A History Of Christianity (2009) s01e04 Episode Script

DIARMAID MacCULLOCH: The Amish community of Pennsylvania are quiet and peaceable folk.
And yet five centuries ago their ancestors were seen as some of the most dangerous people in Europe.
They were radicals.
Protestants.
One of dozens of groups in the 16th century that tore apart the Catholic Church.
In the fourth part of this History of Christianity, I'll point out the trigger for religious revolution.
I'll try to make sense of the terrible wars and suffering it ignited in Europe.
And show why it also brought great joy and liberation.
I want to see how the old Western Church fought back, renewing Catholicism.
Of all the mad churches I've seen in Mexico, - this is definitely the maddest.
- Well, I think it's paradise.
MacCULLOCH: Above all, I want to understand how a faith based on obedience to the authority of the clergy gave birth to one where the individual is accountable to God alone.
In 1500, the only Christianity most Western Europeans knew was the Church which called itself Catholic, the Church of the Pope in Rome.
(PRIEST SINGING PRAYERS) Its priests were an elite with power to link ordinary people to God.
(CONGREGATION SINGING PRAYERS) They showed miraculous ability in the Mass to turn bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ.
Yet millions of Europeans were on the verge of rejecting this Catholic Church for a very different Christianity.
Only one thing could force such dramatic change.
That was the power of an idea.
An idea about something which concerns us all Death.
The Bible's New Testament offers a stark picture.
When we die, we go to Heaven or Hell.
But for us complex mortals, neither very good, nor very bad, the Western Church said there might be a midway stage called Purgatory.
You wait there to be made ready for Heaven.
Now, Purgatory is like Hell in that it's not a nice place to be, but there is a time limit on it.
And so you can do things to shorten the time.
You can give a coin to a beggar and he will pray for your soul.
People would even leave money in their wills to pay the villages taxes so that villagers would pray for them.
It's a wonderfully "you scratch my back I'll scratch your back" system.
(TRADITIONAL MUSIC PLAYING) By the 16th century, all through Europe the Church was selling certificates, called indulgences, to show how much time in Purgatory you had avoided.
The cash paid for new churches and hospitals.
When the Pope wanted to finish the rebuilding of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, he launched an indulgence campaign.
Some might think this a worthy cause.
But it raised big questions in the mind of a German monk whose views on the afterlife would change the Western Church.
His name was Martin Luther.
(MAN SINGING GERMAN SONG) Luther lived most of his life in the small town of Wittenberg in eastern Germany.
Each year on the 31 st of October, they celebrate Reformation Day.
It was on this date in 1517 that Luther announced a university debate on indulgences, which would discuss no fewer than 95 propositions or theses.
And it's said that he announced the debate by nailing a notice to the door of this church here.
And this, in legend, has become the start of the Reformation.
So what was so revolutionary about Luther's ideas? Ironically, his inspiration and so the whole Protestant Reformation, came from the most important theologian of Catholic Christianity, the fourth century African bishop Augustine of Hippo.
Augustine said the Bible revealed an all-powerful God who alone decides our fate after death.
Luther, like Augustine before him, read the Apostle Paul as saying that we are saved from Hell, justified, not by any good deeds of our own but by faith in God.
Now, if that is so then the Church has no claim to change or even influence the fate of a single human being.
Selling indulgences was wicked and useless.
(CHURCH ORGAN PLAYING) Luther was reminding people that the key to salvation didn't lie in the hands of the church but in the word of God.
And that could be found in the Bible.
The trouble was that many ordinary people couldn't read or write.
How could they hear the message in a book? But Luther found effective ways round the problem.
(ALL SINGING HYMN) Up until his time, most church music had been sung in Latin, by clergy and choirs.
Luther wrote superb German hymns for everyone to sing.
They helped convey the Bible's message.
I asked this church's director of music why they were so successful.
We've heard this great tune, A Mighty Fortress, Eine Feste Burg, which does stick in the head somehow, doesn't it? Yes, the tune is by Luther and it brings in elements of the popular music of the time, the folk songs, a little bit of a dance, like.
