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Denominations

Protestantism

Christianity

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Origin 1517 to 1555

Protestantism is a category rather than a church. It is the collective name for the Western churches that broke with Rome in the sixteenth century and for everything descended from them, and there is no Protestant body, no Protestant authority and nobody entitled to speak for it. Lutherans, Reformed, Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Anabaptists, Quakers and Pentecostals all fall within it and are each described separately here; they disagree with one another about baptism, the Eucharist, church government and predestination, and several of them dispute whether the word describes them at all. What the label does mark is a shared inheritance from the Reformation: the appeal to scripture against the authority of Rome, justification understood as God's free gift rather than an achievement, and the rejection of the papacy. Past that the family resemblance thins quickly, and treating Protestantism as one thing produces false statements about roughly a billion people.

Facts
Status
Status Today
Living tradition, practised today 1
A collective term for the churches of the Reformation and their descendants, not itself an organised body.
Giving
Standing Giving ExpectationSourced to the subject's own account
Protestantism spans traditions too different in structure and teaching to share one honest member-giving norm, and nothing above the denominational level has the standing to set one for the whole. The range across Protestantism's own major families spans a real spectrum rather than a family resemblance: Lutheranism's own split between the Church of Sweden's tax-withheld kyrkoavgift and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's fully voluntary practice; the Anglican Communion's own documented absence of any binding member rule; Pentecostal bodies' formally doctrinal ten-percent tithe; the Progressive National Baptist Convention's codified congregation-to-convention due against the Southern Baptist Convention's purely preached tithe; and Methodism's own founding rejection of any fixed proportion at all, in favor of giving without a stated limit. No Protestantism-wide governing body exists to set a shared rule, and the traditions gathered under the label disagree with each other too fundamentally, state-linked taxation against purely voluntary custom, formal doctrine against explicit rejection of any fixed rate, for one sentence to describe them honestly. 3
How the Expectation Is EnforcedSourced to the subject's own account
Customary Norm 3
History
Separation or Divergence
"Protestantism" is a collective term for the bodies that resulted and not itself an organised church 1
Separation or Divergence
The Roman church, in the sixteenth-century Reformation 1
Date of Separation
1517 to 1555 1
Organisation
Governance
No central authority 1
Ordination
Varies between provinces or member bodies 1
Relation to the State
Varies by Province 1
Protestantism spans thousands of independent denominations across every continent with no central authority; a handful of specific Protestant churches are constitutionally established in individual countries (Lutheranism in parts of Scandinavia, for instance) while the great majority are not, so the tradition as a whole varies by province and denomination.
Practice
Liturgical Language
The vernacular 1
Reach
Adherents Today
The Pew Research Center's December 2011 Global Christianity report estimated 800 million Protestants worldwide in 2010 (37 percent of the 2.18 billion people identifying as Christian), compiled from a country-by-country analysis of roughly 2,400 censuses, demographic surveys and population registers. 2
Origins
Origin Period
1517 to 1555 1
Place of Origin
The German and Swiss lands 1
Founder
No single founder. 1
Belief
Defining Doctrinal Position
Trinitarian: one God in three persons 1Tradition: Christianity
Finances
Financial Disclosure Regime
Protestantism is not a single church but the broad family, numbering many thousands of independent denominations worldwide, that trace their origin to the sixteenth century Reformation's rejection of a single central ecclesiastical authority. It has no worldwide governing body, no central clergy and no denominational treasury; each Protestant denomination, and often each individual congregation, holds and discloses its own finances separately. There is no consolidated financial statement, budget or wealth figure for Protestantism as a whole to disclose. 1
Trajectory
Membership Over Time
In 2010, an estimated 800 million people worldwide were Protestant Christians, 37 percent of 2.18 billion Christians, per the Pew Research Center's country-by-country demographic analysis of censuses and surveys. 4
Membership Figure As Of
2010-01-01 4
Basis of the Membership Figure
Scholarly or Demographic Estimate 4
Learn More
Who Rejects the Label, and Why the Count Is Soft

The figure usually given for Protestants worldwide is somewhere between eight hundred million and a billion. It is built on a residual definition: Western Christians who are not Roman Catholic. That definition sweeps in several groups who reject it.

Anglicans have argued about the word since the sixteenth century. A large part of the communion understands itself as a reformed catholic church rather than a Protestant one, and the Anglo-Catholic tradition rejects the label outright.

Anabaptists were persecuted by Lutheran and Reformed authorities as well as by Rome, and the historic peace churches descended from them have never regarded themselves as a branch of the magisterial Reformation.

