Protestants

“Let us bear therefore with a sigh what we cannot correct” — Calvin

Whether they were dealing with Catholics, radicals, or witches, Protestants could kill in the name of religion with a zeal that was second to none. They could also disagree with one another vigorously about doing so and could shift their ground with remarkable speed and flexibility. That combination of implacable fervour, conscientious stubbornness, and willingness suddenly to abandon and to repent of their old views is one of Protestants' most distinctive hallmarks.

The irony of German and British Protestant propaganda in the First World War is that both sides were uncomfortably accurate. The German account of the British, the self-righteous, money-grubbing imperialists who are sticklers for rules that somehow never apply to themselves, was fair. So was the British account of a Germany that abandoned law, believed force to be self-justifying and prized national and even racial superiority over justice and mercy. Britain's stance was more traditionally Christian and more profoundly hypocritical.

The revivalist preacher Billy Sunday, who moved seamlessly in 1917 from denouncing progressivism's evils to (literally) pulpit flag-waving, claimed that "if you turn hell upside down, you will find 'Made in Germany stamped on the bottom". If conservative Protestants would not fight for heaven, they would fight against hell.

The best that can be said of his 1543 tract, On the Jews and Their Lies, is that it does not openly call for genocide. Instead, he demanded that Jewish synagogues, books, schools, and homes be destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, and Jews' property confiscated. He recommended that Jews have no legal rights and be either used as forced labour or banished. While he did not actually advocate murder, he did argue that Christians have no moral obligations towards Jews and that there is no sin in killing them. The Nazis, for whom Luther was a German national hero, made sure this work was copiously reprinted.

Protestantism's immense theological malleability made it uniquely able to play this role. Yet Protestantism's restlessness and its incorrigible tendency to revisit and question its own orthodoxies also meant that support for apartheid was not graven in stone. Protestants can dig deep holes for themselves, but they can also dig themselves out.

One unregistered church leader, asked to estimate the numbers in his congregation, replied that they were like the stars in the sky - in the sense that "when the weather is good, you can see more; when it is a cloudy... day, they all disappear".

A similar transition is well under way on the one sexual issue that we might imagine would be non-negotiable for Christians. The New Testament does not record Jesus having much to say about sexual ethics, but he adamantly opposed divorce, and especially remarriage after divorce. Protestants have questioned that standard from the beginning, often allowing for divorce in cases of domestic violence or even simple adultery. In many contemporary societies, even this watered-down version of the traditional standard has become almost impossible to apply. Most modern Protestants find themselves holding a middle position: disapproving of or lamenting divorce in the abstract while acknowledging it as a social fact and accepting the reality of remarriage. Sometimes this is done joyfully, sometimes grudgingly, but rarely with demands that couples separate or that children be treated as illegitimate. For good or ill, much of the world now lives in an age of serial monogamy. Protestantism has had to get used to the fact. Having swallowed that camel, it will not strain at a few further gnats, although it may take a little time to digest them. One longstanding issue that has not gone away is polygamy. Christians have since ancient times insisted on exclusive monogamy as the only legitimate form of marriage and have developed theological and ethical arguments for this, but the biblical basis for it is pretty shaky. A couple of New Testament verses require Christian ministers to be monogamous, and the rest of the New Testament seems to assume that monogamy is normal, but the Old Testament is full of divinely approved polygamists. As we have seen, the question has periodically resurfaced through Protestantism's history, even if we discount the example of Mormonism. Luther burned his fingers on the issue. John Milton wrote a treatise defending polygamy but thought better of publishing it. Various radical and utopian groups have practised it. The main reason it has been rare among Protestants is simply that it has been rare in most of their host societies. In parts of Africa and Asia, however, polygamy is a wellestablished social reality, and the rise of Protestantism in these regions has made the question unavoidable