Protestantism

n.

1. Adherence to the religion and beliefs of a Protestant church.
2. The religion and religious beliefs fostered by the Protestant movement.
3. Protestants considered as a group.

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[For the pre-1600 period see Reformation; Evangelicals; Wars of Religion].

1. Before 1789

At the time of the Edict of Nantes (1598) there were about 1, 250, 000 Protestants in France, almost all Calvinists, constituting about 6 per cent of the population. They were often called Huguenots (from the German Eidgenossen); their religion was officially referred to as the religion prétendue réformée (RPR). They were geographically concentrated in a long crescent stretching from La Rochelle to Valence, skirting the Massif Central. Some towns were almost exclusively Protestant, notably La Rochelle and Montauban; others, like Nîmes and Montpellier, had strong Protestant majorities. Paris had about 15, 000 Calvinists, about 5 per cent of the population.

The acquisition of most of Alsace (1648), the Pays de Montbéliard (1676), and Strasbourg (1681) brought to France a considerable population of Lutherans. Their theology was not radically different from that of the Calvinists (except perhaps in their belief in the Real Presence), but they had a different religious culture: in particular, they tolerated iconography, and they had a tradition of accepting princely authority. They were also largely German-speaking. They were not subject to the full rigours of the Edict of Fontainebleau (i.e. the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes), because Louis XIV could not risk such persecution in a newly acquired frontier region; they were, however, subject to severe persecution after 1685.

French Protestantism seems to have stood up fairly well to the often virulent persecution of the 17th c. However, the intensified persecution of the 1680s [see Dragonnades] and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685 forced many to leave the country [see Refuge]. Most of the rest conformed outwardly, while in many areas keeping alive a family tradition of Bible-reading and prayer. In the early 18th c. millenarian Protestantism among the peasantry of the Cévennes broke out in the Guerre des Camisards. Many Protestant notables found this kind of apocalyptic popular religion not to their taste, and welcomed the work of Antoine Court, who after 1713 began to preach a moderate religion more in keeping with Huguenot traditions. Protestant worship, however, was still illegal and had mostly to be conducted in le Désert, i.e. in secret meetings usually held in the open air. A number of pastors were executed for their religious activity. Despite continuing persecution, French Protestantism maintained itself and even flourished in the first half of the 18th c. From about 1750 state persecution began to decline, perhaps in the face of Enlightenment principles of toleration and the increasing secularization of the concept of the state (a notable exception to this general trend is provided by the execution of Jean Calas). In 1787 the Edict of Toleration gave Protestants the right to keep their own parish registers, which were to have legal validity (i.e. it accepted their right to a legal existence).

2. Since 1789

The Revolution of 1789 was generally welcomed by Protestants, partly because it rapidly turned against the Catholic Church, partly because the Déclaration des droits de l'homme (art. 10) decreed that ‘no one ought to be harassed on account of his opinions, even religious, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law’. Protestants were, however, subject, along with Catholics, to the de-Christianization campaign of 1793-4. They welcomed the Concordat of 1801, because it gave official state recognition to the Protestant religion and provided it with state financial support (until 1905). Since then, the only case of serious persection of Protestants has been the White Terror in and around Nîmes in late 1815, which saw a wave of violence carried out by Catholics against Protestants, with a number of deaths; the motivation appears to have been partly religious and partly social (Catholic populace against Protestant élite). Protestants have remained largely sympathetic to the republican tradition; they played an important part in the founding of the Third Republic in the 1870s, and a century later were prominent in the Socialist cabinets of the 1980s.

Until the 19th c. the pressure of persecution kept French Calvinism a reasonably united body. The first half of the 19th c., however, saw a split between liberals and partisans of the movement known as Le Réveil. The liberals adopted an increasingly rationalist and moralistic approach, and emphasized the human conscience as a source of moral and religious knowledge. Le Réveil, in the Romantic style, emphasized the intuitions of the heart as the way to know God; it was strongly Christocentric, and placed renewed emphasis on the Bible. By the mid-19th c. followers of Le Réveil constituted 40-45 per cent of the Calvinist faithful (rather less among Lutherans). The national synod of 1872 saw a formal split between ‘evangelicals’ (the inheritors of Le Réveil) and liberals, with the former constituting a two-thirds majority; in 1879 and 1882 they established separate national organizations (there were also some independent churches). The split was not fully resolved until 1938, when a reunified Église Réformée de France was set up (excluding a smallish minority of independents). The 19th c. also saw the establishment in France of a number of minority Protestant denominations, such as the Mennonites, Quakers, and Methodists.

