Our knowledge of Melanchthon's thought on the role of godly magistrates in the church is surprisingly incomplete, despite the generally acknowledged importance of that thought. Most Reformation scholars are familiar with Melanchthon's argument that the Christian magistrate is, as custodian of both tables of the Law and as foremost member of the church, the incumbent of an office established for the sake of the church and thus burdened with responsibility for the establishment and maintenance of true religion. Most know too that this argument became the standard Lutheran justification for what is called the cura religionis of the magistrate. Few, however, are aware that it took Melanchthon a good decade to arrive at that doctrine, that he spent a further decade or so refining and developing it, and that during all that time there was an intimate connection between the content of his thought and the course of public events. The reason for this gap in our knowledge is that the history of the development of Melanchthon's thought on the religious duties of secular rulers has not yet been written.

Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon (1648–1717) has been best known for her role in the Quietist controversy of late-seventeenthcentury France, leading to the public debate that pitted her defender, Fenelon, against Bossuet. Madame de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV, also became an opponent, adding her influence to that of Bossuet, so that Madame Guyon was imprisoned in the Bastille from 1698 to 1703.

In a 1959 survey of 2,706 ministers of the Churches of Christ, an American denomination that grew out of the nineteenth-century reform movement of Alexander Campbell, the rhetorician James Swinney discovered 215 preachers who said that they had conducted public oral debates as a way of attracting converts and defending their tradition. During the previous half-century, they had held around 4,400 debates, each lasting from one to fourteen days, mainly in the rural areas and small towns of the South and lower Midwest. Another student of Campbell's movement has compiled a list of more than 9,000 such debates, around 500 in the nineteenth century and more than 8,500 in the twentieth. The forensic superstars included regional celebrities like J. D. Tant of Texas, who held more than 350 such contests between 1885 and 1941 and who argued that four people would attend a debate for every one who attended a worship service. His assertion calls for qualification, but it reminds us of a practice that once attracted widespread attention and that has continued to flourish in parts of American Protestantism.

The first decade of the twentieth century was a time of great theological ferment in the Catholic church in France. In order to reconcile Catholic teaching with the latest findings of historical criticism, Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) and other “modernists” proposed sweeping reforms in the Church. From the perspective of Rome, however, these reforms seemed to threaten the very heart of the faith. In Roman eyes, Loisy and his theological allies had adopted the scientific methods of the anticlerical university. Like their secular colleagues but less openly, they then used these methods to subvert the Catholic tradition and the institutional structure of the church. The Vatican defended its embattled faith with a series of measures designed to crush this movement.

“Growth is as essential in human personality as it is in a stalk of corn,” wrote the pastor of First Community Church, Columbus, Ohio, in 1935. His remark typified the changes underway in mainline American Protestantism as it digested empiricist theology, Christian realism, psychoanalysis, and world events from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. In those years the terms of discourse about what it takes to make a strong democracy gradually shifted from “character”—the traits, attitudes, or behaviors of an individual that publicly express private conviction—to “personality”—the inner, psychodynamic organization of an individual that expresses itself socially in relation to God and other people. Prominent religious educators debated it; pastoral counselors put it into practice. Popularization of psychotherapy in the denominational presses brought the language of “personality” and the psychological dimension of human existence into the lexicon of the mainline churches by the end of World War II. Earlier in the century in the face of mass immigration America's churches had extolled the merits of “character” and “character education” as the chief way for mediating private conviction and public action that would preserve democracy, but in the late 1930s they sounded this theme in the new key of personality: promoting the inner growth and freedom of each individual would safeguard America from moral decay and totalitarian regimes.