Protestantism multiplies: Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, Pietists, and Methodists

Between AD 1600 and 1800, Protestant Christianity changed from a set of sixteenth-century confessional churches into a far more plural world of established churches, gathered congregations, dissenting communities, renewal networks, missionary societies, and revival movements. This chapter traces that multiplication from the post-Reformation settlement through English Puritanism, Separatism and Congregationalism, the emergence and diversification of Baptists, the Society of Friends, German Pietism, the Moravian renewal, the transatlantic awakenings, and Wesleyan Methodism. It argues that these developments cannot be reduced either to doctrinal fragmentation or to a simple story of spiritual progress. They arose through interacting disputes over Scripture, church government, baptism, predestination, conversion, assurance, sanctification, inward illumination, religious liberty, and the relationship of church and state, while war, migration, print, commerce, colonial expansion, voluntary association, and persecution shaped which movements survived. Particular attention is given to primary confessions and founders' writings, together with recent scholarship that clarifies contested genealogies, especially Baptist origins and the relation of Moravian, Pietist, and Methodist renewal. The chapter also integrates the global consequences of eighteenth-century missions, including South India, the Caribbean, and southern Africa. Genealogically, the period produced durable Congregational, Baptist, Quaker, Methodist, and Moravian families while transmitting Pietist and revivalist impulses across denominational boundaries. A Sola Scriptura assessment affirms recoveries of conversion, holiness, mission, congregational responsibility, and liberty of conscience while testing infant baptism, inward revelation, sacramental rejection, coercive godly commonwealths, predestinarian and perfectionist systems, and revival experience by the apostolic Word. The result was the voluntary, revivalist Protestant environment from which nineteenth-century restorationism and new Christian-derived movements would emerge.