The early 16^th-century Protestant reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin were not enlightened, forward-thinking individuals. They were brutal, superstitious, intolerant, and repressive individuals who exploited popular stereotypes of "witches" in order to persecute those who disagreed with their views.

The Protestants' use of the witch craze to enforce religious orthodoxy was no less dramatic than that of the Catholics. One of Martin Luther's tools for attracting a mass following to his breakaway movement from the Catholic Church was the use of powerful emotional imagery. Just as he compared Rome to Babylon and the Pope to the Antichrist following his rejection of papal authority during the Leipzig debate in 1519, Luther was ready to brand eccentric or ideologically divergent individuals as "the Devil's whores."

Luther, in his 1522 sermon, charged the "witches" with a litany of supernatural behaviors, including transformation into different animals, accusations which, to the rationally thinking mind, would be ludicrous indeed. This further demonstrates that Luther's motive for breaking away from the Catholic Church was not to defend freedom of individual thought, but to establish a religious orthodoxy of his own.

Luther, in addition to his intense anti-Semitism, strived to encourage the adoption of his version of Protestantism as the state-sponsored religion of numerous German principalities, at the expense of the religious freedoms of those principalities' citizens. His intolerance extended even to the Zwinglians in Switzerland, with whom he exhibited only a minor disagreement over transubstantiation. Luther would undoubtedly have been eager to use the fear of witches as yet another weapon to direct mass hostility against those whose views diverged with his own.

John Calvin's description of witches in the Institutes of the Christian Religion even more transparently revealed his true motives of combating dissension from his version of Protestantism. Calvin draws, from his passage on witchcraft, the conclusion that "we have to wage war against an infinite number of enemies." Calvin might have included under this category anyone who did not conform to the dicta of his strict church government in Geneva.

Calvin's policy was to stringently oversee people's private lives, church attendance, and intellectual expression, and ensure that nothing they said or did would displease God. It should therefore come as no surprise that Geneva experienced a far larger number of witch hunts than most other major European cities.

H.C. Erik Midelfort's statistics show Geneva as having experienced 95 cases of witch persecution over 125 years, almost two and a half times more than had occurred in the entire Department of the Nord in France during 137 years.

Calvin was frank about his use of the witch craze to enforce the power of his own theocratic order, stating in the Institutes that he had brought up the entire issue "in order that we may be aroused and exhorted," i.e., rallied behind Calvin's religious movement.

G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right, Le Quebecois Libre,  Rebirth of Reason, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Senior Writer for The Liberal Institute, weekly columnist for GrasstopsUSA.com, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. Mr. Stolyarov also publishes his articles on Helium.com and Associated Content to assist the spread of rational ideas. His newest science fiction novel is Eden against the Colossus. His latest non-fiction treatise is A Rational Cosmology. His most recent play is Implied Consent. Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.

Read Mr. Stolyarov's new comprehensive treatise, A Rational Cosmology, explicating such terms as the universe, matter, space, time, sound, light, life, consciousness, and volition, here.

Read Mr. Stolyarov's new four-act play, Implied Consent, a futuristic intellectual drama on the sanctity of human life, here.