3. Numbers and Distribution

Throughout this period the Protestant heartlands referred to in the first paragraph have remained largely unchanged. Estimates of the total Protestant population are riddled with difficulties, but the Table gives a recent estimate.

	All Protestants	% of population
1562	2, 000, 000	10.0
1598	1, 250, 000	6.0
1670	1, 026, 000	5.0
c.1760	659, 000	3.0
c.1815	751, 000	2.6
1866	802, 339	2.1
c.1900	900, 000	2.2
1950	754, 000	1.8
1974	850-880, 000	1.7
1980	850, 000	1.6

The figures in the Table include the Lutherans (also a small number of minority groups). The Lutheran population is estimated at 70, 000 in 1670, 59, 000 in 1760. There were about 220, 000 Lutherans in Alsace and the Pays de Montbéliard in the early 19th c. After the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 (regained in 1919) only 80, 000 Lutherans remained (out of 280, 000). In 1975 there were about 275, 000.

Although never more than a small minority of the population, French Protestants have made a disproportionate impact on public life. They have been prominent among economic and (after the Revolution) political élites. The strength of Protestant élites should not, however, hide the fact that until very recently a large majority of Protestants were rural and poor. The economic decline of many Protestant rural heartlands has recently changed this picture somewhat. A 1980 survey suggested that Protestants were over-represented among cadres supérieurs et moyens and employés, under-represented among ouvriers and agriculteurs.

[Ralph Gibson]

Bibliography

• J. Garrisson, L'Édit de Nantes et sa révocation: histoire d'une intolérance (1985)
• A. Encrevé, Les Protestants en France de 1800 à nos jours (1985)
• Dictionnaire du monde religieux dans la France contemporaine, vol. 5, Les Protestants, ed. A. Encrevé (1993)

In 16th-cent. England the State successfully sponsored the realignment, over two generations, of popular religious allegiances. In Gaelic Ireland, the Reformation made virtually no headway. The Old English of the Pale [see Irish State], a conservative provincial élite, were willing to accept royal supremacy, but showed little enthusiasm for reformed doctrine and liturgy. Even within the Church of Ireland, many of the first generation of clergy were no more than nominal adherents to the new faith. In the decades that followed the plantations of Munster and Ulster, the Church of Ireland made little attempt to break out of its minority status. The growing numbers of Scots settling in Ulster brought Presbyterianism with them. The restoration of monarchy in 1660 meant a renewal of an episcopal Church of Ireland. Dissent in the three southern provinces, still seen as a major problem in the 1660s, thereafter dwindled into insignificance. Quakers now shed their radical origins to become a prosperous, largely self-contained sect. After 1691 the Government sponsored around twenty small colonies of Huguenots, refugees from France. A second immigrant sect were the Palatines, Protestant refugees from the Rhineland, who arrived in 1709. The shrinkage of dissent in the south was not matched in Ulster, where Presbyterians, already by the mid-17th cent. the largest single denomination, continued to grow in numbers and strength. Yet relations with the established Church remained tense. Much of the party conflict of Whig and Tory in these years centred on the question of whether it was Catholics or dissenters that presented the greater threat to the established Church. The sacramental test, introduced in 1704 and not repealed until 1780, excluded Presbyterians as well as Catholics from offices of trust or profit under the Crown. But the radicalism of the Ulster United Irishmen in the 1790s, and the vitality of Ulster Liberalism up to the Home Rule crisis of 1885-6 [see Irish Parliamentary Party], were based in part on continued Presbyterian antipathy towards what they perceived as an Anglican-dominated establishment. The Church of Ireland of the 18th cent. enjoyed both wealth and legal privilege, while serving only one-eighth or so of the population. Lower-class members were thinly scattered in the rural south, but were more numerous in Ulster, and also in many of the towns of Munster and Leinster; Dublin was, up to the middle of the century, a predominantly Protestant city. Following a tradition established by Archbishop James Ussher in the 1620s, historians emphasized the continuity between the Church of Ireland and the early Christian Church, appropriating to themselves the idealized image of an island of saints and scholars. All denominations of Irish Protestantism were affected, from the end of the 18th cent., by movements of religious revival. John Wesley visited Ireland twenty-one times between 1747 and 1789 and Irish Methodism continued to expand rapidly in the early 19th cent. From Samuel Ferguson and his colleagues in the ‘Orange Young Ireland’ of the 1840s to Yeats and other participants in the literary revival, there were repeated attempts to construct a historical and cultural tradition that would reconcile Protestantism and Irishness. At another level there was a ruthless and pragmatic struggle to maintain privilege. After 1922 this formerly dominant minority found themselves in an Irish State whose official ideology advanced the interests of the Catholic majority. Between 1926 and 1971 the Protestant population of independent Ireland fell by more than 40 percent, partly as a result of the tough line taken by the Catholic Church on the upbringing of children of religiously mixed marriages (Ne Temere). In Northern Ireland, meanwhile, Unionism continued to appeal to an explicitly Protestant identity, reinforced by the threat, real and imagined, of Catholic nationalism.

