Louis R wrote:
The real contrast, when you plot merchants vs reformation isn't, as Jeff points out, really Catholic vs Protestant. It's the kind of Protestant: the merchants are most influential in precisely the places that came down on Calvin's side rather than Luther's - the French cantons, Holland, lowland Scotland and bits of England [and, IIRC, the more Huguenot parts of France fit the bill at least somewhat]. Luther and his hierarchical church picked up the slack where princes and nobles mattered - and it was a matter of princely influence. I saw a comment recently to the effect that Luther and the North German princes pulled of their version of the Reformation in large part because it was years before the people down in the parish churches noticed that anything was happening. In fact, judging by some of the music Bach was writing for the Thomaskirche, it was decades before they noticed much beyond the fact that they could now understand what that guy up front was saying. Some Anglicans still haven't noticed
I think there is some truth to this. Lutheranism is not really hierarchial, at least in Germany... But when the fecal matter hit the fan, the princes became important as protection. Eventually this evolved into a situation where the superintendent was appointed by the prince who in turn appointed pastors which was certainly not the original vision of Luther who started out very strong on the notion that congregations should be able to call their own pastors... So you end up with a defacto rather than a theologically formal hierarchy. Sweden, of course, took over the old Catholic structures intact and as a result are much like the Anglicans.
In the areas of Germany where Lutheranism prevailed, it tended to be the faith of the merchants and the princes. The peasantry tended more toward the Anabaptists, especially after Luther's tirade against the peasants during the peasants war in 1525.
Don