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Protestantism

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Radical Protestants have always been concerned for the inwardly authentic quality of personal experience and commitment. ... This critical perspective on hypocrisy and superficiality presupposes a more authentic alternative, which is very difficult to define. Once it is clearly defined, that new, more authentic form becomes inauthentic in its turn. ~ John Howard Yoder

Protestantism is a form of Christian faith and practice which originated with the Protestant Reformation.

Quotes

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  • 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.
  • 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."
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Rene Guenon, Crisis of the Modern World (London: Luzac and Co., 1975), pp. 58-59
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Because of the central importance in Luther’s thought of individual reading of the Bible, Protestantism encouraged literacy, not to mention printing, and these two things unquestionably encouraged economic development (the accumulation of ‘human capital’) as well as scientific study. This proposition holds good not only in Prussia but also all over the world. Wherever Protestant missionaries went, they promoted literacy, with measurable long-term benefits to the societies they sought to educate; the same cannot be said of Catholic missionaries prior to Vatican II.
  • Protestantism made the West not only work, but also save and read. The Industrial Revolution was indeed a product of technological innovation and consumption. But it also required an increase in the intensity and duration of work, combined with the accumulation of capital through saving and investment. Above all, it depended on the accumulation of human capital. The literacy that Protestantism promoted was vital to all of this. On reflection, we would do better to talk about the Protestant word ethic.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Heinrich Heine, “The Romantic School,” The Romantic School and Other Essays, J. Hermand, ed. (1985), P. 24
  • 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.
    • Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1982), pp. 33-34
  • Protestantism is better than Catholicism, because there is less of it.
    • Robert G. Ingersoll, The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll: Interviews (New York : The Dresden pub. co., C. P. Farrell, 1902), pg. 542
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Charles F. Keyes, “Being Protestant Christians in Southeast Asian Worlds”], Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Sep., 1996), pp. 280-292
  • 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.
    • Maguire, Daniel C. (3 April 2003). Sacred rights: the case for contraception and abortion in world religions. Oxford University Press. p. 84. ISBN 978-0-19-516001-7. Retrieved 3 January 2012.
  • 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.
  • Because their acts of racism often have been so violent and blatant, discussions of racism over the years have centered on conservatives and hardcore racists. But as these few paragraphs have attempted to show, although they have not been publicly associated with acts of physical violence acts, Christian liberals are little different than their conservative counterparts when it comes to embracing the twisted Protestant theological ideas first planted by the Puritans.
    The one glaring difference between the two groups is that liberals throughout American history have learned to be more sophisticated with their antiblackess. From the Puritan era to the present, their sophistication often has been in the form of an eerie silence regarding the matter of race and racism. For example, the writings of heralded American theologians stretching from Jonathan Edwards through H. Richard Niebuhr, and Paul Tilich are conspicuously empty of any critical analysis of the interplay between Christian ideas of racism. While all of these “giants” wrote volumes analyzing the finer points of theology and showing how theology relates to human enterprises, none raised a question about how Protestants repeatedly have corrupted theology in order to justify antiblackness as God-ordained.
    As we seek to not only understand but also to find solutions to the persistent problem of racism, the silence of these revered liberal Protestant thinkers is most troubling. Troubling because their writings – void of any critique of Protestantism’s racist history – are the very ones that seminaries and graduate schools of religion continue to lift up as standard reasoning for all who would learn and embrace the Protestant faith. Free of any critique of Protestant history in shaping racist attitudes, these writings give the false illusion that this faith is colorblind. But as these pages have attempted to demonstrate, skin color has always been one of the key embraces of many who embrace this tradition. Indeed, as Kyle Haselden said, Protestanism in the hands of bigoted Christians has long been the “other of racial patterns, the purveyor of arrant sedatives, and the teacher of moral moralities” as it relates to black people (Haselden, 1964:14).
  • Rarely does a historian venture solutions. But I offer one here. In an era when some are asking again what can we do to bring an end to race prejudice, we must once more insist that Protestant churches are one, if not the, starting point. The churches hold this status because they still have not confessed and repented of their sins in making racism a cornerstone of this society. If there is any hope of a day when antiblackness will no longer be a hallmark of the society, Christians must rise up and be the first to confess the mighty role Protestantism has played in shaping that bigotry. Such a confession has been difficult for a variety of reasons. But the neglect of scholars to tell the story of how Protetantism and its theologians, from the Puritan era to the present, often have been leaders in planting, resowing, and resowing again and again the evil seeds of race hate into the very soul of America stands large.
