Protestantism is generally thought of as being one of the three major branches of the Christian faith (the other two being Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy). Protestantism is a broad category. It includes, for example, Anglicans, Baptists, Campbellites, Congregationalists, Lutherans, Methodists, Mennonites, Nazarenes, Presbyterians, Quakers, Seventh-Day Adventists, and Unitarians. Texts that are generally taken to embody the spirit of Protestantism include Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into the German language, John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Isaac Watts’s Hymns and Spiritual Songs, John Woolman’s Journal, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, S0ren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death, the Barmen Declaration, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.
HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY
Protestantism arose in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It came into being as the result of the efforts of men such as John Calvin, John Knox, Martin Luther, Menno Simons, and Huldrych Zwingli to "reform" what they saw as the "errors" of the Roman Catholic Church. The drive to "correct" these "mistakes" ended up profoundly transforming the political, as well as the religious, institutions of Western Europe. Indeed, scholars have claimed that the Protestant Reformation played a crucial role in creating the religious, political, social, economic, and cultural formations that came to embody "modernity."
There is no scholarly consensus on the number of Protestants in the world. If one adopts a quite broad definition and counts people who are only nominally Christian as well as those who are quite devout, then one might argue that the total is over 800 million. Although Protestantism was created in Western Europe, it has spread throughout much of the world. Protestant beliefs and practices are quite common, of course, in Australia and North America, and have a strong foothold in some Asian countries—South Korea and the Philippines, for instance. Protestants make up sizable minorities in Latin American nations such as Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Guatemala. In a number of African countries (Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, and Swaziland, for instance), Protestants constitute a large proportion of the citizens. Indeed, some scholars have argued that Protestantism’s future may lie in Africa and Latin America rather than in Europe or North America. Certainly, it now seems to be far more vital in Africa and Latin America than in some of the nations of Western Europe.
PRACTICES
From the sixteenth century to the present, Protestants have consistently claimed to be highly suspicious of "empty ritualism." Such suspicions notwithstanding, over the centuries Protestants have developed a set of powerful religious practices that vivify the doctrines and symbols of the Christian faith. Some Protestants (Lutherans and Anglicans especially) have maintained carefully crafted formal liturgies. The roots of those liturgies stretch back to—indeed reach back beyond—the sixteenth century, and have much in common with Catholic and Orthodox liturgies. Other Protestants, often referred to as Evangelicals, have created revival services intended to convert nonbelievers into devout Christians. And since the beginning of the twentieth century, a group of Protestants who are often labeled Pentecostals or Charismatics have held services that focus on the "gift of tongues." This gift—which often results in a kind of ecstatic speech that is not intelligible to hearers—is thought of as a sign of the power of the Holy Spirit.
As a general rule, Protestants tend to display a strong love for singing hymns and gospel songs. Accordingly, a good portion of many Protestant worship services is devoted to choral and congregational singing. Protestant worship services also tend to devote a good deal of time to listening to homilies and sermons. These sermons, which are sometimes filled with emotion and sometimes quite erudite, are intended to help the people who hear them comprehend the truths of the Christian faith as those truths are set forth in the Christian scriptures.
Indeed, the importance of the Christian scriptures in shaping Protestant practice and belief is difficult to exaggerate. Reading the scriptures aloud is one of the high points of many Protestant worship services, and the hymns Protestants sing are often based on passages from the Bible. (Martin Luther’s "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" is, for example, based on Psalm 46.) The scriptures also play a large role in the private devotional practices of most Protestants. And Protestants greatly value Bible study groups and Sunday School classes in which small groups meet together to ascertain the meaning of passages from the Bible.
It is no accident that many Protestant devotional practices focus on the Christian scriptures, for Protestants have tended to see the Bible—rather than the traditions of the church—as the surest guide to understanding the nature of reality and of God. Protestants have often expressed a certain distrust of human reason or of observations of nature as a way to grasp the truth. If given a choice between relying on observations of nature, reason, tradition, or the Bible as a way to understand the nature of God and the universe, many Protestants would say, without hesitation, that their choice would be the Bible.