Bibliography

S. J. Connolly, Religion, Law, and Power: The Making of Protestant Ireland 1600-1760 (1995).

Martin Luther never set foot in North America, but the movement he unleashed in the sixteenth century profoundly shaped society and culture in America, informing everything from social policy and architecture to literature and health care. Protestantism has been, by far, the dominant religious tradition in America, although the denominational diversity of Protestantism has rendered its influence more diffuse.

Protestantism Defined

While Christianity remained fairly unified during its first millennium, cultural differences prompted a split between the Western church, based in Rome, and Eastern Christianity (Constantinople) in 1054. The Roman Catholic Church enjoyed both religious hegemony and considerable political influence in the West throughout the Middle Ages, but by the fifteenth century various reformers began to agitate for change. Some, like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus, wanted the Bible made available in the vernacular, while others called attention to ecclesiastical abuses, including simony (the buying and selling of church offices), nepotism, and general corruption among the clergy and the hierarchy.

Luther himself had been a loyal son of the church and an Augustinian friar. The combination of a visit to Rome, a spiritual crisis, and an itinerant emissary of the Vatican, however, dimmed his affection for the Roman Catholic Church. Luther returned from his sojourn to Rome in 1511 disillusioned with both the splendor of the church and the squalor of the city. A spiritual crisis over the salvation of his soul drove him to an intensive study of the New Testament, especially Paul's epistles to the Romans and to the Galatians, which convinced the restless monk that salvation was available by grace, through faith, not through the agency of priests or the church. Finally, the peregrinations of Johannes Tetzel, raising money for the completion of St. Peter's Church in Rome by selling indulgences (forgiveness of sins), convinced Luther that the Roman Catholic Church was sorely in need of reform.

On 31 October 1517 Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses to the castle church door at Wittenberg, inviting a debate with anyone who wished to engage him on the selling of indulgences. Word of Luther's defiance spread quickly throughout the Europe and led eventually to his excommunication from the Roman Church in 1521. In the meantime, while hiding from papal authorities, Luther translated the New Testament into German, drafted catechisms for teaching the rudiments of theology to the masses, and eventually set about solidifying a church free from papal control.

Luther believed, as do most Protestants today, in the priesthood of all believers; everyone is accountable for himself or herself before God, thereby obviating the necessity of priests as dispensers of grace. Whereas Rome taught the twin bases for authority—scripture and tradition (as interpreted by the church)—Luther insisted on sola scriptura, the Bible alone was the only authority on faith and practice. In worship, Luther emphasized the centrality of the sermon as a means of proclaiming the gospel and educating the laity. By implication, he rearticulated the importance of the Eucharist or Holy Communion; Catholics believe in transubstantiation, that the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus in the saying of the mass, while Luther believed that the real presence of Christ was in the bread and wine, assuring believers of God's grace.

