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Introduction

In 1524, Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote a blistering attack on a fanatical new cult that was spreading across northern Europe like a plague. These people claim to be preaching the Bible’s pure message, he said, but look at how they actually use the Bible, twisting it to mean whatever they want:

They are like young men who love a girl so immoderately that they imagine they see their beloved wherever they turn, or, a much better example, like two combatants who, in the heat of a quarrel, turn whatever is at hand into a missile, whether it be a jug or a dish.¹

This book is about that cult and how it became one of the most creative and disruptive movements in human history. At present, around one-eighth of the human race belongs to it, and it has decisively shaped the world in which the other seven-eighths live. My aim is to convince you that we cannot understand the modern age without understanding the dynamic history of Protestant Christianity.

It turns out that Erasmus was right: Protestants are fighters and lovers. They will argue with anyone about almost anything. Some of these arguments are abstruse, others brutally practical. If we look at the great ideological battles of the past half millennium – for and against toleration, slavery, imperialism, fascism, or Communism – we will find Protestant Christians on both sides.

But Protestants are also lovers. From the beginning, a love affair with God has been at the heart of their faith. Like all long love affairs, it has gone through many phases, from early passion through companionable marriage and sometimes strained coexistence, to rekindled ardour. Beneath all the arguments, the distinguishing mark of a Protestant is the feeling and memory of that love, one on which no church or human authority can intrude. It is because Protestants care so deeply about God that they have been willing to fight one another and take on the world on his behalf.

So this is both an interior and an exterior story, a spiritual and emotional drama with practical and political implications. The spirituality at Protestantism’s centre sends out waves that sometimes crest into tsunamis as they encounter the ordinary stuff of human life. This book will tell the stories of the changes they have left in their wake. Protestants have faced down tyrants, demanded political participation, advocated tolerance, and valued the individual. Equally, they have insisted on God-given inequality, valorized state power, persecuted dissenters, and placed the community above its members. They have fought religious wars against each other and have turned secular struggles into crusades. Some have tried to withdraw from the secular world and its politics altogether, and at times they have been the most revolutionary of all.

The Protestant Reformation was clearly an important event in world history, but that does not mean that it can take the credit or the blame for everything that has happened since. Nor does it make Martin Luther a prophet of individualism or a hero of self-determination. He and the Protestants who succeeded him were not trying to modernize the world, but to save it. And yet in the process they profoundly changed how we think about ourselves, our society, and our relationship with God. This book tells the story of that transformation: a story, in outline, of how three of the key ingredients of the world we live in are rooted in Protestant Christianity.

The first is free inquiry. Protestants stumbled into this slowly and reluctantly, but Luther’s bedrock principles led inexorably in that direction. The insistence that all human authority in religious matters is provisional, and that the human conscience, constrained only by the Bible and the Holy Spirit, is ultimately sovereign, means that Protestants who try to police the boundaries of acceptable argument have in the end always failed. Protestants have always been divided among themselves both in their religious and in their political leadership, making it easy for new and dissenting ideas to find spaces both at home and across borders.

Protestantism is not a paradise of free speech, but an open-ended, ill-disciplined argument. How it has come to continuously generate new ideas, and revive old ones, is a recurring theme of this book. Protestants’ bare-knuckle style of public debate wore down print censorship, and Protestant universities and scholars led the way in the emergence of the new natural sciences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Slowly and reluctantly, one notion which a few radical Protestants put about – that religious difference and free speech ought to be accepted as matters of principle, rather than merely tolerated as unavoidable necessities – became a new orthodoxy.

This is linked to Protestantism’s second, more dangerous contribution: its tendency towards what we are compelled to call democracy. Virtually all Protestants before the nineteenth century, and many since, regarded that word with horror, yet the undertow was there. Protestants regularly found themselves having to deal with governments that did not share their beliefs. They asserted not a right to choose their rulers but a solemn duty and responsibility to challenge them. In performing that duty, the Scottish radical John Knox wrote in 1558, “all man is equal”² Few Protestants at the time agreed, and even Knox meant something very different from what we understand equality to mean today. Most early Protestants favoured monarchy, order and social stability. But their rulers had an intolerable tendency to act in defiance of God’s will, and so, again and again, they were forced reluctantly to take matters into their own hands. This is what we should expect from consciences fired with love for God and ready to take on all comers.

