"I'm In Love With a Church Girl."

[DetlefK]

3. The protestant reformation was puritan backlash against a decadent catholic church.

In that time, there were two big streams of Christianity:

* The catholic church had grown fat, corrupt and political. (The contemporary pope Alexander VI is the best example.) The contradiction to Jesus Christ's teachings of love, poverty and and political anti-authoritarianism became bigger and bigger.

* At the same time, an occult, syncretic, magical version of Christianity was emerging: Some Christians began mixing Christianity with philosophical and religious concepts from Kabbala, Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt... This was done to bring Christianity back to its original roots, but to those outside of the movement it looked like a perversion of Christianity.



The protestant reformation was about rejecting all the things that had polluted Christianity. It was about purifying it.

Ironically, today's Evangelicals are now engaging in the very same decadence and corruption and politization that the original Evangelicals rejected.