Anti-Protestantism is bias, hatred or distrust
against some or all branches of Protestantism
and its followers.
Anti-protestantism dates back to before the
Protestant Reformation itself, as various
pre-Protestant groups such as Arnoldists,
Waldensians, Hussites and Lollards were persecuted
in Roman Catholic Europe.
Protestants were not tolerated throughout
most of Europe until the Peace of Augsburg
of 1555 approved Lutheranism as an alternative
for Roman Catholicism as a state religion
of various states within the Holy Roman Empire
of the German Nation.
Calvinism was not recognized until the Peace
of Westphalia of 1648.
Other states, such as France, made similar
agreements in the early stages of the Reformation.
Poland–Lithuania had a long history of religious
tolerance.
However, the tolerance stopped after the Thirty
Years' War in Germany, the persecution of
Huguenots and the French Wars of Religion
in France, the change in power between Protestant
and Roman Catholic rulers after the death
of Henry VIII of England in England, and the
launch of the Counter-Reformation in Italy,
Spain, Habsburg Austria and Poland-Lithuania.
Anabaptism arose as a part of the Radical
Reformation, lacking support of the state
Lutheranism and Calvinism enjoyed, and thus
was persecuted.
Theological disagreement initially led to
a Lutheran-Reformed rivalry in the Reformation.
Protestants in Latin America were largely
ostracized until the abolition of certain
restrictions in the 20th century.
Protestantism spread with Evangelicalism and
Pentecostalism gaining the majority of followers.
North America became a shelter for Protestants
who were fleeing Europe after the persecution
increased.
Persecution of Protestants in Asia can be
put under a common shield of the persecution
Christians face in the Middle East and northern
Africa, where Islam is the dominant religion.
== History ==
Anti-Protestantism, also known as Catholic
Anti-Protestantism, originated in a reaction
by militant societies connected to the Roman
Catholic Church alarmed at the spread of Protestantism
following the Protestant Reformation of the
16th century.
Martin Luther's Proclamation occurred in 1517.
By 1540, Pope Paul III had sanctioned the
first society pledged to extinguish Protestantism.
Christian Protestantism was denounced as heresy,
and those supporting these doctrines excommunicated
as heretics.
Thus by canon law and the practice and policies
of the Holy Roman Empire of the time, Protestants
were subject to persecution in those territories,
such as Spain, Italy and the Netherlands,
in which the Catholic rulers were then the
dominant power.
This movement was started by the reigning
Pope and various political rulers with a more
political stake in the controversy then a
religious one.
These princes instituted policies as part
of the Spanish Inquisition, abuses of that
crusade originally authorized for other reasons
such as the Reconquista, and Morisco conversions,
which ultimately led to the Counter Reformation
and the edicts of the Council of Trent.
Therefore, the political repercussions of
various European rulers supporting Roman Catholicism
for their own political reasons over the new
Protestant groups, only subsequently branded
as heretical after rejection by the adherents
of these doctrines of the Edicts of the Council
of Trent, resulted in religious wars and outbreaks
of sectarian violence.
Eastern Orthodoxy had comparatively little
contact with Protestantism for geographic,
linguistic and historical reasons.
Protestant attempts to ally with Eastern Orthodoxy
proved problematic.
In general, most Orthodox had the impression
that Protestantism was a new heresy that arose
from various previous heresies.In 1771, Bishop
Charles Walmesley published his General History
of the Christian Church from her birth to
her Final Triumphant States in Heaven chiefly
deduced from the Apocalypse of St. John the
Apostle, written under the pseudonym of Signor
Pastorini.
The book forecast the end of Protestantism
by 1825 and was published in at least 15 editions
and several languages.By the 19th century
and later, some Eastern Orthodox thinkers,
such as Berdyaev, Seraphim Rose, and John
Romanides believed that Northern Europe had
become secular or virtually atheist due to
its having been Protestant earlier.
In recent eras Orthodox anti-Protestantism
has grown due to aggressive Protestant proselytization
in predominantly Orthodox countries.
