Religion and History in Switzerland

Switzerland is one of the places where the Reformation happened rather than one of the places it arrived. Huldrych Zwingli began preaching at the Grossmunster in Zurich in 1519 and pushed further than Luther on the Eucharist and on images, and the two men failed to agree at Marburg in 1529, a split that has divided Protestantism ever since. A generation later John Calvin turned Geneva into a working model of a reformed city, and the academy he founded there trained the preachers who carried Calvinism to France, Scotland, the Netherlands and Hungary.

Anabaptism also emerged in Zurich, among Zwingli's own followers who concluded that infant baptism had no warrant, and was persecuted by Protestant and Catholic authorities alike; the Swiss Brethren and later the Amish trace to that movement. The forest cantons of the interior stayed Catholic and defended that choice by arms, and the confessional map that resulted has proved remarkably stable. Because the cantons rather than the confederation held religious authority, Switzerland never produced a single national settlement, and it still has not: church tax, recognition and religious instruction remain cantonal questions answered twenty six different ways. Both historic churches have lost members steeply since the 1970s, and the largest single group in the country now reports no religious affiliation at all.