But big congregations couldn't do that, surely, they're not that sophisticated.
They did have a hard time and the pastors complained, "We keep trying to sing these hymns but the people aren't, "they're not singing loud enough" or "they're not working with it".
But what they did is they tried to get the school kids to learn them.
They were even sent into the congregation to sit amongst the people.
And they're supposed to sing loudly in worship and hopefully the others will come along with them.
Sorry.
MacCULLOCH: Luther had no thoughts of quitting the Church.
All he was doing was giving God back the power which was God's.
Then he found the Church quit him.
The Pope felt Luther threatened the God-given authority of the Church.
(PEOPLE CHATTERING) So a solemn papal pronouncement condemned him.
(MAN ANNOUNCING IN GERMAN) (CROWD CHANTING) Luther replied by burning it Over the next decade, this open defiance of ancient authority was christened "Protestantism".
But in proclaiming his view of salvation Luther risked death at the stake.
He was defying not only the Pope but Europe's most powerful monarch, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.
(MAN CONTINUES ANNOUNCING) There's a pious legend that has Luther saying to the Emperor, "Here I stand, I can do no other".
Well, if he didn't say that he ought to have done, because it captures the essence of his defiance.
And it's a cry which I find the most compelling thing about Protestantism.
We stand alone with our consciences, we can do no other.
Luther's message appeals to modern individualism.
A refusal blindly to accept authority.
But it took huge bravery to defy Pope and Emperor.
And the odd thing is that Luther also talked a lot about obedience to the powers that God had placed in the world.
That meant a lot to him.
So, was Luther's message about revolt or about creating a settled, obedient society? Well, Luther never really answered that one.
And that unanswered question remains a central problem for Protestantism.
And worse was to come.
Luther found that other reformers refused to follow his own line.
"Here he stood, they were going to do something else.
" While Luther was a university lecturer, another great reformer, Ulrych Zwingli, was a busy parish priest.
He played out his own reformation in one of Europe's greatest city-states, Zürich.
Zwingli always claimed that independently of Luther, he discovered the central Protestant idea that only God's gift of faith can save us from Hell I find that hard to believe.
It would certainly be one of the biggest historical coincidences of all time.
And it must be said that Luther and Zwingli did not get on.
We'll see why.
In 1522, Zwingli was invited to a dinner party, where the guests ate a sausage.
That night the sausage became the rallying-cry for a Swiss reformation.
(BOTH SPEAKING GERMAN) It was Lent, when the Church told people to show penitence for their sins by giving things up, especially tasty sausages.
The inappropriate sausage eating caused quite a stir in Zürich.
Zwingli didn't actually eat the sausage himself, but he argued that there was nothing morally wrong with the sausage.
He pointed out that the Bible has no commandment about keeping Lent.
And he warned Zürich that the church was sidelining God's real laws by making such a fuss about things like that.
Zwingli was saying that the Bible and not the Pope carried God's authority.
So far, so much like Luther.
But Zwingli's Reformation went much further.
Now, here there's no getting away from technical jargon to make things clear.
All Protestants at the time were reformers but it was only this non-Lutheran version of Protestantism that came to be known as Reformed, with a capital "R".
So what was happening here in Zürich was the creation of a whole new sort of Protestantism.
The Zürich authorities felt that they had a sacred trust from God to govern.
Zwingli told them that this was what God wanted.
That nerved the City Council to take the whole church of Zürich out of the hands of the local Catholic bishop.
And Zwingli was more than ready to tell them how to run it Zwingli and his colleagues re-read the Ten Commandments.
The Commandments forbid graven images, so they tore down the images of the saints.
They even banned music for half a century and more because beauty distracts from worshipping God.
And since the Bible nowhere tells clergy to be celibate, the Zürich clergy broke with half a millennium of Western Christian tradition and got married.
But Zwingli had one more controversial proposal that became a distinguishing characteristic of Reformed Protestants.
At Zürich's wealthy collegiate church, the Great Minster or Grossmünster, Zwingli's view on the Mass, or Eucharist, transformed the heart of Christian worship.
