Protestantism is usually regarded as one of the three major branches of Christianity; the other two are Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy (usually called Orthodox Catholicism in American English, which avoids potential confusion with the common noun orthodoxy which means conformity with an established doctrine.)1.
The history of the Christian church includes numerous episodes of in which dissidents have attempted to reform the church and return it to a purer state [see a "family tree" of Christianity here]. The early 13th-century "Cathars" in southern France are an example: they adopted theological positions and doctrines that differed in various ways from those of the established Church, in the belief that theirs were more nearly in accord with the teachings of the early Church. The established Church and the feudal lords that supported it labelled Catharism as heresy, and succeeded in eradicating it, by killing the people that propounded the Cathar beliefs.
Protestantism is usually held to have begun in a similar way, with a protest against some of the practices of the Church by a Roman Catholic monk, Martin Luther 2. Luther believed, among other things, that the sale of indulgences was a corruption of the original ideals of the Church, and called upon ecclesiastical authorities in 1517 to debate the issue. As things transpired, Luther turned out, unintentionally, to be the catalyst not only of debate within the Church, but also of a major schism or rather a series of schisms, which, for a variety of reasons, the established Church as unable to contain as it had done with the Cathars. [A longish book review about the Reformation, including Luther and Calvin, can be read here.]
As a consequence, large numbers of new Christian groups began to appear, which shared one significant doctrinal characteristic: they did not recognize the authority of the Roman Catholic Pope.
In retrospect, it seems clear that the period of the beginning of the sixteenth century was ripe for theological debate: a number of groups appeared, typically followers of a charismatic theologian; some famous examples include John Calvin in Geneva (1536) and John Knox in Scotland (1545). Surprisingly quickly, groups in various places and with various religious beliefs, sprang up. As they did not accept the Pope or any similar authority, no mechanism existed to recognize one or another of them as legitimate, nor to brand any as heretical. Thus numerous churches developed, each as legitimate as the others; when disagreements over theological questions arose within a group, it was (and still is) common for the group to split into two new, competing groups. Protestantism thus contains within itself the potential for a nearly infinite number of groups, each with its own doctrinal identity, based on specific readings of sacred texts, including both the Old and especially the New Testaments.
Other, less theological, reasons also motivated breaks with the Pope; for example, Henry VIII of England, unable for years to produce a male heir, divorced one wife after having married another, and was excommunicated. Parliament adopted various laws to insulate the ecclesiastical hierarchy in England from the Pope's authority; the end result was a Church of England, with an ecclesiastical organization similar to that of the Roman Catholic Church, but with the monarch as head of the church as well as of state.
Hand-in-hand with defiance of the Pope often came defiance of civil authorities, who were quick to react. For example, dissent within the Church of England was often considered to be a threat not only to religious regulations, but also to civil order, and was prosecuted by civil authorities. One seventeenth century example is the "Pilgrim Fathers" who left England to escape from religious persecution. They went first to Holland, but eventually negotiated an arrangement with English authorities, under which the Pilgrims would establish a new English colony in the New World, where they would benefit from a certain amount of protection from the English imperial power, but would be allowed to practice their religion without interference by the government. The Pilgrims, in a ship called the Mayflower, landed near what is now Boston in November of 1620, and established a colony
There can be little doubt that Protestantism is one of the major forces in US social, economic and political history, from the settlement established by the Mayflower colonists in 1620 until developments in Pennsylvania and Kansas in 2005 (see more about the debate over "intelligent design" here).
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1 There are also other Christian groups, but they will not be dealt with here. [back to text].
