups which are now understood to be Protestant – namely, the Lutheran and Reformed (later to be known a Calvinist) communities – were commonly referred to as 'evangelical' (evangelisch or evangelique), thus stressing its center of biblical exegesis (sola scriptura) and its doctrinal core in a faith-based redemptive Christology. At this early stage, issues of church identity were seen as subordinate to the greater question of the recovery of an authentic and biblical understanding of the gospel itself. Yet a debate over the nature of these ecclesial groupings could not be postponed. Throughout the 1530s, the issue of evangelical self-definition became of increasing importance, both to the evangelical movement itself and its increasingly concerned critics."

"If maps were shaded like balance sheets, the bottom part of mainland Europe would be deepest red. Italy, Spain and Portugal are heavily in debt. They are also Catholic countries. Their predominantly Protestant neighbours to the north, including Germany and Scandinavia, are in comparatively good shape financially. Is that simply a coincidence, or is Max Weber's theory about the Protestant ethic being intertwined with the spirit of capitalism still valid, over 100 years on?"

"So there is no single European people. There is no single all-embracing community of culture and tradition among, say, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Berlin and Belgrade. In fact, there are at least four communities: the Northern Protestant, the Latin Catholic, the Greek Orthodox, and the Muslim Ottoman. There is no single language - there are more than twenty. (...) There are no real European political parties (...). And most significantly of all: unlike the United States, Europe still does not have a common story."

"It is from the shadow of a cloister that there emerges one of mankind's greatest very greatest scourges. Luther appears; Calvin follows him. The Peasants' Revolt; the Thirty Years' War; the civil war in France; the massacre of the Low Countries; the massacre of Ireland; the massacre of the Cévennes; St Bartholomew's Day; the murders of Henry II, Henry IV, Mary Stuart, and Charles I; and finally, in our day, from the same source, the French Revolution."

"The terms fundamentalism and traditionalism are unfortunately interchanged in common discourse. For the purposes of this chapter it is important to make a clear distinction between them. Traditionalism, as I use the term here, involves a strong and positive relationship with one’s religious tradition: its rituals, its narratives, its way of interpreting experience, its practices of moral and theological discernment. Traditionalism, as it is expressed in Protestantism, is capable of preserving the central characteristics of Protestantism that developed in the European context of struggle against hierarchical authority. Traditionalism need not become fundamentalist. Fundamentalism, on the other hand, is inimical to that heritage. As a reaction against modern worldviews, fundamentalism is itself an outgrowth of modernity. The development of both the social and physical sciences, as well as growing cross-cultural experiences that revealed the existence of large, ancient, complex alternative religions presented a challenge to all Christian denominations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The “liberal” Protestant response emphasized confidence in human reason and its new knowledges with the expectation that reason and faith need not be adversarial. The fundamentalist response that developed near the end of the nineteenth century was, and is, a reaction of fear as modernity produced multiple alternative knowledge sources that challenged any narrowly defined religious control over how people will understand their world. As I described earlier, a central characteristic of the Protestant Reformation was the recognition that all things human, including the human experience of religion, were finite and fallible. The reformers argued that no guarantee of absolute truth could reside in the magisterium of the western church, nor in its traditions. The fear that drives fundamentalism, however, required the reimposition of an absolute truth that will stand, unchanging, against all contending sources of knowledge. In the mid-seventeenth century, the need to counter the knowledge claims of modern science with an unquestionable source of religious truth led to a new theology of biblical inerrancy. Although the reformers made no claim to biblical inerrancy, nor would they given their schooling in Christian humanism, certainly the temptation of such a claim can be traced to the way in which they tied their claims to biblical texts. Protestants, in denying the simple authority of tradition of a church hierarchy, are left with the unending task of relating a culturally based scripture with always new, culturally produced texts."

"Until quite recently, most of the writing on Protestant Christianity in Southeast Asia was from a missiological perspective. While some of this writing is sensitive to the question of how people in Southeast Asia adapted Protestant Christian practice to their local worlds, it was not until the 1980s that a significant number of scholars began to focus attention on how Christian practice in Southeast Asia was shaped by both Christian doctrines and indigenous cultures. Recent work has included studies of the emergence of a Protestant-derived religious movement in nineteenth-century Java; of the linkages between late nineteenth-century Protestant missionary work among the Karo Batak in Sumatra and the expansion of Dutch colonial rule; of the political and economic aspects."

"The global distribution of Christians is expected to change by 2050, with the largest proportion of Christians – more than a billion – residing in sub-Saharan Africa. Historical and empirical studies have argued for a positive relationship between the proportion of Christians – Protestants in particular – and the development of liberal democracy. A key explanation for this positive influence is cultural, namely the valuing of the individual. Could the growth in Christianity have the potential to influence democratic development and good governance in the sub-Saharan region? To test our hypotheses – (1) sub-Saharan states with proportionally larger Protestant populations are more likely to have higher levels of democracy and good governance, and (2) sub-Saharan states with growing Protestant populations are more likely to have increasing levels of democracy and good governance – we employ a longitudinal and cross-sectional study (a panel of data) using data from the World Christian Database, Polity IV and the International Country Risk Guide. Our data show that the population share of Protestants is positively related with both levels of and growth in democracy and good governance. With the spread of Protestantism we could expect the future improvement of democracy and governance in the region."

"Protestantism is better than Catholicism, because there is less of it."

"If Protestant theology has reached the point where it is closed to the challenge of atheism, then it has ceased to be the intellectual vanguard of Christianity."

"Protestantism promoted the spread of that cold rationality which is so characteristic of the modern individual. ... By allying itself with the rising economic system it made men dependent upon the world of things even to a higher degree than before. Where formerly they worked for the sake of salvation, they were now induced to work for work’s sake, profit for profit’s sake, power for power’s sake."

"Although the Protestant Church is accused of much disastrous bigotry, one claim to immortal fame must be granted it: by permitting freedom of inquiry in the Christian faith and by liberating the minds of men from the yoke of authority, it enabled freedom of inquiry in general to take root in Germany, and made it possible for science to develop independently. German philosophy, though it now puts itself on an equal basis with the Protestant Church or even above it, is nonetheless only its daughter; as such it always owes the mother a forbearing reverence."

"Kevin Kruse in his book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America details how industrialists in the 1930s and 1940s poured money and resources into an effort to silence the social witness of the mainstream church, which was home to many radicals, socialists and proponents of the New Deal. These corporatists promoted and funded a brand of Christianity—which is today dominant—that conflates faith with free enterprise and American exceptionalism. The rich are rich, this creed goes, not because they are greedy or privileged, not because they use their power to their own advantage, not because they oppress the poor and the vulnerable, but because they are blessed. And if we have enough faith, this heretical form of Christianity claims, God will bless the rest of us too. It is an inversion of the central message of the Gospel. You don’t need to spend three years at Harvard Divinity School as I did to figure that out."