"What, actually, is Protestantism?" asks historian Alec Ryrie at the end of his comprehensive and very readable Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World. If anyone can answer that question it would be Ryrie, a specialist in the history of Christianity at Durham University in England, a fellow at the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., and one of the world's leading authorities on the Protestant Reformation.
"It is not a doctrine or theology," he contends. "Nor is it a purely genealogical category, of people who share a common descent from Martin Luther's act of defiance but are now split into such a wild variety of branches that their only connection is historical."
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