At the Last Supper, before Christ was crucified, he broke bread, took wine, calling them his body and blood.
The old Church taught that in the Mass God had given the priest the power to transform bread and wine into Christ's body and blood.
He actually brought God physically to the people.
That gave priests astonishing power.
For centuries, they were the main gateway to God.
And the High Altar, at which they presided at Mass, was the most sacred place in church.
This Grossmünster had been built for Catholic worship centuries before the Reformation, and so the whole thing is intended to look behind me, right up to that east end.
There, you'd have the High Altar where the Mass was celebrated day in, day out.
But you see, it's gone.
And instead, everything's been pulled forwards to where I'm standing.
This extraordinary piece of Reformation furniture.
Well, it's a font for baptism, but it actually doubles as a Communion table on the top.
And they're in the middle of the people thanks to Zwingli and the Zürich Reformation.
(ALL SINGING HYMN) Zwingli argued that the bread and wine are not miraculously transformed in the Mass.
He justified this revolutionary thought by his reading of the Gospels.
The Bible tells us that Christ ascended into heaven and will not return until the last day.
He's sitting at the right hand of the Father, not here on a table in Zürich.
Zwingli said that breaking bread, drinking wine, are symbols.
The believer remembers that Christ died on the Cross.
Luther's comeback to that? Zwingli's wicked and crazy.
Today, the presiding minister of the Grossmünster is Kathi La Roche.
In the true spirit of the Reformation, she has her own ideas about the bread and wine.
So you're the successor of Zwingli in this church, but I just get the sense that you might not feel quite the same about the Eucharist as them.
No, I'm a little bit more close to Luther.
- Aha.
- Yeah.
Luther.
The great enemy of Zwingli, you're closer to Luther.
Zwingli was a very rationalistic man.
He thought with the head.
Head's everything.
Yeah.
And I think Luther was more close to the people, and I can feel when I give the bread to somebody and I say, "This is the body of Christ", or "This is the bread of life", something happens between this person and me and receiving.
And I think this is a moment where people can feel, "Yes, he is here with me.
" I see.
So you're saying that Zwingli has this great idea of community, but there is something which he might be missing here, that there's an event between God and an individual.
I think so.
And that's the insight that Luther had which Zwingli - seems to have missed perhaps.
- Yeah.
No wonder they hated each other so much! (LAUGHING) (BELLS TOLLING) Both reformers championed individual conscience over obedience to priestly authority.
It's just, Zwingli favoured cool, logical thinking above Luther's insights into the more passionate depths of faith.
But the split showed up the big problem for the Reformation, one that is still a hallmark of Protestantism.
A tendency to sectarianism.
If you let anyone read the Bible, then any idea can suddenly seem the most important.
This can be a weakness.
It can also be a strength, a trigger for expansion.
To Zwingli's dismay, some of those he'd inspired now pointed out that the Bible made no mention of baptism for infants.
(CHATTERS) So they began baptising adults afresh, earning themselves the nickname Anabaptists, or re-baptizers.
Now they were not so much defying the Pope but the city-state of Zürich.
In fact, they argued that nowhere did the New Testament link church and state.
In January 1525, a group of radical enthusiasts baptized themselves in public.
They followed it up by breaking bread and drinking wine, and all without a single clergyman involved.
It was an open challenge.
It was too much.
The City Council condemned four of them to death in a way suited to their crime against the waters of baptism.
They drowned them, here in the River Limat But the Anabaptists were not about to give up.
In the hills above Zürich is the secret meeting place used by those who fled the persecution.
I climbed up there with Peter Dettwiler who's a minister in the Reformed church.
You have to imagine people coming up here with their children, families being persecuted to gather here for services, and I think it was a very special place for them.
MacCULLOCH: The Swiss Anabaptists were soon just one among many groups claiming to be the only authentic Christianity.
They all survive to this day.
Unitarians, Mennonites, Amish, Quakers.
(TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWING) Thirty years after Luther's revolution it was not yet obvious that Protestantism would spread across Europe, never mind the rest of the world.
It was at this moment that a young French exile brought new dynamism to the Reformation, John Calvin.
