History of Persecutions By Christians - The Protestant Theory of Persecution

The Protestant Theory of Persecution

The Protestant Reformation changed the face of Western Christianity forever, but initially it did nothing to change the Christian endorsement of religious persecution. The Reformers "fully embraced" Augustine's advocacy of coercion in religious matters, and many regarded the death penalty for heresy as legitimate. Furthermore, by presenting a much more powerful threat to Catholic unity than the heretic groups of the Middle Ages, the Reformation led to the intensification of persecution under Catholic regimes.

• Martin Luther had written against persecution in the 1520s, and had demonstrated genuine sympathy towards the Jews in his earlier writings, especially in Das Jesus ein geborener Jude sei (That Jesus was born as a Jew) from 1523, but after 1525 his position hardened. In Wider die Sabbather an einen guten Freund (Against the Sabbather to a Good Friend), 1538, he still considered a conversion of the Jews to Christianity as possible, but in 1543 he published On the Jews and their Lies, a "violent anti-semitic tract."
• John Calvin helped to secure the execution for heresy of Michael Servetus, although he unsuccessfully requested that he should be beheaded instead of being burned at the stake.

Effectively, however, the 16th century Protestant view was less extreme than the mediaeval Catholic position. In England, John Foxe, John Hales, Richard Perrinchief, Herbert Thorndike and Jonas Proast all only saw mild forms of persecution against the English Dissenters as legitimate. But (with the probable exception of John Foxe), this was only a retraction in degree, not a full rejection of religious persecution. There is also the crucial distinction between dissent and heresy to consider. Most dissenters disagreed with the Anglican Church only on secondary matters of worship and ecclesiology, and although this was a considered a serious sin, only a few 17th century Anglican writers thought that this 'crime' deserved the death penalty.

The Elizabethan bishop Thomas Bilson was of the opinion that men ought to be "corrected, not murdered", but he did not condemn the Christian Emperors for executing the Manichaeans for "monstrous blasphemies". The Lutheran theologian Georgius Calixtus argued for the reconciliation of Christendom by removing all unimportant differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, and Rupertus Meldenius advocated in necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas (in necessary things unity; in uncertain things freedom; in everything compassion) in 1626.