Luther's spirited defense of sola scriptura, the vernacular Bible, and the priesthood of believers virtually ensured that the Protestant Reformation would become diverse and unwieldy. Within Luther's own lifetime various sects arose, each claiming the infallibility of its own interpretation of the Bible, some insisting, for instance, solely on adult baptism or on nonviolence.

Protestantism in America

All of these divergent Protestant groups found their way to North America. Anglicans, members of the Church of England, which had broken with Rome in 1534, settled in Virginia. The Pilgrims, who had separated from the Church of England, founded Plymouth Colony in 1620, the Dutch Reformed organized their first congregation in New Netherland (New York) in 1628, and Puritans began migration to Massachusetts Bay around 1630, followed by the Quakers. Swedish Lutherans settled along the Delaware River. A dissident Puritan, Roger Williams, adopted the belief in adult baptism in 1638, thereby initiating the Baptist tradition in America. The arrival of Scots-Irish in the 1680s brought Presbyterianism to North America, and the immigration of various Germanic groups planted Pietism and the Anabaptist tradition in the middle colonies.

All of these groups functioned with relative autonomy until the mid-eighteenth century when a colonieswide revival, known to historians as the Great Awakening, reconfigured Protestant life in America by eroding ethnic barriers and creating a new vocabulary of faith, known as the "new birth," or evangelicalism. Although evangelical refers to the first four books of the New Testament and also to Luther's "rediscovery of the gospel" in the sixteenth century, the term took on a special valence in America, combining the remnants of New England Puritanism with Scots-Irish Presbyterianism and Continental (especially Dutch) Pietism to form a dynamic, popular movement. Itinerant preachers during the Great Awakening summoned their listeners to obey the call of God and be "born again." Converts as well as those favorably disposed to the revival became known as New Lights, whereas those who looked askance at the revival enthusiasm, included many of the settled clergy, earned the sobriquet Old Lights.

In the decades surrounding the turn of the nineteenth century another revival convulsed three theaters of the new nation: New England, the Cumberland Valley of Kentucky, and western New York, an area newly opened to settlement by the Erie Canal. The Second Great Awakening in the late 1820s and 1830s brought evangelical Protestantism to the frontiers, and in so doing it reshaped American society. In the South, camp meetings combined opportunities for socialization with fiery preaching, and many came away converted—even though some detractors noted that as many souls were conceived as converted. Methodist circuit riders organized congregations in the wake of the camp meetings, while Baptist congregations tended simply to ordain one of their own as their pastor.

The Second Awakening unleashed a flurry of reforming zeal in the new nation. Protestants believed that they could, by dint of their own efforts, bring about the kingdom of God here on Earth. Many believed that such efforts would usher in the millennium, the one thousand years of righteousness predicted in Revelation 20. This conviction animated sundry social reform initiatives during the antebellum period: the temperance movement, prison reform, women's rights, the female seminary movement, and (in the North) the crusade against slavery.

The carnage of the Civil War, however, began to dim hopes of a millennial kingdom, and the arrival of non-Protestant immigrants, most of whom did not share evangelical scruples about alcohol, convinced many Protestants to rethink their understanding of the millennium. Latching onto a mode of biblical interpretation called dispensationalism, imported from Great Britain, conservative Protestants decided that the teeming, squalid tenements no longer resembled the precincts of Zion. Jesus would not return after Protestants had constructed the millennial kingdom; he would return before the millennium, which meant that his return was imminent. This shift in theology effectively absolved conservatives from social engagement. If the world was on the verge of collapse, why bother with social and moral reform? The popularity of dispensational premillennialism signaled a turn on the part of conservative Protestants from the amelioration of society to the redemption of individuals. "I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel," the Chicago evangelist Dwight L. Moody famously declared. "God has given me a lifeboat and said, 'Moody, save all you can.'"

