Originally Posted By: DMD
A valid point and one in which churches found themselves 'whipsawed' during the post Reformation period and beyond as the secular rulers vacilatted between Catholicism and Lutheranism...


Most certainly true of Germany. In England, the whipsaw was a troika of Catholocism, Anglicanism, and Puritanism (Cromwell).

For the Pennsylvania colony the reaction was to be entirely dis-established from the onset in what proprietor William Penn called a "holy experiment"--but which some visitors rightly discerned led to freedom FROM religion. One such visitor predicted that this would lead to moral anarchy. It took three centuries, but Gottlieb Middleberger was right.