Calvin never wanted to leave France.
Catholic persecution forced him out.
It was a sheer fluke that he fled to a city-state on the edge of Switzerland.
(TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS) He never much liked the place, but he felt that God had sent him there, and you can't say no to God.
Driven, single-minded, humourless Calvin, he was such a success that his city became known as the Protestant Rome.
It was Geneva.
There is an arresting intensity in what Calvin said about encountering God.
He spoke of believers experiencing union with Christ.
He tends to be remembered as a killjoy, and it's true that at one time he tried to stop the whole city of Geneva dancing.
But his real significance is that he turned the swirling confusion of the Protestant Reformation into a practical and accessible guidebook, his Institutes of the Christian Religion.
The former head of the Reformed Church in Geneva is now director of the city's Reformation Museum.
She looked me out a special copy of Calvin's Institutes from their collections.
- Can I pick it up? - Of course.
It's a first edition, isn't it? That's right.
1536.
And so, it's extraordinary, he's a university lecturer.
- What, late 20's? - Yes, that's right.
And he's trying to re-write Christianity or encapsulate it - in a little book, isn't he? - Yes, and I think that I like to understand this attempt of Calvin as giving to people new keys for understanding Christianity to interpret the Christian doctrine, and I like to think of reformation first as an interpretation of the old ideas.
Well, you use the word "new" but I think Calvin would say really old, before medieval Catholicism, before that corruption.
Yes, but at least we have to recognise that he brought these new ways, this new spreading of old ideas, so to speak.
Isabel, it's a special delight to me to meet you because you were the first woman successor of Calvin.
- That's right.
- And less than 500 years after his birth? Well, that's nothing, is it! But what do you think Calvin would have thought of that? Of course, it was not acceptable for Calvin because he had the ideas of his time.
That women should keep in their place.
So, I don't think that he would have approved, neither did he approve of woman pastors or of women who wanted to preach.
So how did you approach becoming moderator? I went to Calvin's grave and I put down a rose in memory of this life, this so important life.
But then I turned to the grave and then I said, "Now, it's my turn.
" (MacCULLOCH LAUGHING) MacCULLOCH: Calvin's guide spread Protestantism far beyond Geneva thanks to a particular technology.
Printing made it possible for anyone educated to read Calvin's Institutes, which they did.
His followers also used print to create a special Geneva Bible, carefully edited and annotated to guide their reading and interpretation.
This is actually my own copy of the Geneva Bible.
But this is from 1606, by which time it's a real best seller in England.
And it's more than just a book.
It's a way of life.
It's a way of Christian life.
You open it up and you see every chapter divided into verses so you can remember just a little bit and quote it.
But much more than that it tells you how to read it.
All round the text there's huge quantities of notes, so you're told how to think as a reformed Christian.
And bound up at the back there's something else.
The 150 psalms turned into metrical psalms, poetry.
And some of these psalms still survive in hymnals in churches, and the famous one is Psalm 100, the Old Hundredth, so called.
Geneva had become the beacon for a Protestant movement stretching right across Europe.
Zürich and Geneva saw their Church as the true, properly Reformed, Catholicism.
Roman Catholics would disagree, of course.
Calvin's style of Protestantism defined itself by what it was against.
Not just the Pope, but to his mind pathetically half-Reformed Lutherans and mad Anabaptists.
Reformed Protestantism was also extraordinary in its ability to leap over the frontiers of language and culture.
Built into Geneva's old city walls is a memorial to key figures of the Reformation from all over Europe.
Standing among them is a Scotsman, John Knox.
In the Genevan church Knox found a model to take back to Scotland.
Preaching God's word was central to worship.
And this was reflected in the size and grandeur of the city's new pulpits, and copied far beyond.
The Genevan-style Church of Scotland out-Calvined Calvin.
Scottish congregations might be moved to shout cries of praise or "Amen!" in the way that we're still familiar with in American evangelical Protestantism.
Children would be expected to repeat at home what the minister had said that morning in church.
As a result, the Scots came to value a good education for all, in a fashion which has never quite seized their English neighbours.