=== Reformation ===
The Reformation led to a long period of warfare
and communal violence between Catholic and
Protestant factions, leading to massacres
and forced suppression of the alternative
views by the dominant faction in much of Europe.
Anti-Protestantism originated in a reaction
by the Catholic Church against the Protestant
Reformation of the 16th century.
Protestants were denounced as heretics and
subject to persecution in those territories,
such as Spain, Italy and the Netherlands,
by the Inquisition, in which the Catholics
were the dominant power.
This movement was orchestrated by popes and
princes as the Counter Reformation.
This resulted in religious wars and eruptions
of sectarian hatred such as the St Bartholomew's
Day Massacre of 1572.
=== Francoist Spain ===
In Franco's authoritarian Spanish State (1936–1975),
Protestantism was deliberately marginalized
and persecuted.
During the Civil War, Franco's regime persecuted
the country's 30,000 Protestants, and forced
many Protestant pastors to leave the country.
Once authoritarian rule was established, non-Catholic
Bibles were confiscated by police and Protestant
schools were closed.
Although the 1945 Spanish Bill of Rights granted
freedom of private worship, Protestants suffered
legal discrimination and non-Catholic religious
services were not permitted publicly, to the
extent that they could not be in buildings
which had exterior signs indicating it was
a house of worship and that public activities
were prohibited.
== Hostility to mainline Protestantism ==
Among theologically conservative Christians
(including Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians,
as well as Evangelicals and Protestant fundamentalists),
mainline Protestant denominations are often
characterized as being theologically liberal
to the point where they are no longer true
to the Bible or the historic Christian tradition.
These perceptions are often linked to highly
publicized events, such as the decision to
endorse same-sex marriage by the United Church
of Christ.
While theological liberalism is clearly present
within most mainline denominations, surveys
show that many within the mainline denominations
consider themselves moderate or conservative
and holding traditional Christian theological
views.
== Hostility to Evangelicals ==
In the United States, critics of the policies
adopted by the Religious Right, such as support
of one-man one-woman marriage and support
of Right to Life for the unborn, often equate
evangelicalism as a movement with the Religious
Right.
Many evangelicals belong to this political
movement, although it is a diverse movement
that draws support from other Protestants,
Jews, Mormons, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox,
among other non-evangelical groups.
Some critics have even suggested that evangelicals
are a kind of "fifth column" aimed at turning
the United States or other nations into Christian
theocracies.
Cultural progressive activists have indicated
fear of a potential Christian theocracy as
one of the reasons for their opposition to
the Christian Right.Some evangelical groups
that hold to a Dispensationalist interpretation
of Biblical prophecy have been accused of
supporting Zionism and providing material
support for Jewish settlers who build communities
within Palestinian territories.
Critics contend that these evangelicals support
Israel in order to expedite the building of
the Third Temple in Jerusalem, which Dispensationalists
see as a requirement for the return of Jesus
Christ.
Many evangelicals reject Dispensationalism
and support peace efforts in the Middle East,
however.Some Christian groups focused on the
Bible have been derided as "Bible thumpers".
Depictions of evangelicals as uneducated rubes
or hypocrites are common in Hollywood movies
and television shows, such as Saved!, Shawshank
Redemption, There Will Be Blood and Inherit
the Wind.
== Catholic and Protestant disagreement in
Ireland ==
In Northern Ireland or pre-Catholic Emancipation
Ireland, there is a hostility to Protestantism
as a whole that has more to do with communal
or nationalist sentiments than theological
issues.
During the Tudor conquest of Ireland by the
Protestant state of England in the course
of the 16th century, the Elizabethan state
failed to convert Irish Catholics to Protestantism
and thus followed a vigorous policy of confiscation,
deportation, and resettlement.
By dispossessing Catholics of their lands,
and resettling Protestants on them, the official
Government policy was to encourage a widespread
campaign of proselytizing by Protestant settlers
and establishment of English law in these
areas.
This led to a counter effort of the Counter
Reformation by mostly Jesuit Catholic clergy
trained specifically for this purpose, to
maintain the "old religion" of the people
as the dominant religion in these regions.