Restorationists, the Churches of Christ and related movements, hold that they are not reforming a corrupted church but restoring the original one, and that Protestantism and Catholicism are two halves of the same wrong turn.

Latter-day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses are filed as Protestant by some statistical agencies purely by residue, and neither accepts it.

Pentecostals and independent African and Asian churches, now a very large share of the total, often have no institutional connection to the Reformation at all and would not use the word about themselves.

There is a second problem underneath the first. Counting requires a unit, and Protestantism has no unit. There is no register, no communion boundary and no authority to be in or out of, so the number is assembled by adding up denominations that count differently: some count baptised members, some count communicants, some count adherents including children, and some report attendance. The totals are not comparable and the sum is not a measurement.

The useful statement is comparative rather than absolute. Whatever the total, most Protestants no longer live in Europe or North America, and the largest single-country Protestant populations are now in Africa and Asia.
The Solas, and What Actually Divides the Confessions

Protestantism is usually summarised by five Latin slogans, and the summary is useful as long as two things about it are understood: the list was assembled long after the Reformation, and it is not what the Protestant confessions argue with each other about.

Five words, formulated late

Scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone, glory to God alone. Luther and Calvin use the individual phrases, but the five as a set are a twentieth-century teaching device, and no sixteenth-century confession lists them. They describe the common front against Rome accurately enough. They are silent on everything that split the front itself.

The real fault lines

The divisions that produced separate churches are about the sacraments, about church government, and about the extent of the atonement. Luther held that Christ is bodily present in the supper; Zwingli held the meal a memorial; Calvin proposed a third account, and the failure to agree at Marburg in 1529 is the moment Protestantism became plural. Baptism of infants against baptism of believers divided the Reformed from the Anabaptists violently. Whether a church is governed by bishops, by elders or by the congregation produced three more families.

A word that not everyone accepts

Anglicans of the Anglo-Catholic tendency, and many Lutherans, resist being described as a denomination within Protestantism at all, on the grounds that they are reformed catholics rather than members of a movement. The atlas records that disagreement on the link itself rather than deciding it.

Denominations of Protestantism
Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Protestantism directly: "generally alongside Catholicism or Protestantism rather than as an exclusive identification."

This source names Protestantism directly: "Hutchison names it one of the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism, the mainline tradition's most institutionally prominent members."

Source American Baptist Churches USA (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Protestantism directly: "practice that mixed evangelical Protestantism with older Appalachian custom carried in by Scots Irish settlers."

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
Basel, Cities

The Basel Mission, founded 1815, sent Protestant missionaries across Africa and Asia.

This source names Protestantism directly: "Hutchison coined the term "the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism" for the tradition's most institutionally dominant denominations."

This source names Protestantism directly: "the Social Gospel movement in American Protestantism, published by Yale University Press from his Yale doctoral research, treats the Methodist Episcopal Church's 1908 Social Creed as the movement's..."

This source names Protestantism directly: "Bersier's virtual museum of French Protestantism, documents Antoine Court's convening of nine believers, four laypeople and five preachers, at Montezes in the Gard on 24 August 1715, the..."

This source names Protestantism directly: "An article from the Virtual Museum of Protestantism on the roughly ten month dechristianization campaign between September 1793 and July 1794, tracing its effect on France's Protestant clergy..."

This source names Protestantism directly: "Gordon Melton's Encyclopedia of Protestantism, recording that the Nigerian Association of Aladura Churches began in 1964 with 95 member denominations representing about 1.2 million members."

This source names Protestantism directly: "own congregation supplied Reformed Protestantism with its most influential account of revival."

This source names Protestantism directly: "topic overview of mainline Protestantism, covering its member denominations and the 1908 founding of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America in Philadelphia as the tradition's first..."

Source Mainline Protestantism (Encyclopaedia Britannica)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

This source names Protestantism directly: "recorded event, resettled English Protestantism against exactly this reversal."

Source Marian Persecutions (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names Protestantism directly: "affiliation categories including Protestantism and the Four Mothers Society."

Source Muscogee (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Sonderbund War, Wars & Conflicts

The federal majority that opposed the Sonderbund was drawn largely from Protestant cantons, though the federal cause was secular centralization and confiscation of Catholic institutions rather than the establishment of Protestant doctrine, and several federal cantons and soldiers were themselves Catholic.

This source names Protestantism directly: "evangelicalism reshaping American Protestantism."

This source names Protestantism directly: "Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Islam, Protestantism and World Christianity."

This source names Protestantism directly: "National Socialist control of German Protestantism, and although the alliance did not hold past the Second World War, the declaration itself became the twentieth century's most cited confession of..."

