Historically,
Protestant Christianity was decisive in forming western civilization as we know
it, especially in the United States. You can’t imagine modern individualism,
democracy, or freedoms without it – and it has given us some other legacies
which we might not like so much. But it’s not just a subject of historic
interest. There are a billion Protestants in the world today, and in Africa,
China, Latin America and other places the numbers are rising fast.
Protestantism is going to be one of the key forces shaping the world this
century, and we’d better understand it.
The first Protestants didn’t set out to create the world we live
in now, but some key features of that world come directly from them. The ideal of
free inquiry and free speech; the assumption that we’ve got a right to
challenge our rulers, and that in spiritual terms we’re all equal; and the
notion of limited government, that there are freedoms of conscience over which
no political authority has any jurisdiction. If you want, you can push that to
say that Protestants created modern democratic capitalism, though they didn’t
do it alone. More to the point, if you look at all the really decisive
ideological conflicts of the modern age – for and against religious toleration,
slavery, colonialism, nationalism, fascism, Communism, women’s rights, civil
rights – in all of those you’ll find Protestants at the heart of the argument:
and on both sides. Protestants love to argue. The world we live in
is the world their arguments made.
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the complete article at http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165635
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