The result was that Catholicism came to be
identified with a sense of nativism and Protestantism
came to be identified with the State, as most
Protestant communities were established by
state policy, and Catholicism was viewed as
treason to the state after this time.
While Elizabeth I had initially tolerated
private Catholic worship, this ended after
Pope Pius V, in his 1570 papal bull Regnans
in Excelsis, pronounced her to be illegitimate
and unworthy of her subjects' allegiance.
The Penal Laws, first introduced in the early
17th century, were initially designed to force
the native elite to conform to the state church
by excluding non-Conformists and Roman Catholics
from public office, and restricting land ownership,
but were later, starting under Queen Elizabeth,
also used to confiscate virtually all Catholic
owned land and grant it to Protestant settlers
from England and Scotland.
The Penal Laws had a lasting effect on the
population, due to their severity (celebrating
Catholicism in any form was punishable by
death or enslavement under the laws), and
the favouritism granted Irish Anglicans served
to polarise the community in terms of religion.
Anti-Protestantism in Early Modern Ireland
1536–1691 thus was also largely a form of
hostility to the colonisation of Ireland.
Irish poetry of this era shows a marked antipathy
to Protestantism, one such poem reading, "The
faith of Christ [Catholicism] with the faith
of Luther is like ashes in the snow".
The mixture of resistance to colonization
and religious disagreements led to widespread
massacres of Protestant settlers in the Irish
Rebellion of 1641.
Subsequent religious or sectarian antipathy
was fueled by the atrocities committed by
both sides in the Irish Confederate Wars,
especially the repression of Catholicism during
and after the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland,
when Irish Catholic land was confiscated en
masse, clergy were executed and discriminatory
legislation was passed against Catholics.
The Penal Laws against Catholics (and also
Presbyterians) were renewed in the late 17th
and early 18th centuries due to fear of Catholic
support for Jacobitism after the Williamite
War in Ireland and were slowly repealed in
1771–1829.
Penal Laws against Presbyterians were relaxed
by the Toleration Act of 1719, due to their
siding with the Jacobites in a 1715 rebellion.
At the time the Penal Laws were in effect,
Presbyterians and other non-Conformist Protestants
left Ireland and settled in other countries.
Some 250,000 left for the New World alone
between the years 1717 and 1774, most of them
arriving there from Ulster.
Sectarian conflict was continued in the late
18th century in the form of communal violence
between rival Catholic and Protestant factions
over land and trading rights (see Defenders
(Ireland), Peep O'Day Boys and Orange Institution).
The 1820s and 1830s in Ireland saw a major
attempt by Protestant evangelists to convert
Catholics, a campaign which caused great resentment
among Catholics.
In modern Irish nationalism, anti-Protestantism
is usually more nationalist than religious
in tone.
The main reason for this is the identification
of Protestants with unionism – i.e. the
support for the maintenance of the union with
the United Kingdom, and opposition to Home
Rule or Irish independence.
In Northern Ireland, since the foundation
of the Free State in 1921, Catholics, who
were mainly nationalists, suffered systematic
discrimination from the Protestant unionist
majority.
The same happened to Protestants in the Catholic-dominated
South.The mixture of religious and national
identities on both sides reinforces both anti-Catholic
and anti-Protestant sectarian prejudice in
the province.
More specifically religious anti-Protestantism
in Ireland was evidenced by the acceptance
of the Ne Temere decrees in the early 20th
century, whereby the Catholic Church decreed
that all children born into mixed Catholic-Protestant
marriages had to be brought up as Catholics.
Protestants in Northern Ireland had long held
that their religious liberty would be threatened
under a 32-county Republic of Ireland, due
to that country's Constitutional support of
a "special place" for the Roman Catholic Church.
This article was deleted in 1972.
== See also ==
Religious tolerance
Anti-Christian sentiment
Anti-Catholicism
Anti-Eastern Orthodox sentiment
Anti-Oriental Orthodox sentiment
Anti-Mormonism
Black Legend
Counter-Reformation
List of people burned as heretics
Criticism of Protestantism