This source names Protestantism directly: "so a claim about what Reformed Protestantism actually agreed on the sacrament can be checked against its own words."

Source The Consensus Tigurinus (the Zurich Consensus)John Calvin and Heinrich Bullinger

This source names Protestantism directly: "new sects, that reshaped American Protestantism in the decades following the Revolution, published by Yale University Press."

This source names Protestantism directly: "An article from the Virtual Museum of Protestantism on the dragonnades as a chapter in French Huguenot history, covering the same billeting mechanism and its escalation from the 1681 Poitou campaign..."

This source names Protestantism directly: "Bersier's virtual museum of French Protestantism, documents the Edict of Toleration that Louis XVI signed in November 1787 and the Parlement of Paris registered on 29 January 1788, restoring civil..."

This source names Protestantism directly: "first official recognition of French Protestantism after a century of clandestine worship."

This source names Protestantism directly: "dispensationalist reading in American Protestantism, so it is the primary evidence of what that reading looked like in print."

Source The Scofield Reference BibleCyrus I. Scofield (ed.)
The Troubles, Wars & Conflicts

Northern Ireland's Protestant community, spanning Presbyterian, Church of Ireland, Free Presbyterian and other denominations, supplied the great majority of the conflict's unionist and loyalist combatants and voters.

This source names Protestantism directly: "Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America, Basil Blackwell, 1990, is the foundational sociological study of Pentecostal and evangelical Protestant growth across Latin America..."

This source names Protestantism directly: "movement, the faction within German Protestantism that sought to align church teaching with Nazi racial ideology."

This source names Protestantism directly: "act that ended official toleration of Protestantism in France and drove large scale Huguenot emigration."

This source names Protestantism directly: "odds with much of mainstream American Protestantism."

Source The Unitarians and the UniversalistsDavid Robinson
Worms, Cities

The Diet of Worms is a founding episode of the Protestant Reformation.

Belongs to Tradition

Branch Of

Contains

A Protestant family, of the Radical Reformation.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)
Anglicanism, Denominations

Why this is disputed. Anglicanism's own self-description has long been genuinely divided on this point. Its Reformation formularies, the Thirty Nine Articles among them, and much of its Evangelical wing place it inside the Protestant tradition without qualification. Its Anglo-Catholic wing has just as long rejected the label outright, holding a via media or branch theory in which Anglicanism is a distinct catholic body continuous with the pre-Reformation church rather than a Protestant denomination, a self-understanding some Anglican provinces write into their own constitutions.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)
Baptist, Denominations

A Protestant family.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

A Protestant confession.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

A Protestant body of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement.

Source Churches of Christ (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Source The CongregationalistsJ. William T. Youngs

A Protestant body of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement.

Source Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

A movement running across Protestant denominations rather than a denomination of its own.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

A Protestant confession.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

A Protestant family.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

A Protestant body, the renewed Unity of the Brethren.

Source Moravian Church (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

A Protestant family.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

A Protestant family, Reformed in doctrine.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

A Protestant body of the Radical Reformation.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Derived from This

Paul Schafer led a German Protestant lay youth mission before the colony was founded in Chile.

Source World Religions and Spirituality ProjectDavid G. Bromley (founding director) and the profile authors of record

Victor Paul Wierwille was an Evangelical and Reformed minister; the group's nontrinitarian teaching came later.

Source World Religions and Spirituality ProjectDavid G. Bromley (founding director) and the profile authors of record

Sun Myung Moon was raised in Korean Presbyterianism, and the Divine Principle is written as a completion of the Christian scheme.

Excluded from Canon

1 Esdras, Scriptures & Texts

The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize 1 Esdras, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.

2 Esdras, Scriptures & Texts

The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize 2 Esdras, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.

3 Maccabees, Scriptures & Texts

The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize 3 Maccabees, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.

4 Maccabees, Scriptures & Texts

The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize 4 Maccabees, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.

Additions to Daniel, Scriptures & Texts

The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize Additions to Daniel, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.

Additions to Esther, Scriptures & Texts

The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize Additions to Esther, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.

Book of Baruch, Scriptures & Texts

The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize Book of Baruch, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.

Book of Judith, Scriptures & Texts

The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize Book of Judith, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.

Book of Tobit, Scriptures & Texts

The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize Book of Tobit, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.

Books of the Maccabees, Scriptures & Texts

The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize Books of the Maccabees, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.

Letter of Jeremiah, Scriptures & Texts

The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize Letter of Jeremiah, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.

Prayer of Manasseh, Scriptures & Texts

The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize Prayer of Manasseh, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.

