Protestantism in the Balkans and Serbia

Abstract

After the end of the unity of the Western church at the beginning of the 16th century, the reformation movement of returning to Evangelical ideals of Christian collectiveness arrived inevitably to the area of the Balkans. The spectrum of churches belonging to the reformation heritage with different doctrines, relying upon the agency of the first medieval heretic movements (Waldenses, Bogomils, Hussites, Hutterites, Unitarians), endeavored with varying success to grow in the reformation oriented aristocracy and wider peasantry in the South Slavic countries. The Evangelisation of Slavic population in the Balkans intensified in the middle of the 19th century. Christians and Jews became the focus of missionary activities in the Ottoman Empire, since talking to Muslims was punishable by death. The support of the American consular officers and the sympathy of Turkish authorities toward technologically advanced Western forces on the wave of the first industrial revolution was helpful. The changed social atmosphere for further process of protestantisation among the population loyal to traditional churches and religious communities first led to the end of World Wars and then to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the start of civil wars on the territory of former Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 1990's. Through a meticulous analysis of the collected theological, ethnographic, historical, sociological, and other material, the author here presents the most represented Protestant religious communities in the Balkans, in the ex-republics of the former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia and contemporary Serbia (Calvinists, Lutherans, Baptists, Methodists, Nazarenes, Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Pentecostals).