Page 222 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

protestantism 1523

When and Where
World Religions Began

4000–2500 bce Hinduism South Asia
Rousseau, J.-J. (1757). The second discourse: Discourse on the origin and 1300–1200 bce Judaism West Asia
foundations of inequality among mankind.
500–400 bce Buddhism South Asia
Schaumann, N. (2002). Intellectual property in an information economy:
Copyright infringement and peer-to-peer technology. William Mitchell Confucianism China
Law Review 28(1001), 1–31. Retrieved June 11, 2004, from Lexis-
Nexis database. Zoroastrianism West Asia
Strayer, J. R., & Coulborn, R. (1956).The idea of feudalism. In R. Coul- Jainism South Asia
born (Ed.), Feudalism in history (pp. 3–11). Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
400–221 bce Daoism China
The UCLA Online Institute for Cyberspace Law and Policy. (1998).The
“No Electronic Theft” Act. Retrieved June 11, 2004, from http://www. 1st century ce Christianity West Asia,
gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/hr2265.html Europe
U.S. Copyright Office. (2003). About copyright. Retrieved June, 14,
2004, from http://www.copyright.gov 3rd century ce Manichaeism West Asia
U.S. Copyright Office. (1998).The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of
1998: U.S. Copyright Office Summary (of Pub. L. No. 105–304, 112 6th century ce Shinto Japan
Strat. 2860, Oct. 28, 1998).
7th century ce Islam West Asia
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. (2003). FAQ. Retrieved June 14,
2004, from http://www.uspto.gov 11th century Orthodoxy West Asia
15th–16th Sikhism South Asia
century
Protestantism 16th century Protestantism Europe
19th century Latter-day Saints North
America
rotestantism represents a form of Christianity that
Pspread in five hundred years from northwest Europe Babi and Baha’i West Asia
to every continent.This global version of the faith derives 19th–20th Pentecostalism North
from a cluster of movements within Western or Catholic century America
Christianity in the early sixteenth century and thrives in
the form of thousands of independent church bodies.
Rejecting the authority of the pope, Protestants almost Church of England, which numbers 82 million adher-
universally profess that the Bible—that is, the Hebrew ents; a third group, labeled Independents, numbers 415
Scriptures and the New Testament—is the authoritative million. Taken together, after 2000 these non-Roman
source and norm of their teaching. Through the centur- Catholic varieties of Christianity, all of which derived
ies, Protestantism quite naturally took on the culture of from the sixteenth-century Reformation, have over 800
whatever new environments its churches spread to.Thus million followers. (By comparison, there are an esti-
Lutherans in Namibia differ in many respects from those mated 101 million Roman Catholics and 217 million
in Norway, yet both stress the grace of God and are crit- Eastern Orthodox adherents.) Demographers estimate
ical of any Catholic teaching that insists on human en- that by 2025 the Protestant numbers will grow from 370
deavors to impress and please God. million to almost half a billion, a sign that Protestantism
is not confined to the period of early prosperity from the
Global Protestantism sixteenth through the nineteenth century, but faces a
Today prosperous future.While these are necessarily imprecise
Early in the twenty-first century, religious demographers numbers, the totals suggest the enormous historical
estimate that about 370 million people are Protestant. importance of this movement.
Often associated with Protestantism but insisting on its The momentum of Protestantism, however, has dramat-
Catholic character is Anglicanism, the heritage of the ically shifted.While much of its base remains in northwest