Left to itself, this could lead to revolution or to the creation of self-righteous theocracies, and as we shall see, both have repeatedly happened. But these impulses have been tempered by the third, much less remarked-upon but perhaps more significant ingredient of Protestantism’s modernizing cocktail: its apoliticism. Protestants might have sometimes confronted or overthrown their rulers, but their most constant political demand is simply to be left alone. Returning to Christianity’s roots in ancient Rome, they have tried to carve out a spiritual space where political authority does not apply and have insisted that that space, the kingdom of Christ, matters far more than the sordid and ephemeral quarrels of this world. The results are paradoxical. Protestants have often been obedient subjects to thoroughly noxious rulers, taking no interest in politics so long as their own separate sphere is respected. It has also meant that rulers who will not or cannot respect that sphere have faced unexpectedly stubborn opposition. In the process, Protestants have helped to give the modern world the strange, counterintuitive notion of limited government: the principle that the first duty even of the most righteous ruler is to respect his subjects’ freedom and allow them to live their lives as they see fit.

These ideals, which seem natural to our own age, are in the span of human history very unusual indeed. That we should all have a say in choosing our own rulers and that those rulers’ powers over us should be limited – these principles are in obvious tension, as every society that has tried to combine liberty and democracy has discovered. Without Protestantism and its peculiar preoccupations, that strange and marvellous synthesis could never have come into being as it has.

This brings us to one of the most persistent puzzles of Protestant modernity. Ever since the great German sociologist Max Weber advanced the notion of “the Protestant work ethic” in 1904, it has seemed intuitively obvious that there is some kind of connection between Protestantism and capitalism. But for all the brilliance of Weber’s arguments, the actual evidence he advanced to prove this intuition did not really hold up, and his successors have not done much better.³ It is true both that capitalism has often flourished in Protestant societies, and Protestantism has often flourished in societies that are newly embracing capitalism, from sixteenth-century Holland to eighteenth-century England through to twentieth-century South Korea. Equally plainly, capitalism and Protestantism can each prosper in the other’s absence. Two observations, perhaps, can be made. One is that the kind of socio-political structure that Protestantism engenders – based on free inquiry, participatory politics, and limited government – tends to favour market economics.

The other is a matter of mood. As Weber pointed out, one of capitalism’s odd features is its “restless activity”.⁴ Protestants are not always driven to restless economic activity, although the need to fill the unforgiving minutes of their lives in a manner which is both blameless and worthwhile can certainly push them in that direction. But a certain generic restlessness, an itchy instability, is absolutely a core characteristic of the Protestant life. Settled peace and consensus does not come easily to Protestants. They are more usually found straining after new truths, searching out new sins or striving to recover old virtues. They have always known that their religious life is flawed and inadequate, and no sooner create an institution than they suspect it of calcifying into formalism and hyprocrisy. They are forever starting new arguments and spawning new forms. This self-perpetuating dynamo of dissatisfaction and yearning has helped to fuel and support the growth of capitalism. More broadly, it has also been, and still is, one of the engines driving modern history.

This book tells the story of how the first five centuries of Protestant history brought us to where we are now and asks what might be coming next. It is not chiefly a history of Protestantism, of doctrines and churches and theological systems, although a certain amount of that can’t be avoided. It is a history of Protestants, who see themselves as God’s chosen people. There are towering thinkers like Martin Luther, the stubborn monk whose own overwhelming encounter with God began it all, and John Calvin, the brilliant and arrogant Frenchman who came tantalizingly close to forging a single, united Protestantism. There are outsiders like the self-taught Vermont preacher William Miller, whose apocalyptic hopes swept across 1840s America, and Choe Ja-Sil, the destitute Korean nurse who co-founded a tent church that became, by the time of her death in 1989, the world’s largest congregation. There are noblemen like Justinian von Welz and Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, whose conversions drove them from their German estates to cross the world spreading their subversive religion. There are women like Rebecca Freundlich Protten, one of the first ordained Protestant women, who risked re-enslavement rather than compromise her faith, and Pandita Ramabai, the Indian widow whose campaign for women’s rights was underpinned by her Pentecostal revivalism. There are heroes with clay feet, like Martin Niemöller and Johan Heyns, who only slowly and painfully realized that their faith could not square with Nazism or apartheid; and reactionaries, like Walter Grundmann and Gustav Gerdener, whose faith seemed to find its fullest expression in those doctrines.

