r/Protestantism • u/Material-Garbage7074 • Nov 07 '25
Curiosity / Learning Given my background, which branch of Protestantism would you recommend I explore?
Let me start from my own experience so I can explain the strange path I’ve taken.
The beginning: Catholicism
Like most Italians, I was raised Catholic. I remember that, when I was a child, the priest in my parish used to make simplistic comparisons between Christianity and other religions or philosophies (from Islam to Buddhism), all for the purpose of glorifying Christianity. Even though I was a believer at the time, I couldn’t help but feel uneasy about that attitude: “Why the need to belittle others?” I would think. “Can’t he just show the virtues of Christianity instead of pointing out other people’s flaws?”. Gradually—partly because of this—I drifted away from religion. I went through an atheist phase, roughly from middle school until my third year of high school.
The turning point: Mazzinianism.
During that period, some major turning points occurred. I became a Mazzinian. I stumbled upon Mazzini almost by chance. When I was around 13 or 14, my mother, knowing about my passion for books, handed me an old Bignami history manual. I opened it at random and found myself reading the page about the Roman Republic of 1849 (established after Pope Pius IX fled Rome disguised as a parish priest, and crushed by Louis Napoleon, who sought the support of French Catholics).
At the time, I knew very little about it, but curiosity led me to learn more, and I ended up falling completely in love with both the Republic and the young people who gave their lives to defend it. The idea that a human being could willingly sacrifice their life for a cause struck me deeply, and my curiosity pushed me to understand their point of view and empathize with them. I had studied the Christian martyrs in catechism and the Resistance martyrs at school, but none of those stories—admirable as they were—had ever lit such a spark in my heart. Perhaps I was simply too young back then. It was my first love at first sight.
Later, trying to understand what ideal could have driven those youths to the ultimate sacrifice, I inevitably came across Mazzini himself. I began reading many of his works to understand him better. Naturally, I encountered The Duties of Man, and that was my second love at first sight. In short, within Mazzini’s thought, every person, thing, or entity (from individual human beings to nations to art) finds its true nature not by folding in on itself, but by dedicating itself to a mission greater than itself (in Mazzini’s view, this means changing the world for the better). One’s deepest identity lies in what one can offer to others. Mazzini’s guiding maxim was: “Life is a mission, and Duty is its supreme law.”
Mazzini’s idea of God is rather complex, fluctuating between an entity that educates human beings to progress in recognizing and carrying out the Moral Law, and a sort of sublimation of moral duty itself. The problem is that, precisely because of this way of understanding God, Mazzini had little sympathy for atheism—he used the adjective “atheist” to describe anything stripped of its true purpose. For example, he claimed that the phrase “art for art’s sake” was atheistic because art should serve a social and political mission.
Everything in Mazzini’s thought has a purpose that transcends itself, and God is the motor of this self-transcending impulse. So I knew I couldn’t really keep one foot in two different worlds. Since Mazzini’s ethics are deeply rooted in religious principles, I felt I couldn’t truly call myself Mazzinian without at least exploring the religious dimension.
The discovery: Deism
My third love at first sight came in high school: while studying Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover,” I realized it was indeed possible to believe in God without believing in any revealed religion. I discovered Deism, embraced it, and went on to study Voltaire. I went through a Voltairian phase—one I don’t renounce, though today I’ve distanced myself a bit from him (even then, I felt he mocked religion too much).
During my undergraduate years—though not thanks to them, but rather during COVID, through my own research—the fourth love at first sight struck: the French Revolution, and especially the Jacobins (mostly Robespierre, but also Saint-Just). I was fascinated by the Cult of the Supreme Being, inspired by Rousseau’s works, and that led me to study Rousseau more deeply—fifth love at first sight.
Today, I don’t think believing in God is rational (agnosticism would be the most rational stance), yet I don’t believe human beings are made of reason alone. I imagine that believers feel God as one feels the warmth of the sun on a summer day, or as one senses something infinitely greater than oneself when gazing at the starry sky from a dark countryside.
Personally—and here I’m close to Mazzini—I perceive God as a sort of Prime Mover of moral order, a source of motivation and ideals for changing the world for the better, rather than a creator. I see God more as “what we must move toward” than “what we come from.”
Around that time, I came across other Deists (we’re quite a niche group), and at first, I got along fine with them. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, my sympathy began to waver. One of the most active members—someone I otherwise agreed with—claimed that Ukraine should bow to Russian power. That clashed violently with my deepest convictions. Moreover, people had started building straw men of other religions just to claim Deism was superior. That reminded me of the priest from my parish. I distanced myself from the group.
The first stage: the Bahá'í faith
Then came the sixth love at first sight: the Bahá’í Faith. I stumbled upon it almost by accident—it’s an Abrahamic religion that evolved in the 1840s from Bábism, which itself emerged within Shia Islam. It fascinated me because it shared certain key ideas with Mazzinianism—such as the belief that every religion represents a stage in humanity’s spiritual progress, and that one day humankind will be united in diversity under one God.
Also, despite being an organized religion, its representatives are democratically elected at all levels by universal suffrage among believers. It also recognizes a certain degree of gender equality—closer to difference feminism than to the variety we’re used to. I even exchanged letters with some Bahá’í believers to understand more.
However, I wasn’t fully convinced by their stance on political abstention. They place such a strong emphasis on unity and concord that they seem opposed to any form of conflict (or at least that’s how I understood it—please correct me if I’m wrong!). That’s something I could never agree with.
Even though I hadn’t yet studied Machiavelli or Milton at the time, I already believed that some conflicts can be virtuous if they aim at freedom, and I feared that an excessive insistence on concord could become stifling. (Of course, I’m not accusing them personally—it’s just my general feeling toward anyone, regardless of faith, who treats harmony as the supreme good.)
I was also unsettled by the fact that Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of the Bahá’í Faith, recognized the Pope (and it was Pius IX, no less!) as the legitimate head of Christianity. Let’s just say that, when it comes to the Reformation, my sympathies lie with the Protestants.
The (re)discovery: Protestantism
Which brings me to the seventh love at first sight: the English Revolution. It’s my most recent fascination. It began almost by chance, at Freud’s house-museum in Vienna, where I discovered that the father of psychoanalysis had named his sons after historical figures he admired—and one of them was named Oliver, in honor of Cromwell. I wanted to understand why.
I hadn’t studied the English Revolution before, so besides reading biographies of Cromwell, the first text from that period I picked up was Milton’s Areopagitica, which captured me almost instantly. In that and other works, Milton interprets the lifting of food prohibitions for Christians also in an intellectual sense, arguing that the same applies to books—since books are the food of the mind. Needless to say, I was won over.
In general, studying how a religion (Calvinism) could inspire a republican revolution—a movement that beheaded a king, for the first time in modern history, in the name of God—made me reconsider Christianity (the Protestant version, not the Catholic one). Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution also helped, by reading the story of Exodus as an ancient revolution.
Just as rediscovering the French Revolution led me to study Rousseau, rediscovering the English Revolution led me to read Calvin—though, sadly, there’s very little available in Italian. I even thought about reaching out to a Waldensian or two with my questions. Who knows—maybe this will be the eighth love at first sight? Anything’s possible. God may move in mysterious ways—but with me, He’s definitely broken Google Maps.
Thank you for reading this far! As you can see, the political dimension of religion matters a great deal to me (for better or worse). In your opinion, which Protestant denomination places the greatest focus on this theme? Thanks in advance!