What if the Protestant Reformation didn't stick

I'm considering a story where an evangelical Christian is transported to a modern day society (alternate history) where the Protestant Reformation failed. I'd love to hear your ideas on how life is different in present day America.

- Why did it fail? Did it just peter out, or did the Catholic Counter-Reformation crush it?
- What is the make-up of American history without the Puritan core?
- Is there an openness to religious freedom as we have today, or are Islam and eastern religions frowned upon or even banned?

If you've got other ideas on the effect of a world without Protestant Christianity, I'd love to hear them.

Interesting concept! I would say that a world where the Protestant Reformation did not happen or failed would be drastically different from our world today. Consider for a moment society in Europe under the Roman Catholic dominion of the middle ages. Every aspect of life was under the control of the church, even nobles and royalty were subservient to the church, its bishops and pope. Education was limited to only the highest in society and religious understanding was limited to clergy, but not all clergy, only certain levels of clergy. The majority of the people were intentionally kept ignorant, superstitious, and poor, toiling their entire lives to serve lord and church. New or opposing religious and philosophic thought was viewed as heretically and brutally squashed at all costs. There was no hesitation to kill men, women, and even children in the most gruesome manner. It was the Protestant Reformation that opened the door to freedom in religious life as well as education, science, politics, economy, etc. The concepts of separation of church and state, inalienable rights, free markets, tolerance, etc. would not exist as we know them.

My suggestion would be to do a cursory view of some history and church history books on the Reformation (what and why they protested and the results) and choose a few specific areas you would like to "reverse" for your story's setting. Maybe it is separate of church and state; maybe the church still controls politics and government. That would mean that there would be religious laws in addition to civil laws... what you can believe, what days you can and cannot work (i.e.: banning work on Sundays and church holy days), who have rights and can actively participate in governing (Would slavery had been abolished or would there still be slavery? Would women have the right to vote or not?), etc. Would the government even be a democratic republic or would a type of monarchy still reign? This could be a lot of fun depending upon the direction you want to take the story.

Perhaps Luther just got a better initial response from the Pope than he did in our world? If that's the case, maybe we'd see married priests like the Eastern Orthodox have, earlier dialogue Masses (the people saying the server's parts), and definitely earlier reform of indulgences (so they'd look like they do today, either plenary (full) or partial (not full) rather than either plenary or 30 days / 600 days / whatever)? We might also have seen earlier Catholic use of a vernacular Bible - technology was right for printed materials to start becoming available to those who weren't already very wealthy, and without the Protestants as a boogeyman, there wouldn't be the concern about "well if they read the Bible so much maybe we shouldn't". (There would also not have been the fear that too much private scholarship would produce more schismatics and heretics, since there wouldn't be whole countries going into schism and heresy!)

I think there would likely be [i]more[/i] religious toleration and [i]fewer[/i] "blue laws", since there wouldn't be the attitude of "the religion of the country follows that of the king" - civil law just wouldn't be as interested in enforcing religious practice, since that's what canon law would be for. (After all, the one place in all of Europe where Jews were safest was Rome, and without the internecine warfare of Catholic vs Lutheran vs Anabaptists, there wouldn't be as much civil interest in stamping out religious differences.)

Galileo might not have gotten as harsh a reception as he did, too, since he wouldn't have had the misfortune of acting like he was opposing the Pope's authority after the Protestants had gotten going with their own opposition. This could have been good, or it could have (paradoxically!) been bad, since Galileo wasn't totally correct in his scientific assumptions, and scientists could have followed any number of red herrings for a few centuries before getting back on track.

Now that I think about it, the attitude towards the people already on this continent when Europeans arrived would have been different - my understanding is that Protestant Europeans very rarely intermarried with Native Americans, while it was much more common for Catholic Europeans to do so, and Catholics also tended to see existing cultures as "future subjects" rather than "people on the land we want". This doesn't mean (really doesn't mean) they were any more, uh, enlightened in terms of interacting with those other cultures, but there is still a difference between "Hi! You're all ruled by the king of Spain now!" and "If you don't want to trade with us and/or come live with us, go away!"

There's also the possibility that, without the Counter-Reformation making it a priority that Catholic practices conform to a general norm (and all be proven not to be new) right then, the Council of Trent wouldn't have essentially made it impossible to form new Rites, and so we might see, in addition to the Roman Rite and the Dominican Rite and the Mozarabic Rite of the Mass, an Iroquois Rite or a Mayan Rite (et cetera - there might be a dozen or several dozen different ones in North America, and probably at least a dozen if not several dozen in Europe). Besides changes in feast days, wordings of prayers, and ceremonial colors and decorations, there might have been other, more substantial differences. (What those differences would be, I have no idea at all, but it could be interesting background for someone living in Pennsylvania or Ontario, and used to the Iroquois Rite, to visit Europe (especially Rome) and be disoriented at the differences.)

Great insights and ideas. Keep 'em coming!!