The book falls into three parts. Part 1 takes the story from the great crisis of the Reformation through to the eighteenth century, when it finally became clear that Protestantism would not only survive but spread around the world. The story begins in chapter 1 with Martin Luther’s attempt to work out the implications of his own personal spiritual crisis. What began as a decorous academic dispute quickly turned into a scandal, then a political crisis, and, within less than a decade, the largest mass rebellion Europe had ever seen. Chapter 2 asks how the fragmented, antagonistic reforming movements that emerged from this chaos tried to carve out space in which they could live. Some worked with the grain of existing power structures, while others openly defied them; all shared the deeply subversive assumption that Christ’s kingdom was separate from and superior to human hierarchies of any kind. Chapter 3 looks at the most promising attempt at something Protestants have always longed for, namely reunion. Calvinism’s failure to achieve this dream ended up proving that it was not only impossible but positively damaging.

Chapter 4 turns to one of the first consequences of the Protestant upheaval: more than a century of brutal religious violence, as a result of which, slowly and reluctantly, some Protestants began to harbour notions of tolerance. Chapter 5 stops for a more detailed look at one particularly significant example of that process: the English Civil War of 1642–46 and its aftermath, the most fertile nursery of new Protestant sects and ideas since Luther’s day. Chapter 6 considers one vital consequence of violence: mass migration. Protestantism was profoundly shaped by the experience of exile, for good and for ill. In this first age of globalization, Protestants scattered not only across Europe but across the world, especially, fatefully, to North America. Here they tried and failed to build model societies, while initially making astonishingly little effort to convert non-Christian peoples.

In part 2, we see how Protestantism in Europe and North America recovered from its late seventeenth-century nadir only to face new crises in the modern world. Chapter 7 describes how, around the turn of the eighteenth century, Protestants rediscovered some of their old sources of spiritual strength and began a wave of global expansion that has scarcely paused since. This quickly led them into confronting the defining spiritual and political crisis of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Atlantic slavery. Chapter 8 looks at how slavery was defended and opposed by Protestants with equal vigour on both sides of the ocean. The slow but decisive shift to a Protestant consensus that slavery is intolerable would have lasting effects. Chapter 9 looks at another aspect of the early United States: the third great explosion of sectarian creativity in Protestant history, giving rise to a kaleidoscope of utopian, apocalyptic, antihierarchical, and Spirit-led movements, some of which continue to shape modern Protestantism to this day. Chapter 10 turns to a very different feature of nineteenth-century Protestantism, namely theological liberalism, a bold attempt to outflank the emerging secularist challenge. It was, if anything, too successful, and ended up being deeply implicated on all sides in the First World War.

Chapter 11 takes up the role of Protestants in the rise of and resistance to Nazism in Germany, where old Protestant orthodoxies and new liberal ideals combined to smooth the path to genocide. Chapter 12 follows that story to the present in Protestantism’s old heartland, arguing that the rise of secularism in Europe and in parts of the United States reflects many denominations’ inability to find a distinctive voice after the immense moral shock of the Second World War. The real novelty of our own time is not the prominence of the religious Right but the silence of the religious Left.

In part 3, the book’s final chapters look at what has now become a global story. Chapter 13 traces the longest and bitterest of Protestantism’s African adventures: South Africa, where an indigenous African Protestantism took root quickly but ran up against a settler population that justified white supremacy in explicitly Protestant terms. Protestantism was crucial both to apartheid’s beginnings and to its end. Chapter 14 turns to modern Protestantism’s strangest success story, Korea, where colonial and cultural politics combined to give Protestants an opening unparalleled in Asia. The other great Asian story, that of China, examined in chapter 15, is very different; here a long-standing missionary effort bore relatively little fruit, but the pressures of Communist rule have now given China the world’s fastest-growing Protestant population. Finally, chapter 16 looks at the greatest revolution in modern Protestantism: Pentecostalism, a global phenomenon from its inception, which for over a century has been quietly putting down roots in the United States, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere and now has a fair claim to be the modern world’s most dynamic religious movement. Its persistent avoidance of politics has allowed it to deflect attention, but that may turn out to be its most subversive feature of all. The epilogue asks, in the light of this story, where Protestantism might be going next: for it may be that its history is still only beginning.