Liberal and Conservative

Adoption of this new formula of biblical interpretation also marked the deepening of a split in Protestantism between conservative and liberal. Whereas the liberal strain had been present since the eighteenth century and had manifested itself in such movements as Unitarianism and Transcendentalism in the mid-nineteenth century, Protestant liberals at the end of the nineteenth century distinguished themselves by their insistence that Christianity redeemed not only sinful individuals but sinful social institutions as well. Marching side by side with other reformers during the Progressive Era, liberal Protestants engaged in what became known as the Social Gospel, working for the abolition of child labor, the eradication of poverty and political machines, and advocating the rights of workers to organize.

Liberal Protestants had also shown greater receptivity to new intellectual currents in the latter half of the nineteenth century, including Darwin's theory of evolution and an approach to the Bible called higher criticism, which cast doubts on the authorship of several books of the Bible. Conservatives, who tended to read the Bible literally, feared that these developments would undermine confidence in the Scriptures.

Fearing a slippery slope toward liberalism, conservatives countered with a series of pamphlets called The Fundamentals, published between 1910 and 1915. Financed by Lyman and Milton Stewart of Union Oil Company, The Fundamentals contained highly conservative affirmations of such traditional doctrines as the virgin birth of Jesus, the authenticity of miracles, the inerrancy of the Bible, and the premillennial return of Christ. Those who subscribed to the doctrines articulated in the pamphlets came to be known as fundamentalists. Liberals, also known as modernists, joined the battle in the 1920s in what became known as the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, a fight over control of many Protestant denominations.

Modernists, by and large, prevailed, and many conservatives, fearing contamination by association with what they regarded as heresy, separated and formed their own churches, denominations, Bible institutes, seminaries, publishing houses, and mission societies. Taken together, this vast network of institutions, largely invisible to the larger society, formed the evangelical subculture in America, and it served as the foundation for their reemergence later in the twentieth century.

Protestant liberalism became more or less synonymous with "mainline" Protestantism, the movement that dominated American religious life during the middle decades of the twentieth century. During a gathering in Cleveland in November 1949 mainline Protestants formed the National Council of Churches, an organization intended to underscore Protestant unity and avoid the duplication of efforts. Less than a decade later, on 12 October 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower laid the cornerstone for the monolithic Interchurch Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, thereby symbolizing the fusion of mainline Protestantism with white, middle-class values.

Challenges to Mainline Protestant Hegemony

While mainline Protestants celebrated their unity and their cultural ascendance, other forces conspired to diminish their influence. A young, charismatic preacher named Billy Graham, who hailed from North Carolina, caught the eye of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who instructed his papers to "puff Graham." The evangelist's anticommunist rhetoric fit the temper of the McCarthy-era 1950s. Soon he was preaching to huge audiences throughout North America and the world, inviting them simply to "make a decision for Christ," to accept Jesus into their hearts and become "born again," a term taken from John 3, when Nicodemus visits Jesus by night and asks how to enter the kingdom of heaven. Graham consciously tempered some of the incendiary rhetoric of the fundamentalists; he preferred the moniker evangelical, and he sought to cooperate with all Protestants, conservative and liberal. Graham's knack for self-promotion and his adroit use of emerging media technologies earned him a large public following as well as recognition from major political figures. His popularity, moreover, prefigured the return of evangelicals to the political arena in the 1970s.

In Montgomery, Alabama, another expression of Protestantism rose to public consciousness in December 1955 after a diminutive seamstress, Rosa Parks, refused to surrender her seat to a white man and move to the "colored" section of the bus. African American preachers in the town quickly organized a boycott to protest the entrenched practice of segregation in the South, and they chose the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr., as their leader and spokesman. Influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, King cloaked the teachings of nonviolence and social justice in the cadences of the King James Version of the Bible to shame a nation into living up to its own ideals. In so doing, King drew upon the long history of black Protestant activism; since the days of slavery the ministry was the only real avenue for the expression of leadership within the African American community, so the pastor served not only as the spiritual shepherd to his flock but also as guardian of their temporal interests.

