Calvin, Zwingli, and the Radical Reformation

Luther's break with Rome after 1517 did not produce one Protestant church, it produced a tree. Ulrich Zwingli led Zurich toward a simpler, more symbolic reformation in the 1520s, rejecting Luther's view that Christ was truly present in the Eucharist. Out of these disputes came the Anabaptists, radicals who rejected infant baptism and demanded voluntary adult baptism, separation from the state, and often pacifism, earning persecution from Protestants and Catholics alike. John Calvin, a generation after Luther, built the most influential branch. His doctrine of predestination held that God had already decided, before birth, who would be saved, the elect, and who would not. This sounds bleak, but it gave believers a strange comfort: salvation did not depend on their own shaky efforts, it rested on God's unchangeable will.

Calvin turned Geneva into a working model of this theology. The consistory, a body of pastors and lay elders, supervised worship, settled disputes, and could summon citizens to answer for drunkenness, adultery, or neglecting church attendance. That oversight reached into households, shaping marriage, child-rearing, and daily conduct, because a disciplined life was treated as visible evidence, never proof, of belonging among the elect. From Geneva, missionaries and students carried this model outward: Huguenots in France, Presbyterians under John Knox in Scotland, and Reformed congregations in the Netherlands.

This spread turned religious doctrine into political geography. Calvinist minorities organized tightly and sometimes armed themselves, setting up the confessional conflicts, the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch Revolt, that fill the rest of the unit before it ends in the Peace of Westphalia.