(CHURCH BELLS TOLLING) Protestantism did come to England, too.
But not in a form that John Knox would have approved.
It took on a flavour unique in Europe.
(CHOIR SINGING HYMNS) In 1534, Henry VIII made himself head of the Church of England after the Pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
Reformed Europe in places like Zürich and Geneva turned its back on formal sung services in grand cathedral settings.
But King Henry's daughter, Elizabeth I, controversially decided to keep both.
Responsibility for maintaining the sung tradition here at Winchester Cathedral is down to choirmaster Andrew Lumsden.
Andrew, the choir's performed Teach Me O Lord by William Byrd, which is one of my favourite pieces of Anglican music.
But it also says a lot about the English Reformation, doesn't it? Yes, you have one of the themes in the piece is a piece of Gregorian chant which had been around for hundreds of years before William Byrd.
It's called Tonus Peregrinus, and you'll find it in the top of the chant with the full choir sections.
Up until then, everything had been sung in Latin, was totally unapproachable by the people.
And one of the things was to make it sing in the English so that it was approachable.
But Byrd was very cleverly just sneaking this in to remind people of the former regime.
And that's because he's a Roman Catholic, isn't it? And writing for a Protestant queen, Elizabeth.
How's she allowing this to go on? Well, that's a very good question.
I mean, she obviously had a great love of music of this nature, and I think probably just turned a blind eye.
(CHOIR SINGING) MacCULLOCH: But not everyone in England approved of half-measures of reform.
Puritans were austere Protestants who hated anything which suggested Catholicism.
Under Elizabeth's successor-but-one, Charles I, their anger swelled into civil war.
Puritan soldiers fighting for the Westminster Parliament against Charles smashed stained glass windows and any symbol of English Catholic monarchy.
These caskets contain the bones of Anglo-Saxon kings.
Except all the bones are in the wrong place, because Parliamentarian soldiers tore open the cases and scattered the bones around to express their contempt for kings.
It was all part of their campaign against ancient superstition and their longing to bring the New Jerusalem to England.
In the end, the Puritan commander Oliver Cromwell defeated Charles, even executed him and set up a Protestant Republic.
But the Puritans' New Jerusalem wasn't popular.
The last straw was their effort to abolish Christmas Day for not being in the Bible.
The Church of England was restored, cathedrals and all For all the later complications of English religion, Anglicanism became an integral part of the national identity.
Since the Reformation, the Anglican Communion has swung between the poles of Catholicism and Protestantism, producing a subtle, reflective form of Christianity.
It's the part of the Christian Church which I know best, and I must admit that I still love it, despite all its faults.
So, now we have met a gallery of Protestantisms.
Lutherans, Reformed, Radicals, Anglicans.
The Reformation story is one of splits and persecution.
That's what people find most difficult to understand about it How can you burn someone at the stake for saying that a piece of bread is not God? Our instinct is to feel the pain of the individual burning.
Yet this was a world with different priorities.
They felt the pain of the whole of society if one individual denied God's truth.
So society needed to be healed, even if that meant causing hideous pain for one individual.
People cared passionately about these matters.
And the passion was by no means all on the side of Protestants.
(CHURCH BELL TOLLING) Protestantism had already won over the north, and it had done well in Central Europe, too.
Now, Catholics were hardly going to stand idly by while it gobbled up the rest of the map.
(SCOOTER ENGINE ACCELERATING) If you've heard of a "Counter-Reformation", you may think it was just that, the Catholic Church's reaction to Protestantism.
In fact, it began in response to a much older threat Islam's conquest of Spain in the seventh century.
Catholic Christians hung on in northern Spain.
For 500 years they dreamt of reconquest.
By the 13th century, they'd fought their way back to Andalusia in the south and one of its greatest cities, Córdoba.
Córdoba was a major step in the reconquest of Spain, and behind me is the biggest symbol you could have of that triumph.
Córdoba's cathedral is a weird building.
The great choir and High Altar are like a cuckoo in a nest.
They are stuck right into the heart of what was once a mosque.