  • Protestantism itself, in its early phases, was plainly a movement toward mysticism: its purpose, at least in theory, was to remove the priestly veil separating man from the revealed Word of God. But that veil was restored almost instantly, and by the year 1522, five years after Wittenberg, Luther was damning the Anabaptists with all the ferocious certainty of a medieval Pope, and his followers were docily accepting his teaching.
  • Although they left Protestants back in Europe, Jesuits of that second wave of evangelization never encountered their denominational competitors on the African soil, save for the brief but extremely interesting experience of Guy Tachard (1651–1712) and his companions in the midst of Dutch Calvinist colonists at the Cape in today’s South Africa. Even if the Reformation in Europe influenced their missionary method and agenda,7 the Jesuits in Africa could go about their business as if Protestantism never existed. In Ethiopia, they campaigned to bring Orthodox Christianity into union with Rome;8 in eastern Africa, they lamented the ubiquity of Muslim obstruction;9 and in the western parts of south central Africa, they talked about indigenous religious practices and wondered whether or not they could be accommodated into their version of Christianity.10 At that time, Protestantism may have been imagined as a formidable foe, but, for Jesuits in Africa, it was one that was far away.
    Then still in their first centuries of existence, Protestants busied themselves building foundations in northern Europe while Catholics explored new grounds in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
  • Protestant theologians and political theorists are profoundly suspicious of the natural law approach, an attitude which Catholics find difficult to comprehend, since they are largely ignorant of the Reformation insights and ethical postulates which it reflects. To understand Protestant ethical theory, the Catholic must first clear from his mind the whole apparatus of Aristotelian and Thomist categories with which he has been familiar from the early days of his education and within which all his thinking has been carried out. Only through such an act of intellectual abnegation can he come to see that he Protestant rejection of natural law is not mere perversity, but like the catholic acceptance, an ineluctable consequence of certain premises of thought. The Catholic starts with the conception of the Good but damaged natural man: the Protestant with an idea of man utterly corrupted by the Fall. For the Catholic the State would have been necessary for man had he remained a perfect being; for the Protestant it is the direct result of original sin. For Luther the world was an inn, and the devil its landlord. The employment of power to further social and religious ends seems reasonable to Catholics, but Protestants, at least in theory, are distrustful of all worldly power, as contaminated by sin.
  • In Catholic doctrine, divine revelation did not end with the scriptures, but continued from age to age through the medium of the Church... Protestants, on the contrary, rejected the Church as a vehicle of revelation; truth was to be sought only in the Bible, which each man could interpret for himself. ...In practice, the State claimed the right that had formerly belonged to the Church, but this was a usurpation. In Protestant theory, there should be no earthly intermediary between the soul and God.
  • Previous studies have examined the causal link between Protestantism and democratization, primarily in shaping a nation-state's cultural ethos and its tendency to affect the outcome of democratic politics. Historically, Protestantism has also been linked to generating a political culture that promotes individualism, tolerance, the pluralism of ideas, and civic associationalism. Recent empirical evidence also shows how Protestant countries are more likely to be democratic compared to largely Islamic and Catholic states. Drawing from established cultural theories, the author empirically tests the argument whether or not transitional states with larger Protestant populations are more likely to strengthen their democracies. Findings indicate that transitional states that have higher Protestant populations are more likely to have higher levels of voice and accountability, political stability, citizenship empowerment, and civil society pluralism. The author contends that transitional states with higher Protestant populations are more likely to consolidate their democracies.
  • For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not justification, in the Protestant sense. Rather is this latter ethical. It is from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions — namely, that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in Catholicism.
  • But further, and especially important: it may be, as has been claimed, that the greater participation of Protestants in the positions of ownership and management in modern economic life may today be understood, in part at least, simply as a result of the greater material wealth they have inherited. But there are certain other phenomena which cannot be explained in the same way. Thus, to mention only a few facts: there is a great difference discoverable in Baden, in Bavaria, in Hungary, in the type of higher education which Catholic parents, as opposed to Protestant, give their children. That the percentage of Catholics among the students and graduates of higher educational institutions in general lags behind their proportion of the total population, may, to be sure, be largely explicable in terms of inherited differences of wealth. But among the Catholic graduates themselves the percentage of those graduating from the institutions preparing, in particular, for technical studies and industrial and commercial occupations, but in general from those preparing for middle-class business life, lags still farther behind the percentage of Protestants. On the other hand, Catholics prefer the sort of training which the humanistic Gymnasium affords. That is a circumstance to which the above explanation does not apply, but which, on the contrary, is one reason why so few Catholics are engaged in capitalistic enterprise.
