The Other Reformation
Michael Bruening September/October 2026When we think of the roots of religious liberty, we tend to think of such people as John Locke, Roger Williams, and Thomas Jefferson. The tumultuous Protestant Reformation doesn’t exactly leap to mind. The sixteenth century, after all, was the time of “Bloody” Mary, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, gruesome executions of heretics, and seemingly endless wars of religion, all driven by the Christian schism into Protestant and Catholic sects. Each side viewed the other with violent hatred and too often acted on it.
Or so it would seem. But we should remember, first, that just as in American politics, ordinary people often held different views from the elites who drove the polarizing narrative. Second, many people, such as merchants and educators, dealt daily with individuals of both faiths. Often they literally could not afford to get caught up in the religious hostility coming from the zealots on both sides. And finally, there were some little-known areas of Europe in which, for practical reasons, both faiths were officially tolerated from early in the Reformation. One of the most important of these was Switzerland.
First to Fight, First to Stop
Technically, “Switzerland” did not exist at the time. Instead, 13 independent territories called cantons had formed an alliance called the Swiss Confederation. Because of their independence, each canton was able to make its own decisions about most things, including religion. On the religious question they split almost down the middle. A few—including Zurich, Bern, Basel, and Schaffhausen—went Protestant. The others remained fully or mostly Catholic.
This religious division was uncharted territory for the confederation. In the 1520s it was not at all clear the alliance would survive the upheaval of the Reformation. The first European war of religion, in fact, erupted among the Swiss. “War” may be too strong a word for what is often called instead the Battles of Kappel: In 1529 and 1531 two brief conflicts, the first entirely without bloodshed, pitted Protestant and Catholic cantons against each other. The second Battle of Kappel did see fighting and resulted in the death of the Zurich Reformer Ulrich Zwingli, who introduced Protestantism to Switzerland.
But if the Swiss were the first to go to war over religion, they were also the first to figure out how to stop the fighting. It is one of the great tragedies of European history that it took more than 100 years of bloody religious conflict for the rest of Europe to figure out what the Swiss knew already in 1531, following the Battles of Kappel. Each canton, they decided, should decide which religion it wanted to follow without interference from the others. It would be the same solution adopted in both the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, which ended the religious warfare in Germany, and the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which put an end to the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War.
This principle became enshrined in the Latin rhyme, cuius regio, eius religio (“whose region, his religion”); in other words, whoever governed a particular territory got to choose which religion it would follow. It was not religious freedom in the modern sense; people still had to follow the religion of their ruler—or move to an area where the ruler had adopted their faith. But it was an important step, an official acknowledgment that Europe was becoming religiously pluralistic and that accommodation had to be made for the presence of multiple faiths.
A greater measure of religious freedom emerged during the Reformation in certain localities in Switzerland. First, there was almost always a grace period after authorities turned an area officially Protestant. They knew the common people would not give up their old faith instantaneously.
In 1536, when the Bernese conquered the French-speaking region north of Lake Geneva, their initial decree allowed for almost total religious freedom for Christians (religious liberty for non-Christians would be a long time coming). The Protestant Bernese promised that the people “would not be forced to abandon their faith.”1 For about seven months the people were free to practice whichever religion they wanted. Of course, at the end of that period, the Bernese reneged on their earlier promise and required their subjects to abandon Catholicism.
Sharing Space
But some territories, called “common lordships,” enjoyed religious freedom for a much longer time. These areas were jointly governed by two or more cantons. Before the Reformation the challenges this presented were political and administrative. The Reformation complicated matters considerably, especially if each governing canton adopted a different faith, as was, in fact, the case for several of them.
In what would become French-speaking Switzerland, several common lordships were under the joint control of Catholic Fribourg and Protestant Bern. In those territories, which religion would the people follow? The answer was an astonishing “both!” The terms of the peace treaty that ended the first Kappel conflict spelled out the solution. Such common lordships were required to permit Protestant preaching but would allow the Catholic Mass to be celebrated, at least until a majority of the heads of household in a parish voted to abolish the Mass. There was no provision, however, for the continuation of Catholic worship after a Protestant majority held sway.
