Benefits Of The Protestant Reformation

The Protestant Reformation was a massively important European religious and political movement. For the first time in over half a millennium, the European Church split. H. G. Wells said that this happened because people, “objected not to the church’s power, but to its weaknesses… Their movements against the Church, within and without, were movements not for release from a religious control, but for a fuller and more abundant religious control.” While the Catholic Church was undeniably becoming increasingly corrupt and the clergymen were pluralistic, extortionist, and simony-condoning, this was likely not what caused the widespread Protestant Reformation. While a select few people who abhorred the Catholic Church’s methods of religious control, …show more content…
After the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, which was caused by “a combination of religious fervor and dynastic rivalries”, confessionalization became a “form of political assimilation and cultural homogenization”. The new source of societal division allowed individual communities to grow closer together. This consolidation allowed the people to unite and the culture to further homogenize. Ute Lotz-Heumann and Matthias Polhig summarize Heinz Schilling’s work to emphasize this point, saying, “Schillling argues that, in general, confession-building and state-formation reinforced one another: confessionalization ‘enable states and societies to integrate more tightly’.” The religious divide also fueled linguistic and naming differences that further reinforced each region’s identity. People’s names varied greatly between religions. Lotz-Huemann and Pohlig explain this difference, saying, “Protestants preferred names from the Old Testament for their children, while saint’s names appealed mainly to Catholics and were, in fact, forbidden in Calvinist Geneva.” Furthermore, the German linguistic differences arose with the religious split reaffirmed regional identity and cultural homogeneity within each region. In the northern region of what eventually becomes Germany, Protestants wrote in Meißisch. The Catholics in the Southern and Bavarian regions, however, wrote in Upper German. These linguistic differences have continued throughout the centuries. Although both North Germans and Bavarians eventually wrote in Upper German, North Germans continued to pronounce words differently from Bavarians. Confessionalization united and strengthened individual German