Because heirs of Luther are supposed to be humble, they don’t ordinarily make noise or news, though they will sing and shout this year. Things have been put in place to put their Reformation in its place. Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead tried to, when he spoke of the Reformation as a family quarrel of northwest European peoples, who contrived events which Rome could not ignore, and tried to suppress, but which some other Christians, Eastern and Orthodox, “serenely ignored.”
What is the current status of the Reformation as it lives on among those Christians who call themselves “Lutheran” and/or “Protestant”? To update Whitehead’s cramping observation, we look at statistics in atlases. Yes, northwest Europeans in Germany still head the list. But also in the top 10 are Ethiopia (2nd), Tanzania (3rd), Indonesia (5th), and India (7th)—all of them among the nine nations where Lutherans number more than they do in the United States. “Protestantism,” the more expansive term and reality, is sizable in the U.S., but does not hold the majority it once did.
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