For two interesting (if very Whiggish and anti-Catholic) perspectives on a world with a failed Protestant Reformation, try reading these alternate histories: Kingsley Amis' "The Alteration", set in a 1970s where the son of Arthur Tudor and Catherine of Aragon succeeded to the English throne as Stephen II in 1509 and Martin Luther became Pope Germanian I in the 1520s, and Phyllis Eisenstein's "Shadow of Earth", also set in a 1970s where the Spanish Armada defeated England in 1588. It would be nice to read an alternate history with a different spin on a failed Protestant Reformation.

Um...I would be miserable. That's pretty much it.

If I remember correctly, this was part of the history in the universe where The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman takes place, but it's not so much that the Catholic Church remained the same as it ever was so much as it seemed to absorb the reformation into itself. It takes place in present-day Europe, and just like in the Middle Ages the Church is in charge of everything, including sciences (after all, with no alternatives, there's no real way to question the Church's authority). What we know as theoretical physics, they know as "experimental theology". Also gender roles are much more old-fashioned, as it seems the feminist movement didn't quite take off. It's an odd mix of advanced technology and outdated social constructs. There's mention of Calvin having been a pope.

That was a fantasy book and there were several other differences between the universes (the presence of deamons and witches, for instance). But it might still be worth looking into.

Any thoughts on tactile differences? Imagine a typical 8000 person midwest town. In our world 7 or 8 different denomination churchs scattered throughout the town, sometimes even on competing corners of an intersection. In my alternate worlds, would there be only a Catholic church? Would Islam and eastern religions have a greater, or lesser, impact in present day America? Would there be more bells ringing, or less?

I think in your alternate world, there would be a bunch of parishes in that town; if people moved around less than they do now, people would probably think of themselves as being "from St. Ipsydipsy's" rather than "from the northeast side of town". Instead of primarily-territorial parishes ("you live between 38th St. N and Loop 1208, so you're a member of St. Ipsydipsy Parish") there might be parishes emphasizing specific ethnicities (the way it is in parts of the US East Coast) or specific religious orders ("I go to St. Kateri because I like the Jesuits' preaching" or "I go to St. Mary Magdalen because I attended a parish run by Dominicans before I moved here").

With 8000 people, I'd expect three or four parishes, with maybe one or two more very small ones. If the town has its own hospital - towns of that size in Montana often don't - it's probably run by a religious order.

There might be mosques, but probably about as many as in your typical 8000 person midwest town, I think; if you decided your alternate world was much more or much less tolerant of Islam, I think I'd find it equally believable. (There are people today who still consider Islam a Christian heresy. Not many of them, but they exist.) Depending on how things went with the Native Americans, there might be some sort of holy site for them nearby - or there might be a different kind of controversy from the ones we see now, where instead of "I don't care if you found coal there, that's our sacred mountain," people might say "I don't care if you built a church there three hundred years ago, you purposefully built it on our sacred mountain and we want it gone."

There would probably be more bells, since I don't imagine a Catholic city - even a Catholic-in-name-only city - getting very far with a noise ordinance that didn't exclude church bells. This might mean that if there's a mosque in Bat Fart, Oklahoma, they have a muezzin (or a recording of the call to prayer) that also can't be prevented by local ordinance. (Now I'm imagining a court case where someone tries to defend a broadcast at 4:20pm in honor of the Flying Spaghetti Monster on the grounds that it's religious, and thus the city needs to keep hands off!) Separation of church and state would just plain look different, no matter how much separation there actually was, and would mostly take the form of "don't tell the church what to do, don't make laws about purely religious subjects, and in return we won't meddle in government too often". Bishops might or might not hold any secular power - if the Reformation fizzled because the Pope was more amenable to Luther (though I'd be disappointed if the Church ended up teaching sola fide, and completely unable to believe it if the Church ended up teaching sola scriptura), it's entirely possible that bishops would have stopped being secular authorities much earlier.

And at what point did it not stick? There were over 100 years of war in the continent of Europe for Protestant versus Catholic points of view. Was it a Crusade by Catholicism against European protestants that made it fail? If the Catholic church had re-merged with the Eastern Orthodox church, and the Byzantine empire was even stronger (and lasted longer than 1000 years), Protestantism would probably not have had a chance to survive.

Hehehe. Got a bit of inspiration this evening and am going to take the issues, themes and some painted historical incidents of this theme, twist it into a fantasy romance, and produce my 2011 Nano titled "Hearts of Heresy". I haven't written fantasy (though I used to love to read it) and I haven't written romance (yeah, I surreptitiously "borrow" my wife's Nora Roberts and Jude Devareaux). This ought to be fun!!

I think that you'd find that the whole Church vanished, adn that the PAgan religios of the Highlands and countrysides was the largest religion.

Let me know if you want a free edit for this story. I remember thinking about how interesting this would be when I was in AP Europe, and I still remember most of the details.