ABSTRACT
Protestantism embraces by far the largest number of Christian bodies. Beginning in the seventeenth century in Europe, dissidents seeking to reform the Roman Catholic Church and to reshape Christian worship and governance created national and independent churches that included Lutheran Evangelical denominations, Calvinist churches (Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and many national Reformed churches), Anabaptist expressions (Mennonites, Moravians, Baptists), Anglicanism in England and its offshoots (Episcopalians, Quakers, Methodists), and various Rationalist churches resulting from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (Unitarians and Universalists). Additionally, hundreds of sects, cults, and larger innovative denominations have appeared in the last two hundred years making Protestantism so diverse as to be nearly impossible to define. But this family of Christians does share qualities that help define Protestantism’s boundaries and that also have shaped the life of millennialism.
