The Protestant Reformation in Germany and England
Copyright © Henry J. Sage 2010

In order to fully understand American history one must have a grasp of the role that religion has played in the development of this nation.  In fact, the history of religion in the Western world going back hundreds of years before the discovery of America has affected this nation to the present time. The origins of much of our religious heritage can be traced to the major upheaval in western religion that began in the 16th century with the Reformation.

In the early 1500s, Martin Luther, a German priest, became scandalized by the degree of corruption he observed in the Catholic Church.  Today we refer to Luther’s church as the Roman Catholic Church, but at that time it was the only church that existed in the Western world, although Catholicism varied in certain ways from country to country.  For all kinds of reasons stemming from the church having wielded extraordinary social and political pressure over the Western world for more than a thousand years, the corruption in the church touched the lives of many people. Luther was an extremely pious and devout priest, so much so that even on the day of his ordination, he was not confident that he was holy enough to be able to conduct his first mass.  It is understandable that a man with serious concerns about his own holiness would be shocked to discover corruption in an institution he revered.

Luther began to collect his complaints and finally delivered them in the form of ninety-five theses that he nailed on the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg, Germany.  To say that his complaints were timely doesn’t quite capture the impact; within one generation of Martin Luther’s protest, Protestantism, consisting of a number of Christian sects that had rebelled against the leadership of the Roman authorities, had spread over much of northern Europe.  As frequently happens in cases of such revolution, after the initial revolution was complete, it fragmented further into various segments.  Thus the Protestant Reformation led to the creation of a variety of churches:  Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Calvinist, and many other varieties.  (More than one hundred different Protestant denominations exist in America today.) The political implications of the Protestant Reformation soon emerged, as the Roman Catholic church was deeply embroiled in matters of government throughout the European world.

Most interesting for American history is the fact that at the time the Reformation was beginning, a young English prince had fallen in love with his brother’s widow; he was Prince Henry, she was Catherine of Aragon.  At that time it was considered incestuous for a man to marry his brother’s widow, so Henry appealed to the Rome to nullify the marriage between his brother Arthur and Catherine so that he would be free to marry her.  The Pope in Rome, nervous over the fragmentation of his religious domain, was happy to grant an annulment to keep the English monarch in good favor.  The prince became King Henry VIII, and his story is well known.  What is not so well known is that several years into his reign Henry argued forcefully against the reforms of Martin Luther and defended the Roman church from what he saw as false accusations.  In recognition of his faithful service, he was named “Defender of the Faith” by the Pope, a title borne by British monarchs to this day.

The story does not end there, of course.  After twenty years of marriage to Catherine of Aragon, with no male heir to show for it, Henry became disenchanted with his wife.  At the same time he was becoming attracted to a handsome young woman of the court, Anne Boleyn.  The story of Henry’s infatuation with Anne is less important than the fact that eventually he sought an annulment from Catherine on the grounds that the original annulment had been against God’s favor.  He claimed to believe that the reason he had no male heirs was because God was displeased with his marriage to Catherine.  Now the pope was in a very difficult position; he was being asked to declare that the daughter of two powerful Catholic monarchs of Aragon and Castile, which eventually became the kingdom of Spain, had been living in sin with the English king for decades, and that their child, a girl named Mary, was a bastard.  In addition, Catherine’s nephew was the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, a powerful political figure and staunch supporter of the Catholic Church, who would also have been outraged by the annulment.  So the pope denied Henry’s request.

Infuriated and infatuated, Henry decided to break with Rome, and thus came about the English Reformation, so-called because Henry made himself head of the Church of England, which became known as the Anglican Church.  Although the Anglican Church had formally severed its ties with Rome, the Anglican faith kept many of the trappings of what was now known as the Roman Catholic religion.  Many Protestants, who felt that Martin Luther had not gone far enough in his reforms, objected to the continuing “remnants of popery” that emanated from English cathedrals and demanded that the church be further purified of Catholic influence.  The most vociferous of these were known as Puritans, who divided themselves into two camps, Puritans and Separatists.

The Puritans were those who stayed in England during the reign of Henry’s heirs, especially during that of Queen Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry and Anne Boleyn.  They tried to work within the system to help reform the Anglican Church.  They were willing to conform to the political demands of the church, for church and state were one, because the king was head of both.  The Separatists, however, being more radical, were unwilling to continue to live under the domination of the church and sought their salvation elsewhere.  The Separatists eventually became the Pilgrims who settled in Plymouth in 1620, and the Puritans were the great mass of people who came to America’s shores in Massachusetts Bay, beginning in 1630.  The influence of the Puritans and the Anglican faith and many other religious convictions that colonial Britons brought with them from England and other countries has become part of the legacy of American religious history.

Religion in Colonial History

Colonial Home | Updated May 18, 2010