These Protestant democratic ideas were among the driving ideological forces of the revolts of the French HUGUENOTS, Dutch pietists (see PIETISM), and Scottish Presbyterians (see PRESBYTERIANISM) against their monarchical oppressors in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They inspired Anglo-Puritans in the English civil wars of 1640–1688 that truncated royal prerogatives, augmented parliamentary power and popular representation, and ultimately yielded the famous 1689 BILL OF RIGHTS and Toleration Act and their many eighteenth-century constitutional progeny. These ideas remained a perennial source of inspiration and instruction for various neo-Lutheran and neoCalvinist political movements in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They also had a modest place, alongside more dominant Catholic views, in the establishment of the Christian Democracy Party at the end of the nineteenth century.
These Protestant democratic ideas also helped to inspire the creation of several democratic church polities in Europe and America. Anabaptist churches (see ANABAPTISM), notably the AMISH and MENNONITES, separated themselves from secular society into small democratic communities, which featured popular election of church officers, public participation in church governance, and intensely egalitarian organizations and activities. Calvinist churches were often created as democratic polities. Church congregations were formed by ecclesiastical constitutions. Church power was separated among pastors, elders, and deacons, each of whom was elected to a limited term of office and held a measure of authority over the others. CHURCH LAW was codified and administered through a variety of public or representative bodies. Church members convened periodic popular meetings to assess the performance of church officers and to deliberate changes in doctrine, liturgy, or government.
Puritan writers in New England drew ready political lessons from this democratic understanding of the church, and these lessons were reflected in several of the new American state constitutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Methodists (see METHODISM), BAPTISTS, and various other smaller religious groups born of the First and Second Great Awakening (see AWAKENINGS) in America eventually made de-mocratization a centerpiece of their political theologies and ecclesiologies—a feature that such nineteenth-century European observers as ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Lord Acton, and ABRAHAM KUYPER both celebrated and advocated among their coreligionists in Europe.
In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, many Anglicans (see ANGLICANISM), Baptists, Congregationalists (see CONGREGATIONALISM), Lutherans, Methodists, and other Protestants joined with Catholics, Jews (see JUDAISM), and ENLIGHTENMENT exponents to establish the core constitutional forms of federalism and separation of powers and to secure the constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion, speech, assembly, and press, due process, and equal protection under the law. Many of these same Protestants later also worked to abolish SLAVERY (see also SLAVERY, ABOLITION OF), to establish public schools, to reform laws of MARRIAGE and FAMILY life, to institute prohibition, TEMPERANCE and other moral reforms, and to broaden the political franchise—although these reform movements permanently splintered Presbyterian, Lutheran, Baptist, and other denominations among more conservative and progressive factions. Some of these Protestant democratic reform efforts found new life in the SOCIAL GOSPEL movement led by WALTER RAUSCHENBUSCH and his allies on both sides of the Atlantic in the early twentieth century. Protestant democratic theory found later theological champions in such luminaries as H. RICHARD and REINHOLD NIEBUHR in America and KARL BARTH and DIETRICH BONHOEFFER in Europe, and enjoyed intense rejuvenation and reformation in the immediate aftermaths of both World War I and World War II.
Today, most mainline Protestant churches in Europe have only a negligible effect on mainstream democratic politics, although Lutheran churches continue to have moral influence on public policy in GERMANY and Scandinavia, and several Anglican and Evangelical intellectuals have come to public and political prominence in ENGLAND and SCOTLAND. American Protestant influence on and in democracy is also somewhat diffuse and diluted, although pockets of intense intellectual and institutional strength remain in black churches, in various Reformed and Evangelical academic, human rights, and public policy groups, and in such political movements as the Christian Coalition.
Although the political influence of mainline Protestantism waned in much of North America and Western Europe in the later twentieth century, it waxed in Latin America, AFRICA, and Eastern Europe as well as in SOUTH KOREA, JAPAN, and scattered pockets of the Indian subcontinent. Particularly in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, Protestant mission churches had for decades served as zones of liberty during the harsh reigns of fascist, socialist, or colonial authorities. These churches were organized democratically like their American and European counterparts. They served as centers of poor relief, education, health care, and social welfare in the community. They catalyzed the formation of voluntary associations, and provided a sanctuary for political dissidents and a sanction for movements of democratic reform and renewal. They also leveled indigenous social hierarchies with their insistence on vernacularizing the BI-BLE, on educating all persons for a vocation, and on relativizing all political authority to the authority of God. Protestant churches thereby provided models of democracy and bulwarks against autocracy in these long-trammeled societies, and have emerged as key leaders of the democratic movements now breaking out in these regions.
