Protestant culture
Although the founding Protestant Reformation was a religious movement, it also had a strong impact on all other aspects of life: marriage and family, education, the humanities and sciences, the political and social order, the economy, and the arts.
This meant that the families of many members of the Protestant clergy were able to contribute to the development of intellectual elites in their countries from about 1525, when the theologian Martin Luther was married.
Despite increasing acceptance for female pastors, in 2023, the Southern Baptist Convention -- the U.S.'s largest Protestant denomination -- voted by an overwhelming majority to restrict the role to men.
[14] The Convention voted again by a 92% majority to expel a church which had allowed a female pastor to serve women and children congregants.
The sometimes divisive nature of these discussions was exemplified by the formation of dissenting groups within the Anglican Communion that rejected reforms that were intended to make the Church more inclusive.
Some of the first colleges and universities in America, including Harvard,[21] Yale,[22] Princeton,[23] Columbia,[24] Dartmouth,[25] Williams, Bowdoin, Middlebury,[26] and Amherst, all were founded by mainline Protestant denominations.
Therefore, craftsmen, industrialists, and other businessmen were able to reinvest the greater part of their profits in the most efficient machinery and the most modern production methods that were based on progress in the sciences and technology.
[31][32][33][34] The Protestant work ethic was an important force behind the unplanned and uncoordinated mass action that influenced the development of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution.
[36][42] According to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center, Episcopalians ranked as the third most financially successful religious group in the United States, with 35% of Episcopalians living in households with incomes of at least $100,000, while and Presbyterians ranked as the fourth most financially successful religious group in the United States, with 32% of Presbyterians living in households with incomes of at least $100,000.
[43] According to the same study there is correlation between education and income, about 59% of American Anglican have a graduate and post-graduate degree, followed by Episcopalians (56%) and Presbyterians (47%).
[45] The Merton Thesis has two separate parts: Firstly, it presents a theory that science changes due to an accumulation of observations and improvement in experimental techniques and methodology; secondly, it puts forward the argument that the popularity of science in 17th-century England and the religious demography of the Royal Society (English scientists of that time were predominantly Puritans or other Protestants) can be explained by a correlation between Protestantism and the scientific values.
[46] In his theory, Robert K. Merton posited that English Puritanism and German Pietism were responsible for the development of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the British variety of modern-time democracy, constitutional monarchy, was taken over by Protestant-formed Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands as well as the Catholic countries Belgium and Spain.
[66][67] Freedom of conscience had had high priority on the theological, philosophical, and political agendas since Luther refused to recant his beliefs before the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire at Worms in 1521.
[69] In the early seventeenth century, Baptists like John Smyth and Thomas Helwys published tracts in defence of religious freedom.
[79] Despite the nation's nominal support for religious freedom, most states either prohibited Catholics from holding office or required them to denounce the papacy to do so.
[80] Anti-Catholic sentiment continued to proliferate and hit its peak during the 19th century, due to an influx of Irish Catholic immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine.
[83] The nation's skepticism toward Catholics remained present until at least the 1960s, when some feared that Kennedy's election to the Presidency may result in American being controlled by the Pope.
For example, torture was abolished in Prussia in 1740, slavery in Britain in 1834 and in the United States in 1865 (William Wilberforce, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln).
[95][96] The Geneva Convention, an important part of humanitarian international law, was largely the work of Henry Dunant, a reformed pietist.
They have founded hospitals, homes for disabled or elderly people, educational institutions, organisations that give aid to developing countries, and other social welfare agencies.
However, in America, contemporary evangelicals and the Christian right more broadly are often skeptical of state interference in the market economy and social welfare programs.
[106] Billy Graham, a key figure in the American Evangelical movement, owed early advances in his career to Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
This proximity to anticommunist efforts helped to solidify economic conservatism as an American Protestant value, to the extent that welfare programs are sometimes case as "anti-Christian" by fundamentalists.
[106] Protestant opponents of welfare programs claim that they reward idleness, disincentivize marriage, and create reliance on the federal government.
Martin Luther, Paul Gerhardt, George Wither, Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, William Cowper, and many other authors and composers created well-known church hymns.
Prominent painters with Protestant background were, for example, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Lucas Cranach, Rembrandt, and Vincent van Gogh.