And so, in most of these territories, for 20 years—much longer in a few cases—there was an early practical form of religious freedom in place. A typical joint decree from Bern and Fribourg said, “We want everyone to have the free choice to go to the [Protestant] sermon or to the [Catholic] Mass.”2
The different worship styles of the two faiths raised difficulties. Catholic churches tended to be richly adorned with images of saints, crucifixes, priestly vestments, and altar cloths. Protestants in Switzerland followed the Reformed ideas that saw such images and ornaments as idolatrous and removed them from the churches. They wanted their churches simple and unadorned, where the spoken words of Scripture would dominate, rather than the “idols” and “smells and bells” of Catholic religion. But churches were expensive to build. New ones would not be constructed for Protestant worship. So Protestants and Catholics were forced to share the same church.
And for the most part, it worked. The governments of Bern and Fribourg, although divided in religion, strove to work together to maintain the peaceful coexistence of the two faiths in these towns. To deal with the problem of two congregations sharing a single church, the authorities simply established a schedule. In the towns of Grandson and Orbe, for example, Protestants got the church from 7:00 to 8:00 a.m. in the winter and 6:00 to 7:00 a.m. in the summer. Catholics were to celebrate Mass after that.3 Firm instructions—aimed at Protestants—were given to leave the religious images and altars alone. All were ordered not to be “so rash as to knock down, break, spoil, or destroy altars, images, or the ornaments of the churches.”4
Everyone was also commanded not to “trouble, molest, or vex” anyone else for the sake of religion. The authorities attached a specific penalty for those who broke this rule: a day and night in prison on bread and water and payment of one ecu of gold, the approximate equivalent of one to two weeks’ wages for most people. No doubt such a stiff financial penalty was a fairly effective deterrent to causing trouble.
But it wasn’t foolproof. There were plenty of complaints and conflicts from these biconfessional towns. One of the best known involved a Protestant pastor in the town of Orbe, named André Zébédée. On Palm Sunday 1542, Zébédée disrupted the Catholic Mass and started arguing with the priest, causing a “great uproar in the church.” Five days later, on Good Friday, Zébédée kept “preaching his sermon from 7:00 a.m. until 11:00 a.m.,” in a kind of Protestant filibuster, thereby denying the Catholics use of the church during their prescribed time.5 Unfortunately, the sources are silent on how many people actually sat through his four-hour sermon! They do reveal, however, that the biconfessional system worked in the end. Zébédée was imprisoned by the Catholics of Fribourg, required to “cry for mercy to God, the Virgin Mary, and all the saints of paradise” and was banished from Fribourg’s lands.6 The Protestants of Orbe had to find a new pastor less bellicose than Zébédée.
Most of the parishes in the common lordships voted to abolish the Mass and convert to Protestantism by the end of the 1550s. But not all of them. The small town of Echallens, for example, remained a Catholic island within a sea of Protestantism into the modern era.
The Fire at Geneva
In the wake of these early experiments in religious freedom, it is all the more disheartening to realize that one of the most appalling acts of religious intolerance of the period took place around the same time in nearby Geneva. There, in 1553, with the assent and indeed the instigation of the famous Reformer John Calvin, the Geneva city council executed Michael Servetus for heresy. Servetus’ “crime” was to deny the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, which teaches that there is one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Servetus was burned alive at the stake.
In the long run, however, this assault on freedom of conscience probably accelerated the push for religious toleration. Many people, of course, supported Servetus’ execution. But for the first time, a rising chorus of voices, many from within the Swiss Confederation, criticized the execution and started to argue in favor of religious toleration.
