The Protestant Reformation was a major split in the western Christian Church in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Its influence is felt to this day as it essentially divided the European Christian nations into Catholic and non-Catholic countries.
There had been significant attempts to reform the Christian Church prior to the Reformation, but it was the German preacher Martin Luther’s protest – writing his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 and nailing it to the door of the Catholic Church in Wittenberg, Germany – that generated enough momentum for the widely-held religious discontent in Europe at the time to turn into a full breakaway movement that split the Church.
Christian priests had for some time been questioning what they saw as malpractice and corruption within the Roman Catholic Church, leading to an erosion of confidence in the authority of the Pope. Luther’s written protest captured this discontent, criticising the new Catholic practice of selling indulgences (pardons of sins) for profit and then going on to question the religious legitimacy of Catholic policies on all matters, from purgatory (the place where souls are said to be purified after death), to the judgment passed on souls, to devotion to the Virgin Mary and the Saints, to the sacraments (sacred rites) of the Church – particularly the concept of holy bread and water literally becoming the body and blood of Christ, to the celibacy of priests, to the ultimate authority of The Pope himself. The criticism grew and widened until it touched on almost all aspects of Catholicism. Luther was excommunicated (suspended) from the Church, and his reform movement condemned by Rome, but other reformers such as Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin took up Luther’s cause and the protest began to spread through Europe.
The Protestant Reformation was in many ways fortunate to occur alongside two other events/ movements during the same time period. First, the rise of the printing press: Luther had translated the Bible into German and copies of that translation – as well as numerous religious pamphlets popularising his views and instructing parents how to teach their children Christianity – flooded Germany and Europe. Literacy rates soared and Luther in many ways waged the world’s first version of a media propaganda war.
Secondly, many aspects of the Reformation chimed with the ‘Humanist’ movement which had been ushered in by the Renaissance and held that true religion was a matter of inward devotion personal to the individual rather than the collective, didactic ritual and ceremony of the Catholic Church. Luther borrowed extensively from Humanism and this new sense of individualism: that each man could be his own priest and the only true religious authority was that of The Bible itself. Luther’s belief in two distinct ‘kingdoms’ or realms that should remain separate – the spiritual and the secular – won over many rulers, landowners and businessmen who were tired of having to send high taxes back to Rome.
The Catholic Church and those loyal to it did not, of course, take these protests lying down. Political and religious debate and acrimony grew out of the movement and led to the European Religious Wars of the early-mid 17th Century that essentially carved up Europe into southern Catholic and northern non-Catholic states and created of a variety of new Christian Protestant churches: the Lutheran churches (in Germany, the Baltics and Scandinavia), the Reformed churches (in Germany, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Scotland), the Anglican church in England (a mix of the old and the new after the Church of England split ties with Catholicism for political reasons), and numerous other new strands like the Puritans and Presbyterians, the Baptists and Anabaptists, the Calvinists and French Huguenots.
The Puritans proved particularly influential: frustrated that the Anglican Church had not reformed enough, they left England in the early 17th Century to establish the colony of Massachusetts in a new, religiously unsullied land far away from Europe. This ‘new world’ would eventually become the United States of America and persecuted Protestants from across Europe set sail for it with a vision of peace, freedom and the opportunity of a new life.
To learn more about the 17th Century wars of religion that shaped Europe, jump to Chapter 32: European Religious Wars
To learn more about Humanism and its ongoing influence, turn to Chapter 33: Humanism
To learn more about the ‘new land’ of religious freedom for Protestants, turn to Chapter 34: United States of America