Psalm 151, Scriptures & Texts

The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize Psalm 151, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.

Wisdom of Sirach, Scriptures & Texts

The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize Wisdom of Sirach, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.

Wisdom of Solomon, Scriptures & Texts

The Protestant confessional consensus holds a thirty-nine-book Old Testament and does not canonize Wisdom of Solomon, against the wider canon affirmed at Trent in 1546 and at Jerusalem in 1672. Lutheran and Anglican practice retains several of these books as edifying reading while denying them authority to establish doctrine.

Holds Element

Luther's paraphrase of Psalm 46, and the hymn that carried the Reformation to people who could not read its arguments.

Source A Dictionary of HymnologyJohn Julian (editor)

Rejected Here

The Reformation appeal to scripture against the authority of Rome denies any church office the power to define doctrine binding on conscience.

Papacy, Religious Organization & Structure

The rejection of the papacy is one of the few things the whole Protestant family holds in common, and it is named as such in its own definition.

The Council of Trent, Councils and Synods

Trent is the council that defined the Protestant churches by exclusion, since its canons on justification were framed to condemn what they teach.

Held Differently

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Sacred Sites

No Protestant body has any share under the Status Quo, and from the nineteenth century much Protestant opinion has identified the burial place instead with the garden tomb north of the Damascus gate.

Objects and Practices of This Tradition

Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe is the humanitarian relief agency of the Protestant regional and free churches in Germany, sharing its parent body with Diakonie Deutschland and Brot fur die Welt, so linked to Protestantism as its churches span Lutheran, Reformed and United traditions rather than one denomination.

Source Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe: Jahresbericht 2024 (Annual Report 2024)Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe (Evangelisches Werk fur Diakonie und Entwicklung e.V.)

A federation of twenty German regional churches, predominantly Lutheran, Reformed and United, per the EKD's own description.

The Parliamentarian and later Commonwealth forces that fought the Confederation, and the Scottish Covenanter troops defending Ulster's Protestant settlers, were themselves Protestant and, under Cromwell, suppressed Catholic public worship and banished or executed priests once the conquest was complete. Lenihan and O Siochru both treat this side's war aims as substantially constitutional and dynastic, contesting Parliament's and later the Commonwealth's authority over Ireland, so this edge connects that side to Protestant identity without asserting the faith alone directed its campaign.

Source Confederate Catholics at War, 1641 to 1649Padraig Lenihan

She was baptised in 1825 under the American Board mission and made its protection a matter of state policy.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

Called by art historians the single most influential image of the Lutheran Reformation, painted with the involvement of Luther himself to teach the justification doctrine at the heart of Protestantism as a whole.

Source Wikipedia, "Law and Gospel (Cranach)"Wikipedia contributors

Clergy or specialist role within Protestantism.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Clergy or specialist role within Protestantism.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)
Sola Fide, Doctrines

Article IV of the Augsburg Confession fixed the Protestant position that a sinner is accounted righteous through faith in Christ alone, and the Reformed and later Protestant confessions restate it in their own terms.

Source The Augsburg ConfessionPhilipp Melanchthon

The appeal to scripture as the sole final authority against the authority of Rome is the ground on which the Reformation argued everything else, and it is held across the Protestant family rather than by any one branch of it.

Source Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700Diarmaid MacCulloch
Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Luther's 1520 argument that all the baptized are of one spiritual estate, differing in office rather than in kind, is common Protestant ground and the basis of vernacular scripture, congregational singing and a married clergy.

Source Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700Diarmaid MacCulloch

Opposes

Purgatory, Doctrines

Purgatory rejected outright at the Reformation, together with the indulgence system built on it.

Position On

The Western reading, sharpened at the Reformation into total inability.

Repentance, Doctrines

Repentance as a turning of the whole life, addressed directly to God, with no priestly absolution required.

Double procession, inherited from the Latin West and retained without controversy at the Reformation.

Regions Where This Is Principal

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

Related To

Protestantism as a body of churches begins here.

Source Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700Diarmaid MacCulloch
Sources
1. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition
F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2005s.v. ProtestantismView the Source
2. Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World's Christian Population
Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 2011Executive SummaryView the Source
2. Global Christianity: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World's Christian Population
Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 2011On the size and distribution of Protestant populationsView the Source
3. Lutheran World Federation (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikimedia FoundationView the Source
4. Global Christianity: Movements and Denominations
Pew Research Center, 2011View the Source
The Creeds of Christendom, with a History and Critical Notes
Philip Schaff, Harper and Brothers, 1877View the Source
A Dictionary of Hymnology
John Julian (editor), John Murray, 1892View the Source
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