The Christianity which developed in the United States [after 1800] was unique. It displayed features which marked it as distinct from previous Christianity in any other land. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Christianity of Canada most nearly resembled it, but even that was not precisely like it.

American Protestantism has been unique in its relationship to state and society, and in its ideas on the matter. Yet these ideas have now been challenged, right down to their presuppositions, by the emergence in recent decades of powerful anti-Christian social movements in western civilization. One of these challengers, Nazism, made a significant impact upon American thought in the transition period of the mid-thirties, for it was regarded as a great religious upsurge of an unbaptized nationalism in the heartland of traditional Christendom. Thus in their reaction to Hitler's movement religious spokesmen revealed the basic social attitudes of their groups and provided answers to the question: “How did American Protestants of twenty years ago conceive the role of Christianity in contemporary society?”

The ground and provocation of the German Reformed Church are first considerations in the appreciation of its character. It is understood that the Palatinate Church Order of 1563, containing the Heidelberg Catechism and the Palatinate liturgy, introduced a permanent Reformed tradition to Germany. It should also be understood that that kirchenordnung represented the effort of a Melanchthonian church to maintain its evangelical consciousness against the pressures of Gnesio-Lutheranism. Later Palatinate religion arose thus from the ground of Melanchthonianism and in the context of the Crypto-Calvinist controversy—the creation of Zacharius Ursinus, a pupil of Melanchthon and Martyr, and more deeply of John a Lasco, the Polish reformer whose influence in this connection remains untold.