This building was the greatest mosque of Arab, Muslim, Córdoba.
But when the Catholics reconquered the city, they seized this sacred Islamic site and re-consecrated it for Christian worship.
It shrieks Catholic triumph at you.
(WOMAN SINGING) Catholic Spain was obsessive about suppressing Islam.
It was equally worried about Judaism.
Its rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella, became the first monarchs to run an inquisition to root out non-Catholics.
The Inquisition operated from Córdoba's old Moorish Palace, the Alcazar.
The Spanish Inquisition has had a bad press over the years for its cruelty and oppression, but it's worth remembering that every 16th century system of justice was cruel and oppressive.
And in fact, overall, the Inquisition executed a lower proportion of suspects than most secular courts.
(CHURCH BELLS TOLLING) What the Inquisition did do was enforce a system of racial and cultural superiority.
It added up to a militant, self-confident Catholicism, emerging quite independently of Protestant reform.
But eventually, Rome realised it had to react to the Reformation as well In 1545, a Council opened at Trent in Italy to restate Catholic truths and to reassert papal authority.
This is another church in Córdoba, and it embodies the spirit of the Council of Trent It was built for a brand new organisation ready to do the Council's bidding, the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits.
This is a very grand building.
But it's also very plain.
The early Jesuits liked plainness.
And of course it's also very open, there's no screen here.
There, of course, is a pulpit, because Catholics can preach as well as Protestants.
But the Catholic Church could offer much more from its tradition.
Sitting on that High Altar behind me is the tabernacle in which you keep the consecrated bread, the body of Christ for the faithful to worship whenever they walk into church.
But more than that, his mother, Mary.
She is always present, a human mother who has borne God.
And she adds a femininity to worship which Protestantism rather lacks.
And you also have the confessional, a brand new invention of the Counter-Reformation so that you can unburden yourself of sin to a priest.
So what the Counter-Reformation offered you was a sense of companionship, companionship with Holy Mother Church.
This was the Counter-Reformation's answer to Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin.
Far from being destroyed by the Protestants, the Catholic church did what Christianity always does, it adapted itself in a crisis.
It eventually emerged renewed and poised to win new converts.
This is Grahada, the last Muslim stronghold to fall to the armies o f Ferdinand and Isabella.
As Muslim power faded here, Catholic Spain and Portugal began building empires overseas.
The man you see above me is Christopher Columbus at the feet of Queen Isabella.
In 1492, in the same year that Muslim Granada fell, Columbus reached what we now call the West Indies.
The Church traveled out on the same ships as his soldiers.
Counter Reformation Catholicism was about to become the first worldwide religion.
The first missionaries to the New World were Franciscan friars, desperate to spread the word because they believed that the end of the world was coming.
Half a century later, the Jesuits followed them.
In countries such as Mexico, these envoys of militant Catholicism met civilisations which to begin with, were able to fight back.
But suddenly, the native peoples began dying in thousands.
In the words of one despairing ruler, "in heaps like bedbugs".
It wasn't the soldiers but invisible armies of European diseases that did most of the damage.
Traumatised local peoples were often only too ready to turn to Catholicism.
Up there is the Church of Our Lady of Help.
You might think it was built on a hill, but in fact, it's built on top of the largest man-made pyramid in the world.
When Catholic missionaries came to Mexico, they deliberately put churches on top of temples.
They placed their place of sacrifice slap bang on top of the old place of sacrifice.
You might say "Catholicism Rules OK".
We can learn a great deal about the mindset of the Spanish conquerors by taking a closer look at one of their monuments to victory.
This is the Capilla Real de Indios, the Chapel Royal of the Indians, in Cholula.
I paid it a visit with leading Mexican historian, Clara Garcia.
I was intrigued because it took me far away to Spain and Jerusalem.
It's like nothing in the Christian world, but it's like lots of great mosques in Syria and Egypt, and of course, one in Spain.
You've got the Grand Mosque of Córdoba.
Now, do you think that's coincidence? No, no, no, you're quite right, it's fashioned after the Great Mosque in Córdoba.