Niklaus Zurkinden, a prominent city councilor from Bern—and hence, someone who knew firsthand the experiments in religious freedom in the common lordships—wrote Calvin to criticize his published defense of Servetus’ execution. “You are the first,” Zurkinden explained, “to take up publicly this argument [that heretics should be executed], to which almost everyone is opposed, as far as I can tell from the initial responses.”7
Servetus’ execution is often explained away as the “error of the times,” with Calvin’s defenders claiming that nearly everyone would have been in favor of it at the time. Zurkinden’s response, however, seems to indicate that most of the people he knew were, in fact, opposed to it. This suggests that there may have been more support at the time for religious toleration than most people think.
More important was the response to the execution from Sebastian Castellio in Basel, another Protestant city in the confederation. Castellio wrote several books arguing in favor of religious toleration and in the process became one of Calvin’s bitterest enemies. For Castellio, the fact that no one could agree on all the teachings of the “true religion” demonstrated that no one should be put to death for it. He notes that historically, many people, including Jesus Himself, were considered heretics at the time, only to be later hailed as heroes. There was a good chance, he argued, that today’s persecutors would be tomorrow’s villains and end up being reviled for their actions. Castellio would end up being proved right, for even those who today agree with Calvin’s theological teaching are embarrassed by his role in Servetus’ execution.
Becoming Neighbors
Taken as a whole, the Switzerland story reveals that the advance of religious freedom required both practical experience and intellectual argument. Places such as the Swiss common lordships and pluralistic religious experiences by merchants and others gave people firsthand understanding that the “other” was not as evil as the zealots were saying. Over time, people knew more and more neighbors, friends, family members, and clients who followed different faiths. People knew instinctively that these were not people who deserved to die because of their beliefs. Zurkinden, in the same letter to Calvin quoted above, explained that biblical arguments in favor of capital punishment for blasphemers “do not move me as much as the shocking examples we see in our time in the punishment of the Anabaptists. I saw here an 80-year-old woman led away with her daughter, a mother of six children, for no other reason than that they denied infant baptism.”8 Such examples of religious violence stood in stark contrast to the peaceful experiments in religious coexistence in such places as the common lordships.
But for such gut feelings in favor of religious toleration to become the dominant way of thinking in the West required such theorists as Castellio, and later Locke, Jefferson, and others, to elucidate why it is better for society to permit people to follow their consciences than to enforce religious uniformity. Let’s not forget that this shift in thinking was a sea change for a society whose principal unifying bond for a thousand years had been their common faith in the Catholic Church. The change would not happen overnight, but the tide would begin to turn, often in some very unlikely places, such as small towns in rural Switzerland.
1 Michael Bruening, Calvinism’s First Battleground: Conflict and Reform in the Pays de Vaud, 1528-1559 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), p. 40.
2 A.-L. Herminjard, Correspondance des réformateurs dans les pays de langue française (Geneva : H. Georg, 1866-1897) 2:403, no. 371, Bern and Fribourg to their subjects in Grandson, Jan. 30, 1532; Pierrefleur, Mémoires de Pierrefleur: Édition critique avec une introduction et des notes, ed. Louis Junod (Lausanne: La Concorde, 1933), p. 62.
3 Herminjard, Correspondance 2:402, no. 371; Pierrefleur, p. 61.
4 Herminjard, Correspondance 2:404, no. 371; Pierrefleur, p. 62.
5 Pierrefleur, pp. 152, 153.
6 Pierrefleur, p. 153.
7 Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia (=CO), ed. G. Baum et al. (Braunschweig, 1863-1900) CO 15:22, no. 1904, Zurkinden to Calvin, Bern, Feb. 10, 1554.
8 CO 15:20, no. 1904.
Article Author: Michael Bruening
Michael Bruening, Ph.D., is a historian specializing in the Reformation. He teaches courses on European history from ancient Rome to Tudor and Stuart England. He teaches at Missouri University of Science and Technology and is the author of several books, including Calvinism’s First Battleground (2005) and Refusing to Kiss the Slipper (2021).