These beliefs were mainly Protestant but not yet petty middle-class puritanism: there remained still an element fairly high stepping and wide gestured in its personal conduct. The petty middle class of fundamentalists who saw no difference between wine-drinking, dancing, card-playing, and adultery, had not yet got altogether the upper hand in that part of the country - in fact, never did except in certain limited areas; but it was making a brave try.

Manuel was sent to Harvard, where he developed a profound contempt for American culture. 'The Americans,' he would say, 'brush their teeth before kissing and remember a page to answer a question.

Nineteenth-century print culture shared with the Protestantism that sparked it a democratizing impulse rooted in the ideology of the priesthood of all believers. In the vastly expanded world of print this impulse led to what one might call a priesthood of all readers, a situation ripe for religious turmoil rooted in interpretive chaos.

Protestantism and Catholicism must not be compared to Sunnism and Shi'ism in the Islamic context as has been done by certain scholars. Sunnism and Shi'ism both go back to the origins of Islam and the very beginning of Islamic history whereas Protestantism is a later protest against the existing Catholic Church and came into being some fifteen hundred years after the foundation of Christianity.

Lorsque le marxisme traditionnel, idéologie immanente à la modernisation, cherche à restreindre les concepts de travail abstrait et d'abstraction réelle à la sphère de la circulation, il ne trahit pas seulement par là sa contamination par l'éthique protestante, le productivisme capitaliste et une fausse ontologie transhistorique du travail, mais surtout sa limitation à l'espace interne au système producteur de marchandises moderne et à son temps abstrait.

John Calvin, brought characteristic rigor to the question. Luther dreamed of good princes, disliked law on principle, and had little interest in institutions. As a result, Lutheran churches ended up with a mishmash of governing structures. Calvin, by contrast, had trained as a lawyer, knew that structures matter, and favored more participatory government.

Some Protestants insist that Protestantism is “Bible Christianity,” a religion that takes the whole, inspired Bible as the only and final authoritative source of truth.

Protestants are Christians whose religion derives ultimately from Martin Luther’s rebellion against the Catholic Church. They are a tree with many tangled branches but a single trunk.

The kind of sociopolitical structure that Protestantism engenders—based on free inquiry, participatory politics, and limited government—tends to favor market economics.

That we should all have a say in choosing our own rulers and that those rulers ‘powers over us should be limited—these principles are in obvious tension, as every society that has tried to combine liberty and democracy has discovered. Without Protestantism and its peculiar preoccupations, that strange and marvelous synthesis could never have come into being as it has.