It's got 49 domes and seven aisles and it's a huge open space also.
Actually, what it reminds me of is an Islamic building in Jerusalem.
It's the courtyard of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Now, let me just run this idea past you.
- This is built by Franciscans, right? - Yes.
And the Franciscans at the time think that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is the Temple, - Solomon's temple in Jerusalem.
- CLARA: Mmm-hmm.
So, do you think they're trying to recreate the new Jerusalem of the last days here? Oh, definitely, they're trying to recreate the New Jerusalem - with new Christians, new Catholics - MacCULLOCH: New Catholics.
at the same time that the Protestant Reformation is going on in Europe.
Catholicism is losing souls to the Protestants and here they are gaining thousands - MacCULLOCH: Oh, I like that.
of new souls.
So it's the perfect New Jerusalem with the perfect Christians.
MacCULLOCH: They win some, you lose some! CLARA: Yes, in a manner of speaking, yes.
MacCULLOCH: The inside of this church seems to mirror the mosque in Córdoba.
The courtyard, the mosque in Jerusalem.
So, what is this building trying to say? Maybe this.
Back home in Spain, Catholic Christians had crushed Islam.
They'd turned their mosques into churches.
Now, here in New Spain, Mexico, they'd crushed other false gods and conquered their princes.
Now, what better way to commemorate that victory than in the same way, build the princes a church which looked like a mosque? Just an idea.
But after the horrors of conquest, the missionaries realised that in order to win hearts and minds, they would have to help the new converts to find joy and celebration in Catholicism.
It had to assimilate native cultures.
Nowhere have I seen a clearer demonstration of how this was done than in the nearby town of Santa Maria Tonantzintla.
Of all the mad churches I've seen in Mexico, this is definitely the maddest.
Tell me about it.
Well, I think it's Paradise.
Well, okay.
It's a mad Paradise.
This is what I would imagine Heaven to be like.
MacCULLOCH: Yeah.
CLARA: Full of people, gay, angels everywhere, pretty, beautiful.
What happened is that when the Franciscans came to Santa Maria, it was a small village, they couldn't afford to leave a friar.
So they would teach maybe some elders, some children, educate them in the Spanish language and the rudiments of Christianity and then leave, come back a few years later and see how Christianity was doing.
The actual villagers, the dwellers of the area, took Christianity and fashioned it in their own image and likeness.
So it becomes an indigenous religion then, because it's taught by people to people in the village.
Totally, and if you look at the faces of the angels, they're all local faces of the time.
MacCULLOCH: (GASPS) Yeah.
When the missionaries went overseas, the Catholic Church was more than happy to mingle two cultures.
But it was a curious sort of flexibility, because it was flexible only about everyday religious practice.
Now, some missionaries, especially the Jesuits, wanted to talk about the Christian faith itself in new ways, which would make sense in other cultures.
But after much argument, the church hierarchy rigidly insisted that whatever Rome had said about Christian doctrine must be right and could never be altered.
A perfect example of that curious flexibility is the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City.
The appearance of the Virgin Mary to a native near here was more than a miracle.
She looks like the people of Mexico, which means that she, and the Catholic Church, can speak directly to them.
But doctrinally, she is still the virgin mother of God.
(ALL SINGING) It's a Tuesday and there are 8,000 people gathered.
It's estimated that by 1550, as many as 10 million had been baptized as Catholics in the Americas.
(ALL SINGING) It was a huge morale booster for the popes in Rome, still smarting from the Protestant Reformation.
(PRIEST CHANTING PRAYERS) Catholics were ready to fight back.
(BELL CHIMING) A hundred years after Martin Luther first pinned his rallying cry to a church door, northern Europe had become solidly Protestant, but southern Europe had fallen behind the Catholic Church.
And there was a great swathe of Central Europe where the options were still open.
It was a recipe for war.
(MUSIC PLAYING) The first battlefield was Prague, capital of the modern day Czech Republic.
At the start of the 17th century, Protestantism had not only taken over much of Northern and Western Europe, it even reached here to the capital of Bohemia, a kingdom which was a vital part of the Holy Roman Empire.
