EVANGELICI. – Among Protestant authors, the primitive sects, such as the Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican, etc., are designated by the collective name “Evangelical Churches,” in opposition to the “Catholic Church.” It is in this sense that modern Protestants have wished to revive the name e. Indeed, after the Pan-American Protestant Congress or Conference of Panama (1916), some delegates, having concluded the Congress, visited various nations of Latin America. Having observed the unfortunate impression made among Latin American Catholics by the different names of so many sects, they recommended, in order to erase it, that the name “Evangelical Church” be adopted as the common name for all the Protestant sects of a given nation, and that their members no longer call themselves Baptists or Methodists, but simply e. In Italy, in the most recent censuses, the members of the various sects renounced, for census purposes, their names as Waldensians, Baptists, etc., adhering instead to the common designation e., as though all were members of a single Evangelical Church that did not exist. The name e., however, is applied in a special way to the members of the Evangelical Church of Prussia.
Prussia embraced Lutheranism in 1323, when the grand master of the Teutonic Order, Alberto, apostatized and proclaimed himself Duke of Prussia. The Elector of Brandenburg, Giovanni Sigismondo (1606–19), who had united the Electorate of Brandenburg with the Duchy of Prussia and was a Calvinist (v. CONFESSIONI DI PEDE PROTESTANTI: luterano-calviniste), unsuccessfully attempted to make the Prussians Calvinists. The first King of Prussia, Federico I (1700–13), attempted the same thing, but in vain. Federico II (1740–86), Voltaire’s friend, indeed granted all his subjects broad freedom of worship, but reduced the various sects in his states to mere religious societies under his control. This domination by the German Protestant princes over the sects in their territories was nothing new. Luther had already granted it, at least with regard to the Lutherans, when
he wrote to the Elector of Saxony that “in the name of Christian charity and for the love of God he should take into his hands the care of the Church, etc.” As for the Calvinists or Reformed of Prussia, they were indebted to the Hohenzollern family because the Elector and Duke Giovanni Sigismondo had been a Calvinist, as had his confession of faith, and because the Great Elector Federico Guglielmo (1640–88) had welcomed into his states the Calvinists expelled from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. King Federico Guglielmo III (1707–1840) made use of this authority over the two principal sects in his states to establish the United Evangelical Church. After the wars against Napoleon had ended, in 1817, on the occasion of the third centenary of the Reformation, he wished to unite the Lutherans and the Reformed of his states into a single church. He therefore proposed that, setting aside doctrinal differences and preserving each group’s symbolic books, they should all unite in a spirit of fraternal love in order to receive the Lord’s Supper together. The idea was received fairly well, more by the Reformed than by the Lutherans, and was approved by many provincial synods, which asked the king to convene a general synod to study the structure of the new Church—something that neither the king nor his ministers liked. He then considered introducing the episcopate; but, faced with the opposition of Protestants, who were sensitive to anything that might resemble the detested Catholic system, he was content that they should be called superintendents and that one among them should exercise a certain oversight over all the synods and councils. What mattered most to the king, however, was the new liturgy that he himself had composed, drawn from the earliest Lutheran and Anglican liturgies, which still greatly resembled the Catholic liturgy, and in which he went down to the minutest rubrics. In 1822 he imposed it upon all the Churches dependent on him. Opposition was again strong, but the king continued to pursue his purpose. Among the opponents, Schleiermacher, a professor at the University of Berlin, and Scheibel, a Lutheran pastor of Breslau in Silesia, stood out. Some of the dissenters emigrated to North America and gave rise to the Missouri or Ohio Synod and the Buffalo Lutheran Synod. The successors of Federico Guglielmo III granted greater religious freedom; but even after the Constitution of 1851, by which the Evangelical Church was granted a regime independent of the State through a subtle distinction between the State and the prince, the Evangelical Church remained subject to the king as before. He governed it through a special council called “Evangelischer Oberkirchenrat,” directly responsible to him, while still permitting the holding of provincial synods and, in 1869, even a general synod. This subjection of the Church to the King of Prussia lasted until the Weimar Constitution (1910), which separated the new Reich from all the Churches. At the assembly in Stuttgart in 1921, many of these Churches organized the Confederation of German Evangelical Churches; of the 29 churches that formed it, the first and most numerous, with approximately 20,000,000 faithful, was the Evangelical Church of the Old Prussian Union.
The Confederation was called Deutsche Evangelische Kirche (D. E. K.) and established three administrative bodies to replace the various pre-existing authorities: the Kirchentag, a legislative body of laymen and clergy; the Kirchenbundesrat, or council of advisers; and the Kirchenausschuss, an executive body. The e. still predominated in these bodies because of their numbers. This was the situation Hitler found when he came to power (1913–34). At first he did not appear to be hostile to the Church; but with the formation of the “German Christians” and through his policies, he soon revealed himself as a great enemy of both Catholics and Protestants. The Evangelical Church suffered particularly when Dr. Jaeger, one of the principal leaders of the “German Christians,” was imposed by Hitler as head of the Evangelical Church of Prussia. The many vicissitudes of the e. during the Hitler government followed those of all the other German Protestants; and although not a few joined the German Christians, several, precisely because of the merciless persecution of Nazism, grew stronger in their religious principles and devotional practices. Foremost among them was the minister Martino Niemoller. After the German collapse of 1945, the D. E. K. changed its name to Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (E. K. I. D.), and the Evangelical Church of Prussia followed its course. In 1949, within the E. K. I. D., 10% were Reformed, 70% Lutheran, and 20% e. At present, it seems that the e. and all German Protestants place their entire hope in ecumenism; indeed, they all work together in the Hilfswerk, or relief organization, in which, effectively aided by foreign Protestants, they strive to remedy the calamities caused by the war.
BIBLI.: J. H. Blunt, s. V. Church, in Dictionary of Sects. London 1874, p. 868; Kerr D. Macmillan, Protestantism in Germany, New York 1917, p. 164; D. C. Fabricius, Ecumenical Handbook of the Churches of Christ, Berlin-Stragitz 1927, pp. 48–49; M. Bendicioli, La Germania religiosa nel III Reich, Brescia 1936; M. Power, Religion in the Reich, Oxford 1935; A. Keller, Christian Europe Today, New York–London 1942, p. 65; H. Smith Leger, Christianity Today, no. 4, New York 1947, p. 58; Kenneth G. Grubb and E. J. Bingle, World Christian Handbook, London 1949, p. 33. Camillo Crivelli