The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 4

II. “Left-Wing” and “Right-Wing” Protestantism

Before the Protestant Reformation, church and state had been united in all lands, with the pope, in theory and often in practice, as lord of kings as well as head of the church. Dissent from ecclesiastical dogmas was a civil as well as an ecclesiastical offense, subject to corresponding civil penalties. PFF4 15.3

The Reformation—primarily a spiritual revolution, although soon permeated by political.. elements—was but the crest of a tide that had been rising for centuries among such “left-wing” protesting groups as the early “heretical” Waldenses, Lollards, and Bohemians. But in certain ways the Reformation of Luther’s time underwent a reaction, giving rise to distinctly “right-wing” churches, which actually exchanged the domination of the Catholic Church for the domination of the state. ² PFF4 16.1

Modern historians frequently distinguish between “right wing and left wing Protestantism—using the words in a the social and political implication of those terms in modern parlance. ³ The right-wing group—The Anglicans Reformed(Calvinistic), and Lutherans—com—the union of church and state, and justified The religious “left-wingers” (such as the *, Quakers, Mennonites, and German sectaries in (may, be defined, roughly, as those who rejected all union f^ church and state and stressed the inner, personal character of religion. Springing from the masses, these groups, “commonly on the left also with regard to church organization, sacraments, and creeds,” leaned toward Scriptural literalism and a return to primitive Christian standards of teaching and practice, stressing the necessity of a spiritual rebirth (sometimes turning to mysticism, or perchance to perfectionism). They looked to prophecy, and to eschatology, as commonly involving the concept of an approaching “divine event to shatter the present scheme of history,” or a cataclysmic end of the world. ⁴ PFF4 16.2

It is well to remember, as Sweet pertinently remarks, that the Baptists^ Methodists, Disciples, and Quakers were once the troublemakers for the “respectable” churches—at that time the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. Just a little earlier these, in their turn, had been the troublemakers for the dominant Roman church in Reformation times. ⁵ Pressing the principle back a little further, we find that the early Christian church was, similarly, the troublemaking group for the Jewish church at the beginning of the Christian Era. This would surely suggest reserve in the criticism of lesser groups today. So much by way of a definition of terms. PFF4 16.3

The precious boon of American religious freedom may be called the ultimate fruit of seed sown over centuries of heroic struggle by the religious radicals, the heretics, or spiritual “leftists” of pre-Reformation times. ⁶ The left-wing Anabaptists the “direct descendants,” spiritually, of such groups as the Waldenses, and the “direct ancestors” of the Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers—as well as the Mennonites and the Schwenkfeldians, advocated separation of church and state. And the early English Baptists published a clear Declaration of Faith, demanding this separation of church and state. ⁷ PFF4 17.1