By now, the vast majority of Bohemians were Protestants and their Catholic rulers, the Habsburgs, had been forced to concede them their religious liberty.
But in 1617, everything changed.
The Catholic Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor chose one of his own family to be the next king of Bohemia.
Archduke Ferdinand despised Protestants.
In a pre-emptive strike, Bohemian Protestants seized the Royal Palace.
On the 23rd of May 1618, they threw two of Ferdinand's officials out of this window.
A heap of straw just below saved their lives, but not Hapsburg pride.
The incident has been splendidly christened the Defenestration of Prague.
The Protestants invited a neighbouring Calvinist ruler, the Elector Palatine Friedrich, to become their new king.
(BAND PLAYING) Friedrich lasted barely a year.
Unfortunately for Bohemia, Archduke Ferdinand became Holy Roman Emperor.
His revenge was swift.
(OFFICER SHOUTING ORDERS) In November 1620, the Bohemians, and Protestantism, were crushed at the Battle of White Mountain.
Today the site is at the end of a tram line, which seems appropriate, really.
The only indication of its importance in European history is the nearby Catholic Church of our Lady of Victory.
What we are looking at is the place which triggered one of the most bitter, destructive wars in European history.
And it lasted 30 years.
In his victory, Emperor Ferdinand declared an empire-wide ban on Reformed Protestantism.
Lutherans and Calvinists realised that they had to come together to fight for the future of Protestantism.
War overtook countries from Sweden and Denmark in the north to France and Spain in the south.
Even Poland and Transylvania were sucked in.
In the fight, between a quarter and a third of the population of Central Europe died before their time.
It was 1648 before peace finally broke out.
Much of Europe was a wasteland and much of Europe would never be Protestant again.
Wars of religion didn't seem such a good idea after all.
The Catholics managed to push Protestantism back from parts of Central and Western Europe and confine it mainly to the north.
But the Thirty Years' War had a much wider significance for Christian futures.
Persecuted Protestants took flight not just from Prague.
Some, like the Swiss Anabaptists, quit the Old World for good.
Maybe Protestantism could steal a march on Catholicism in the New World.
In 1682, an influential English Quaker, William Penn, secured a new colony in North America.
His goal was religious freedom, not only for Quakers, but for all Christians.
Religious exiles of all persuasions flocked from across Europe.
William Penn named this land Penn's Paradise, Pennsylvania.
If you want to spot Anabaptists, then Lancaster County is the place for you.
This is home to 37 distinct religious groups collectively known as Plain People, all descended from the radicals of the Reformation.
They all belong to the Amish, Mennonite or Brethren Churches.
They keep up many old ways, especially a fine Protestant disregard for outside authority.
Some defy the modern world by living without things we take for granted, cars, electricity.
I met Stephen Scott of the Old Order River Brethren, who reminded me of that name all these folk have for themselves, the Plain People.
Why have the Plain People split so much? Well, our faith applies to not only intangible doctrines, but to daily living, so, unfortunately the more there is to disagree about.
(BOTH CHUCKLING) And an important principle is non-conformity to the world, so where do you draw the line between the church and the world? You have Mennonites and Amish who drive horse-drawn vehicles, but in my group we have cars.
Well, this might seem a mischievous question, but what's wrong with the world? And I don't just mean the 21 st century world, I mean the 16th century world that the first Anabaptists refused to conform to.
What's wrong with the world? Well, there would be some basic issues like the whole matter of pride.
Dressing in a way that would draw attention to your body is very much discouraged.
You would say, well, the Plain People do attract a lot of attention by the way they dress.
(CHUCKLES) But it's actually little if any different than the principles of monastic order.
MacCULLOCH: The Plain People are more than a curiosity.
They tell us a great deal about what would have happened if the small Jewish sect from Galilee had not adapted.
Yes, it may well have survived, just like the Plain People, into the 21st century.
Clinging to tradition can help in that way.
But it would never have spread and become a world religion.
The refusal of the Plain People to change their ways meant it wasn't they who would turn America into a great powerhouse of world Protestantism.