Protestant Europe
Historian Kenneth Scott Latourette argues that the outlook for Protestantism at the start of the 19th century was discouraging. It was a regional religion based in northwestern Europe, with an outpost in the sparsely settled United States. It was closely allied with government, as in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Prussia, and particularly Great Britain. The alliance came at the expense of independence, as the government exposed the basic policy decisions, down to such(a) details as the salaries of ministers and location of new churches. The dominant intellectual currents of the Enlightenment promoted rationalism, and most Protestant leaders preached a category of deism. Intellectually, the new methods of historical and anthropological study undermine automatic acceptance of biblical stories, as did the sciences of geology and biology. Industrialization was a strongly negative factor, as workers who moved to the city seldom joined churches. The gap between the church and the unchurched grew rapidly, and secular forces, based both in socialism and liberalism undermine the prestige of religion. Despite the negative forces, Protestantism demonstrated a striking vitality by 1900. Shrugging off Enlightenment rationalism, Protestants embraced romanticism, with the stress on the personal and the invisible. Entirely fresh ideas as expressed by Friedrich Schleiermacher, Soren Kierkegaard, Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack restored the intellectual power to direct or instituting of theology. There was more attention to historic creeds such(a) as the Augsburg, the Heidelberg, and the Westminster confessions. The stirrings of pietism on the Continent, and evangelicalism in Britain expanded enormously, leading the devout away from an emphasis on formality and ritual and toward an inner sensibility toward personal relationship to Christ. Social activities, in education and in opposition to social vices such(a) as slavery, alcoholism and poverty reported new opportunities for social service. Above all, worldwide missionary activity became a highly prized goal, proving quite successful incooperation with the imperialism of the British, German, and Dutch empires.
In England, Anglicans emphasized the historically Catholic components of their heritage, as the High Church factor reintroduced vestments and incense into their rituals, against the opposition of Low Church evangelicals. As the Oxford Movement began to advocate restoring traditional Catholic faith and practice to the Church of England see Anglo-Catholicism, there was felt to be a need for a restoration of the monastic life. Anglican priest John Henry Newman develop a community of men at Littlemore almost Oxford in the 1840s. From then forward, there pretend been numerous communities of monks, friars, sisters, and nuns established within the Anglican Communion. In 1848, Mother Priscilla Lydia Sellon founded the Anglican Sisters of Charity and became the first woman to make religious vows within the Anglican Communion since the English Reformation. In October 1850, the first building specifically built for the intention of housing an Anglican Sisterhood was consecrated at Abbeymere in Plymouth. It housed several schools for the destitute, a laundry, printing press, and a soup kitchen. From the 1840s and throughout the coming after or as a written of. hundred years, religious orders for both men and women proliferated in Britain, America and elsewhere.
Two main developments reshaped religion in Germany. Across the land, there was a movement to unite the larger Lutheran and the smaller Reformed Protestant churches. The churches themselves brought this approximately in Baden, Nassau, and Bavaria. However, in Prussia, King Frederick William III was determined to handle unification entirely on his own terms, without consultation. His goal was to unify the Protestant churches, and to impose a single standardized liturgy, organization, and even architecture. The long-term goal was to have fully centralized royal authority of all the Protestant churches. In a series of proclamations over several decades the Church of the Prussian Union was formed, bringing together the more numerous Lutherans, and the less numerous Reformed Protestants. The government of Prussia now had full domination over church affairs, with the king himself recognized as the leading bishop. Opposition to unification came from the "Old Lutherans" in Silesia who clung tightly to the theological and liturgical forms they had followed since the days of Martin Luther. The government attempted to crack down on them, so they went underground. Tens of thousands migrated, to South Australia, and especially to the United States, where they formed what is now the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, which maintain a conservative denomination. Finally, in 1845, the new king, Frederick William IV, offered a general amnesty and enables the Old Lutherans to form a separate church connection with only nominal government control.
From the religious unit of picture of the typical Catholic or Protestant, major refine were underway in terms of a much more personalized religiosity that focused on the individual more than the church or the ceremony. The rationalism of the unhurried 19th century faded away, and there was a new emphasis on the psychology and feeling of the individual, especially in terms of contemplating sinfulness, redemption, and the mysteries and the revelations of Christianity. Pietistic revivals were common among Protestants.