Protestantism has affected every sphere of human life. I have focused on its political effects, especially how it has eaten away at established orthodoxies and distinctions of race, nation, and gender, sometimes despite itself. I have not paid much attention to its role in driving economic change or in fostering modern science, though we will touch on both subjects. I have said virtually nothing about the arts. It would take a whole chapter to do justice to Johann Sebastian Bach; here he gets a single sentence. If you finish this book impatient to know about the parts of the story I have skated over or left out, I will feel I have succeeded.

It will already be obvious that I am using the word “Protestant” broadly. There are narrow definitions, restricting it, for example, to Lutheran and Calvinist Christians and their immediate descendants. One of the things Protestants like to fight over is who does and does not count as a proper Protestant. As a historian, I prefer a genealogical definition: Protestants are Christians whose religion derives ultimately from Martin Luther’s rebellion against the Catholic Church. They are a tree with many tangled branches but a single trunk. So in this book “Protestant” includes those who are often shut out of the party, such as Anabaptists, Quakers, Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Pentecostals. These groups have radically different beliefs, but they share a family resemblance. They are as quarrelsome and fervent as any other Protestant, and that first spark, the life-changing encounter between the individual believer and the grace of God, is visible in all of them.

One definition does need a little more attention: the one on which Erasmus focused. As a much-quoted seventeenth-century Englishman put it, “The BIBLE, I say, The BIBLE only is the Religion of Protestants!”⁵ It is a truism that the Bible, the ancient library of Jewish and early Christian texts that Christians regard as Scripture, is close to Protestantism’s heart. It is also clear that one of the things Protestants love to fight over is what the Bible is and means. To understand those battles, we need to ask just what Protestants’ relationship with the Bible is – as a matter of historical practice, not of theological principle.

Some Protestants insist that Protestantism is “Bible Christianity”, a religion that takes the whole, inspired Bible as the only and final authoritative source of truth. This view makes Protestantism’s history of division easy enough to understand; these are simply arguments about the interpretation of a complex text. But the claim that Protestantism is mere Bible Christianity does not stand up. For one thing, there is that love affair. What Protestants share is an experience of God’s grace rather than a doctrine of authority. Martin Luther had his life upended by God’s grace before he decided that he could not be bound by any authority outside Scripture. Indeed, many Protestants have not treated the Bible as their sole authority. Some have found authority elsewhere, through (as they believed) the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Others have questioned whether and in what sense the whole text as we have it is authoritative at all.

Even those who do use the whole Bible as their sole authority do so in two different ways. They are Erasmus’s lovers and fighters. The Bible has from the beginning been Protestants’ weapon for defending their beliefs and dismissing their opponents’, citing chapter and verse to prove the point. This works best if you believe in the word-for-word authority of the entire text, and the earliest Protestants were as adept as any modern evangelicals at that kind of close-quarters biblical combat.

And yet, before the Bible is a bludgeon that can be used to batter your opponents into submission, it is a source of inspiration. Before you can wield it like a fighter, you must read it like a lover. We can see this through one of the strangest features of Protestant Christianity. Although Protestants have from the beginning vigorously asserted that the Bible is authoritative, they have been strangely slow to argue that that is so. When the case has been made, it has often been done without much energy: citing biblical texts to justify the Bible’s authority, an obviously circular argument, or making shaky deductions to the effect that God must have inspired it. This is not because Protestants are avoiding an awkward subject or know they do not have a leg to stand on. It is because, in truth, their faith does not hang on these arguments. They do not need to convince themselves of the Bible’s authority, because they already know it.

