In the early ninth century Bishops Gerbald of Liège and Haito of Basel described the qualities of the ideal country priest.1 Many of his virtues were negative. For example, he was to shun all questionable contacts with women; drunkenness was condemned, and he was to avoid taverns with their salacious amusements; he was not to ape the laity by bearing arms; commerce and usury were forbidden to him as were, of course, all simoniacal practices. More positively, he was admonished to be diligent in his sacramental functions, especially baptism and anointing, as well as celebration of the Mass, and to observe the canonical hours. Finally, he was to instruct his flock in the rudiments of the faith, the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer, and to exhort them to lead the Christian life. The desire to attain these modestly ambitious goals during the Carolingian period resulted in an increased concern for clerical qualifications. Manuscripts from St. Emmeram at Regensburg and Freising in Bavaria, for example, contain detailed lists of subjects for ecclesiastical examination,2 and the sorts of episcopal statutes or capitularies which Gerbald's and Haito's works represent seem to have been distributed widely throughout the Empire3.

The stress of Elizabethan and early Stuart Puritans on the significance of the family as the fundamental spiritual unit of society has led historians to the apparent but perhaps simplistic conclusion that the origins of this doctrine are to be found in Protestant theology. The concomitants of the doctrine—an exaltation of the marriage relationship, a demand for household religious education and discipline and a slight but noteworthy elevation of the position of women within the household—are therefore attributed to Protestantism and particularly to Protestantism of “the hotter sort.” We are told, for example, that “the Reformation, by reducing the authority of the priest in society, simultaneously elevated the authority of lay heads of households” and that the stress on household religious instruction and discipline “was part of the protestant inheritance.”

Unlike the religious dominance of Puritans in New England and Anglicans in the South, the mid-Atlantic colonies of eighteenth-century America were covered with an assortment of northern European churches and sects. By the 1740s, an overflow of New England Puritans shared New York with an earlier immigrant population of Reformed Dutch and French Huguenots. In the Raritan valley of New Jersey, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians lived alongside enclaves of more Dutch, and coexisted with English Quakers, Swedish and German Lutherans, and a variety of sectarians along the lower Delaware River and in the city of Philadelphia. On the upper Delaware were further German settlements while along the western frontiers of Penn's colony additional Scotch-Irish Calvinists were to be found.

It is a well-known fact that the German Evangelical churches did not hold the Weimar Republic in the highest esteem. This lack of church affection for the republic cannot be wholly explained with reference only to the monarchist, authoritarian intellectual and theological heritage of the German churches. Research in the Evangelical newspaper press and in official church proceedings and proclamations reveals that the republic's treatment of issues of vital concern to the churches played a crucial role in shaping church political opinion.1 Among the most important of these issues was the question of religious instruction in the schools. German children had always received such instruction as a regular part of their elementary school curriculum. Also, the overwhelming majority of school children before 1918 had attended confessional schools; that is, Protestant children attended Protestant schools, Catholics went to Catholic schools, and Jews to Jewish schools. Only three states, Baden, Hesse, and Nassau, had systematically established interconfessional or “simultaneous” schools (Simultanschulen).2

In April of 1952 an article in Christian Life magazine proclaimed Chicago “the evangelical capital of the U.S.A.” To back this claim, editor Russell T. Hitt cited a host of evangelical agencies in greater Chicago: mission boards, denominational offices, colleges, Bible institutes, seminaries, publishing concerns (including Christian Life itself) and youth organizations. In total, the author mentioned over one hundred different agencies such as Youth For Christ International, the Slavic Gospel Association, Scripture Press and the Swedish Covenant Hospital. At first glance, the article appears to present a confusing list of unrelated organizations, but closer inspection reveals a coherent pattern.