The movement for civil rights stirred the nation's conscience, although the opposition of some Protestants occasionally turned violent, as when a bomb ripped through the basement of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on 15 September 1963, killing four little girls, or when three civil-rights workers were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June of 1964. Such events stiffened the resolve of King and a growing number of religious leaders. When King found himself incarcerated in Birmingham for civil disobedience in 1963, he responded to the criticism that a group of Protestant ministers had leveled against him for his leadership of the civil rights movement. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" remains a masterpiece of religious and political rhetoric, arguing that the biblical mandates for justice impelled him to work for desegregation and civil rights.

The Evangelical Resurgence

King's assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on 4 April 1968 deprived American Protestantism of one of its luminaries. By that time the United States was mired in the unpopular Vietnam War (which King had opposed shortly before his death), and the younger generation was rapidly becoming disillusioned with what Eisenhower had dubbed the "military-industrial complex" and with what the counterculture called "the establishment," including religious institutions. Attendance, membership, and giving in mainline Protestant denominations began a steady decline in the mid-1960s, a drop that would show no signs of leveling off until the end of the century.

At the same time, changes in the ways the Federal Communications Commission apportioned airtime for religious programming allowed evangelical preachers to purchase access to the airwaves. Enterprising evangelists, who became known as televangelists, used this opening to catapult them from obscurity to national prominence and, in the process, they pulled in millions of dollars in contributions. The televangelists' simple message and their uncompromising morality appealed to a nation still reeling from the counterculture, the ignominy of Vietnam, and Richard Nixon's endless prevarications.

In this context a Southern Baptist Sunday-school teacher, Jimmy Carter, emerged as a credible candidate for president. The former governor of Georgia declared that he was a "born again" Christian and that he would never knowingly lie to the American people. He captured the Democratic nomination and went on to win the 1976 election with the help of many newly enfranchised evangelicals. Within four years, however, many of these same evangelicals turned against him, led by the televangelists who became leaders of a loose coalition of politically conservative evangelicals known as the Religious Right. Jerry Falwell, pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, formed Moral Majority in 1979, and he, together with other televangelists, anointed Ronald Reagan as their candidate in 1980. Throughout the 1980s the Religious Right enjoyed access to the corridors of power in Washington, and the success of the Religious Right emboldened another televangelist, Pat Robertson, to mount his own (unsuccessful) campaign for the presidency in 1988.

Protestantism in a New Millennium

At the close of the twentieth century American Protestants remained profoundly divided between liberal and conservative, mainline and evangelical. Liberal Protestants, although declining in numbers, continued their pursuit of ecumenism, elevating the standard of inclusivity to the status of orthodoxy. The leadership of mainline Protestant denominations supported racial desegregation, ordained women to the ministry, and endorsed the civil rights of gays and lesbians. The prospect of ordaining homosexuals or blessing same-sex unions, however, was more fraught and divisive, although denominational leaders pushed vigorously for such reforms.

Evangelical Protestants, on the other hand, generally hewed to more conservative stances on doctrine, social issues, and domestic arrangements. While mainline Protestants were debating gay ordination and same-sex unions, for example, evangelicals rallied behind an expression of muscular Christianity called Promise Keepers, which enjoined men to be good and faithful husbands, fathers, and churchgoers. Promise Keepers, founded in the early 1990s by Bill McCartney, a successful football coach at the University of Colorado, also demanded that men take control of their households. Feminists were aghast, but the movement proved enormously popular, drawing several million men to stadium gatherings across the country and to a massive "Standing in the Gap" rally on the Mall in Washington, D.C. As with all revivals in American history, the movement faltered soon thereafter, but its popularity underscored the continuing appeal of conservative values.

Protestantism and American Life

The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 illustrated the importance of Protestantism in American life. Almost immediately, convoys of relief workers arrived at the scene of both the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Victims were rushed to hospitals, many of which had been founded by Protestant denominations decades earlier. Protestant congregations across the country collected money for the victims and their families, organized food and blood drives, and gathered for prayer. But the tragedy also demonstrated that Protestantism no longer enjoyed hegemonic status in American religious life. Members of other religious groups—Jews, Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, Mormons, Buddhists, and many others, including those who professed no religious convictions whatsoever—were amply represented among both the victims and the rescuers.