Early Protestantism’s greatest systematic theologian, John Calvin, confronted the question head-on. In an extraordinary passage, he simply refused to argue the case for the Bible’s authority at all. “We ought”, he said, “to seek our conviction in a higher place than human reasons, judgements or conjectures, that is, in the secret testimony of the Spirit.” In other words, we know that the Bible is the Word of God not by arguing about it but by reading it with “pure eyes and upright senses”, for then and only then “the majesty of God will immediately come to view”. The Holy Spirit inspired the Bible, and only the Holy Spirit can convince you that that is true. Therefore, Calvin concludes,

Scripture is indeed self-authenticating. . . . We feel that the undoubted power of his divine majesty lives and breathes there, . . . a feeling that can be born only of heavenly revelation. I speak of nothing other than what each believer experiences within himself.⁶

The Bible itself provides its own authority, and either you feel it (through the Spirit) or you don’t. This is Scripture for lovers, who can talk rapturously of the vision before them but cannot in the end compel anyone else to see it.

Across the span of Protestantism’s history, the experience Calvin describes is fundamental. The same argument, in essence, was made by seventeenth-century Puritans, eighteenth-century revivalists, nineteenth-century liberals, and twentieth-century Pentecostals. The Bible is woven into Western, and now global, civilization more deeply than any other book, and none of us can come to it cold. Yet in every generation, Protestants have felt that they are reading the Bible for the first time and have been enthralled by its stories, its poetry and its arguments. This is why they persistently refuse to let anyone else tell them how to read their Bibles. “I acknowledge no fixed rules for the interpretation of the Word of God,” Martin Luther told Pope Leo X, “since the Word of God, which teaches freedom in all other matters, must not be bound.” The following century, John Bunyan gently refused to submit to anyone else’s interpretation. “I am for drinking Water out of my own Cistern; what GOD makes mine by evidence of his Word and Spirit, that I dare make bold with.”⁷ Protestants have been finding refreshment and boldness in their own cisterns ever since.

When Protestant groups have distanced themselves from the Bible, like the Nazi-era “German Christians” for whom it was intolerably Jewish, they end up looking not very Protestant any more. But if to read the Bible as a lover is common to all Protestants, whether and how to use it as a weapon is not. Many Protestants have concluded, as Calvin did, that the entire text must be fully inspired. This seems the most openhearted way of honouring their encounter with God in the text and also makes the text much easier to use in combat. Others have for various reasons concluded that they cannot accept it as authoritative in that way, on some variant of a principle first articulated by Martin Luther himself. Luther argued that the Bible contains the Word of God rather than that it is that Word. He even called it “the swaddling cloths and the manger in which Christ lies”.⁸ But even those who have picked up that idea and run with it most daringly still keep coming back to the manger to worship.

Protestants have no consensus on the question of how and in what sense the Bible is authoritative. Some would defend every comma. Others are more free and easy with the text. Both positions are attractive and both present formidable problems. But for all their arguments, both parties continue to drink from this cistern out of a shared conviction that here, supremely, is where they hear God’s voice – even if they are unable to agree on what he says.

A brief note about how and why I have written this book. I have written about a very wide range of religious movements. I find some of them admirable, some of them repellent, and some of them tinged with madness. In each case, I have tried to treat them with sympathy. This is not because I myself believe that witches should be put to death or that apartheid is God’s will. It is because earnest, God-fearing Protestants who were no more inherently wicked than you or I did believe these things, even at the same time as other Protestants passionately opposed them. Condemning ugly beliefs is easy, but it is also worth the effort to understand why people once believed them. If we are lucky, later ages might be as indulgent towards us. We all live in glass houses. Those who are without sin are welcome to cast the first stone.

So I have tried to explain what all kinds of Protestantism felt like from the inside, but like all of us I also have my own corner to defend, and it is only fair to be plain about it. I am myself a believing Protestant Christian and a licensed lay preacher in the Church of England. This book was not, however, written to convert you to my views, and I should be amazed if it did. It was written to convince you of the richness, the power, and the creativity, as well as the dangers, of this vast religious tradition. If you are yourself a Protestant, I hope this book will show you your own tradition in a new perspective: to help you understand more about where it came from, how it ended up the way it is today, and where it might be going next. If you are not, I hope it will show you why so many people have been and still are. I hope you will also see how this tradition has not only made the modern world but also made itself at home in it.