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'John Calvin's Geneva, however, represented the ultimate in repression. The city-state of
Geneva...was also, in effect, a police state, ruled by a Consistory of five pastors and twelve lay
elders...The slightest criticism enraged Calvin...One morning he found a poster on his pulpit
accusing him of "Gross Hypocrisy." A suspect was arrested. No evidence was produced, but
he was tortured day and night for a month till he confessed. Screaming with pain, he was
lashed to a wooden stake. Penultimately, his feet were nailed to the wood; ultimately he was
decapitated...Then there is sad case of Michael Servetus, who ran afoul
of Calvin's theology and made the mistake of going to Geneva'. Stephen Hicks, Ph.D., John Calvin's Geneva |
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'[Michael] Servetus did not abandon his theological studies and his original doctrines...[he] then decided to go to Italy.
He chose the route that passed through Geneva, where on 13 August he was recognized and denounced by Calvin to the
magistrates. He was sentenced to be burned at the stake; his last cry was a reaffirmation of his views on the Trinity'. encyclopedia.com |
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When in January 1546 Pierre Ameaux, a member of the Little Council of Geneva, criticized Calvin at a supper
party in his own home, Calvin demanded that he be punished...[The Council] ordered Ameaux to walk all around
the city carrying a lighted torch, bareheaded and dressed only in his shirt, three times falling on his knees
and begging for mercy. A gallows was set up in front of his home to remind him of his likely fate if he
continued to be contumacious...Calvin drew up a list of acceptable Christian names for children and
prohibited children whose names were not on his list from receiving baptism. Warren H. Carroll, The Cleaving of Christendom, p211f. |
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'It was Protestant ministers who jumped on the Ku Klux Klan bandwagon. Possibly as many as forty thousand fundamentalist ministers joined the Klan. Many of them became Klan leaders in their communities. Others preached pro-Klan sermons from their pulpits, turned their churches over to Klan meetings, spoke at Klan rallies or became national Klan lecturers (of the 39 national Klan lecturers, 26 were fundamentalist ministers)'. W. C. Wade, The Fiery Cross (OUP, 1989), p.171. |
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'Most of the established church leaders quickly demonstrated that they were quite prepared to comply with the Nazi regime in political matters
as long as they were accorded some measure of religious freedom... Churches and churchgoers often looked away when confronted with Nazi crimes so long as they were not directly threatened'.
Prof. E. A. Johnson, Nazi Terror (Perseus, 1999), pp.196,250. |
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'Protestants were more sympathetic than Catholics to Nazism all along...Hitler made a brief radio appeal to Protestants on the eve of the 1933 church elections, and asked them to show their support for Nazi policies. He could not have been disappointed by the pro-Nazi results...
We also have evidence that many ordinary citizens and even religious leaders of Catholic and Protestant faiths did not condemn the Nazi program of 'mercy-killing' in principle... In some parts, Protestant churchgoers were displeased to see how many converted Jews went to church and demanded that they should not have to take the eucharist next to these Jews, whom they wanted banned from the services'. Prof. R. Gellately, Backing Hitler (OUP, 2001), pp.14,105,131 |
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'The leaders of the Protestant Church, with only a few exceptions, endorsed in general the establishment of the Nazi regime in Germany... The establishment of the Third Reich represented for Protestant leaders...the triumph of national religious faith. They generally welcomed that victory with joy'. Prof. T. S. Hamerow, On the Road to the Wolf's Lair (HUP, 1997), pp.151-158 |
'Visiting Cologne in 1636, a churchman wrote 'Outside the walls of many towns, we saw numerous stakes to which...women were bound and burned alive as witches'.
In one place, in the interests of efficiency, the executioner built an oven where in one year alone, he roasted to death forty-two women and girls for alleged witchcraft. Over nine years, he roasted to death over a thousand people, including children as young as two'.
Nigel Cawthorne, Witch Hunt (2003), p.107.