  • The smaller participation of Catholics in the modern business life of Germany is all the more striking because it runs counter to a tendency which has been observed at all times including the present. National or religious minorities which are in a position of subordination to a group of rulers are likely, through their voluntary or involuntary exclusion from positions of political influence, to be driven with peculiar force into economic activity. Their ablest members seek to satisfy the desire for recognition of their abilities in this field, since there is no opportunity in the service of the State. This has undoubtedly been true of the Poles in Russia and Eastern Prussia, who have without question been undergoing a more rapid economic advance than in Galicia, where they have been in the ascendant. It has in earlier times been true of the Huguenots in France under Louis XIV, the Nonconformists and Quakers in England, and, last but not least, the Jew for two thousand years. But the Catholics in Germany have shown no striking evidence of such a result of their position. In the past they have, unlike the Protestants, undergone no particularly prominent economic development in the times when they were persecuted or only tolerated, either in Holland or in England. On the other hand, it is a fact that the Protestants (especially certain branches of the movement to be fully discussed later) both as ruling classes and as ruled, both as majority and as minority, have shown a special tendency to develop economic rationalism which cannot be observed to the same extent among Catholics either in the one situation or in the other. Thus the principal explanation of this difference must be sought in the permanent intrinsic character of their religious beliefs, and not only in their temporary external historico-political situations. It will be our task to investigate these religions with a view to finding out what peculiarities they have or have had which might have resulted in the behavior we have described. On superficial analysis, and on the basis of certain current impressions, one might be tempted to express the difference by saying that the greater other-worldliness of Catholicism, the ascetic character of its highest ideals, must have brought up its adherents to a greater indifference toward the good things of this world. Such an explanation fits the popular tendency in the judgment of both religions. On the Protestant side it is used as a basis of criticism of those (real or imagined) ascetic ideals of the Catholic way of life, while the Catholics answer with the accusation that materialism results from the secularization of all ideals through Protestantism. One recent writer has attempted to formulate the difference of their attitudes toward economic life in the following manner: “The Catholic is quieter, having less of the acquisitive impulse; he prefers a life of the greatest possible security, even with a smaller income, to a life of risk and excitement, even though it may bring the chance of gaining honor and riches. The proverb says jokingly, ‘either eat well or sleep well’. In the present case the Protestant prefers to eat well, the Catholic to sleep undisturbed.”
  • In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life, is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalistic influence. At the same time it expresses a type of feeling which is closely connected with certain religious ideas. If we thus ask, why should “money be made out of men”, Benjamin Franklin himself, although he was a colourless deist, answers in his autobiography with a quotation from the Bible, which his strict Calvinistic father drummed into him again and again in his youth: “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings” (Prov. xxii. 29). The earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling; and this virtue and proficiency are, as it is now not difficult to see, the real Alpha and Omega of Franklin’s ethic.
    • Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, T. Parsons, trans. (Dover: 2003), p. 53
  • Any of several church denominations denying the universal authority of the Pope and affirming the Reformation principles of justification by faith in Jesus alone, the priesthood of all believers, and the primacy of the Bible as the only source of revealed truth" and, more broadly, to mean Christianity outside "of an Orthodox or Catholic church"
    • Merriam Webster.com. "Protestantism" on merriam-webster.com dictionary
  • Radical Protestants have always been concerned for the inwardly authentic quality of personal experience and commitment. From this perspective one judges the run-of-the-mill piety which is satisfied with conformity to easily attained patterns of expression. This critical perspective on hypocrisy and superficiality presupposes a more authentic alternative, which is very difficult to define. Once it is clearly defined, that new, more authentic form becomes inauthentic in its turn; yet that kind of preoccupation always belongs as part of the radical Protestant vision. The "civil religion" is judged for being feasible; its demands are too attainable.

See also

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