In part because they tend to put great confidence in the power of the Christian scriptures, correctly comprehended, to disclose the nature of ultimate reality, Protestants sometimes have acted in ways that have seemed to smack of hubris. In its most extreme form, this apparent hubris has resulted in some Protestant leaders coming close to asserting that the Bible is infallible and that they themselves have fully and correctly comprehended the truths that are taught therein. Critics have sometimes argued that this self-confident scripturalism is one of the hallmarks of Protestantism and that its predilection for that kind of scripturalism makes Protestantism a particularly dangerous form of religion. Such arguments are not without merit.
It should also be noted, however, that Protestants (like many other religious human beings) have sometimes been keenly aware of human finitude. This has sometimes led Protestants to fiercely critique all human attempts to speak for God and all human claims to have fully understood God’s nature and desires. Some Protestants have gone so far as to say that all human ideas and beliefs— including all Protestant ideas and beliefs—are very far from the mind of God. Under some conditions, the Protestant view of the world can, therefore, inculcate a good deal of humility within the people who adhere to it.
SOCIAL TEACHINGS
The Protestant tendency to see all human institutions as imperfect has sometimes been connected with a wide-ranging set of emancipatory impulses. Protestant beliefs and practices played an important role, for instance, in the abolitionist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those beliefs and practices have sometimes been linked, too, with anticolonial and feminist movements. Many Protestants have, on occasion, fiercely critiqued the behavior of the nation-states in whose borders they resided. Created in part in reaction to what sixteenth-and seventeenth-century reformers saw as an overly rigid and overly powerful set of ecclesiastical institutions, Protestantism has sometimes tended to value "freedom" over "tradition" and "conscience" over the "laws of men."
Protestantism has also, many scholars would assert, served to naturalize a wide range of inegalitarian social relationships. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, Protestants wrote and preached countless defenses of the institution of chattel slavery. In the twentieth century, many white Protestants living in the United States (especially those living in the former slave states) advanced theological defenses of white supremacy. Indeed, pious Protestants often played crucial roles in Southern campaigns to defeat the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s.
Patriarchal social relations have also often been naturalized by Protestant beliefs and practices. Protestants have generally thought of God as masculine and referred to God with masculine pronouns. Protestant churches have generally believed that to obtain salvation a woman must submit herself to the authority of this masculine Lord. Historically, women have been taught that it was "natural" for them to defer to men. Protestant churches have also tended to see persons who have sex with someone to whom they are not married as rebelling against God’s laws. Protestant churches have taught that women who have sex with other women and (especially) men who have sex with other men are violating God’s fundamental laws, and these sorts of violations have been regarded as particularly unnatural and repugnant. In general, Protestant churches have tended to be organizations in which heterosexual norms have been enforced quite strictly.
Scholars do not agree on the precise nature of the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism. Some scholarly analyses of that relationship (Max Weber’s, for instance) emphasize Protestantism’s role in creating circumstances in which modern capitalism could arise and flourish; other scholarly analyses (R. H. Tawney’s, for example) focus on ways in which the rise of capitalism decisively influenced Protestants’ assumptions and habits. Most scholars would, however, assert that Protestant churches have tended to naturalize the authority of capitalist institutions. Protestant churches have often seen commercial success as a sign of Godly favor and they have often acted as though it was natural for businessmen to play a large role in running church affairs. Protestant churches have eagerly adopted techniques and methods developed by businessmen. Indeed, many have been run in ways strikingly similar to those of for-profit corporations.
The "peace churches" (Mennonites, for example) have sometimes raised pointed questions about whether the violence employed by nation-states can be reconciled with the life and teachings of Jesus. But for the most part, however, Protestants have tended to see nation-states and nationalism as natural, even as ordained by God. They have been reluctant to challenge state authority even when it conflicts with Christian beliefs.
