The elusiveness of Protestantism: The last expatriations for "apostasy" from the Church of Sweden (1858) in a European perspective

By studying the responses to the last expulsion for "apostasy" from the Swedish National Church in 1858, this article examines how an international Protestant identity was constructed in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. It is the argument of this study that a comprehensive identity - including both evangelicals and theological progressives - could be built around the notion of religious liberty. The advocacy of religious freedom became a line of demarcation that separated this group from the Roman Catholic Church, as well as from those Protestants that were firmly attached to an exclusivist position. In order to manufacture this unity, strategies that had been used to fortify the Catholic-Protestant divide were now also used to establish distinctions between different forms of Protestant belief. It is the argument of this article that this unity definitely broke with the theological disputes of the 1860s.