Protestantism, nevertheless, has cast a long shadow over American history and culture. A poll conducted in 2001 found that 52 percent of Americans identified themselves as Protestants. Although the internal diversity of the movement has attenuated somewhat its influence, it remains the dominant religious tradition in the United States.

Bibliography

Balmer, Randall. Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America. 3d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Balmer, Randall, and Lauren F. Winner. Protestantism in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989.

Marty, Martin E. Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America. New York: Dial Press, 1970.

Warner, R. Stephen. New Wine in Old Wineskins: Evangelicals and Liberals in a Small-Town Church. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Wuthnow, Robert. The Restructuring of American Religion. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Protestantism originally derived from the sixteenth-century Reformation movement begun in western Europe by Martin Luther and John Calvin.

The Reformation, the movement that gave rise to Protestantism, was particular to western Christendom. Russia, as a part of eastern Orthodox Christendom, never experienced an analogous development. Consequently Protestantism in Russia was an imported phenomenon rather than an indigenous product.

Two forms of Protestantism in Russia can be identified. The older form was introduced to Russia by European non-Russian ethnic groups. A later form emerged in the nineteenth century when ethnically Slavic people embraced teachings of European Protestants. Converts to the older form comprised people who moved at various times from Europe to Russia or who were conquered by Russian western expansion. Converts to the later form derived from missionary activity among Russians in the aftermath of the Alexandrine reforms of the mid-nineteenth century that produced groups who were variously called Shtundists, Baptists, Evangelical Christians, Adventists, and, in the twentieth century, Pentecostals.

Protestantism entered Muscovy during the reign of Ivan IV. Initially viewing Protestants favorably, the tsar permitted building two Protestant churches, one Lutheran and one Calvinist, in Moscow. But he came to view Protestantism as heretical and in 1579 ordered both churches destroyed. Protestantism was relegated to an enclave outside the city that came to be known as the "German suburb."

Russia's Protestant population grew in the eighteenth century when Russia conquered Estonia and Latvia, where many Lutherans lived, and when German colonists of Lutheran and Mennonite persuasions settled in south Russia at the invitation of Catherine II. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Protestant notions received some high-level support from Emperor Alexander I, who was fascinated with German pietism.

Only in the aftermath of the abolition of serfdom did Protestantism win substantial adherents within the Slavic population of Russia. This was the result of preaching activity - in St. Petersburg by the English Lord Radstock and in the Caucasus by Baltic Baptists - and of the influence of German colonists in the Ukraine. Russian Protestantism was institutionalized in the Russian Baptist Union in 1884. The official response to this development was expressed in harsh persecution predicated on Chief Procurator Konstantin Pobedonostev's declaration, "there are not, and there cannot be, any Russian Baptists."

Protestants benefited from the tsarist declaration of religious tolerance of 1905 and even more from the Bolshevik declaration of separation of church and state of 1917. By 1929 there were up to one million Protestants in the Soviet Union, less than 1 percent of the population.

Communist antireligious policy limited legal protestant activity between 1929 and 1989 to one formally recognized structure, the All-Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB), and scattered autonomous congregations of such denominations as Lutherans and Methodists, primarily in the Baltic republics, and German Baptists in Siberia. AUCECB claimed to comprise five thousand protestant congregations.

After 1991, Protestants expanded their activity within Russian society. At the end of 2000 the Russian Ministry of Justice reported that there were about 3,800 officially registered Protestant congregations in Russia, out of more than 20,000 religious organizations in the Russian Federation. These included 1,500 congregations of Baptists, 1,300 Pentecostals, 560 Adventists, and 200 Lutherans. Sociological surveys estimated that Protestants, at approximately one million, constituted about twothirds of one percent of the total population of the Russian Federation.

Bibliography

Billington, James. (1966). Icon and the Axe. New York: Random House.

Heard, Albert F. (1887). Russian Church and Russian Dissent. New York: Harper Brothers.

Heier, Edmund. (1970). Religious Schism in the Russian Aristocracy, 1860 - 1900: Radstockism and Pashkovism. The Hague, Netherlands: Nijhoff.

Sawatsky, Walter. (1981). Soviet Evangelicals since World War II. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press.

—PAUL D. STEEVES

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