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Identity: A Movement Without a Center?
Does Protestantism truly have a common identity?
What constitutes an identity in the first place? The question is not trivial. At a minimum, identity require mutual recognition: a sense that “we” belong to one another, and that “they”—whomever they are—do not. So how does Protestantism fare by that standard?
Protestantism As Plurality, Not As Thing
A “thing”, at the most generic level, is a non-descript way of signifying identity. But for something to possess identity, it must exhibit sufficient and discernible unity—enough to differentiate itself from other things. What kind of unity does Protestantism have, and is it enough?
While Protestantism contains shared elements and recurring motifs, it fails most of the tests by which identity is discerned. It has no common memory, no common structure, and no standard doctrine. With few exceptions, Protestantism doesn’t even know what to do with unity—if it thinks about it at all—nor does it have the structures required to bring unity about. Instead, its many smaller pockets function, for the most part, like independent versions of Catholicism.
Yet Protestantism isn’t a thing in the way Catholicism is a thing. While the term may serve, at times, as a convenient label for specifying a general conversation partner, it is ultimately a catchall category—an ephemeral, drip-pan designation for all Western churches in schism with both Roman Catholicism and each other.
Catholicism, by contrast, is a thing like a unified denominational body, such as Anglicans in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury or Lutherans in communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. In these cases, as in Catholicism, there is at least some structural integrity that allows the entity to coexist and move together—at least in theory. Protestantism, as a whole, lacks any such entity. Whatever “identity” or “identities” may be carved out for it, Protestantism’s unity is so weak that even bodily metaphors fail us. One cannot even compare it to a withered skeleton—for despite missing a mind to direct and tissue for movement, it is at least held together well enough that a child might point and say, “Daddy, what happened to him?!”
Nothing holds Protestantism together. It possesses only a theory of unity—an appeal to the invisible Spirit to establish (but not demarcate) an equally invisible and amorphous bond. Catholics, by contrast, conceive of unity through the images of Scripture: as a concrete, visible body, animated by both mind and Spirit.
A Protestant might take umbrage at this critique, seeing in her own denomination a fully-enfleshed manifestation of the Church. And indeed, such a Protestant may hold a rich ecclesiology. But the question here is not about the proper conception of the Church itself—it is about the proper conception of church unity.
Let’s be more precise: a proper conception of the Church requires a proper conception of its unity—”we believe in one . . . Church.” To misunderstand church unity is to misrecognize the one body. It is to fail to integrate a vision of unity with the Church’s concrete, enfleshed reality, and it is to sever the Church’s identity from the very visibility Christ invoked as the mark of her mission.
Some will insist that unity need not be visible—that it resides chiefly in the invisible bond of faith and baptism. But this too easily sidesteps the form Christ Himself envisioned. In His high priestly prayer, Jesus asks not only that His disciples “may all be one,” but that they be one so that the world may believe (John 17:21). The unity for which Christ prays is not a hidden spiritual alignment, but a visible and embodied sign—an ecclesial unity capable of testifying to the truth of the gospel before the watching world. If that sign remains fragmented, so too does the plausibility of the message it was meant to bear.
Gavin’s vision—though only one among many within Protestantism—presents a conceptual oneness alongside a practical multiplicity. But this is not a unified vision; it is two disintegrated ones held in uneasy tension. We cannot have many concrete bodies roaming about and bumping into one another—that’s pandemonium. The Catholic view, by contrast, holds that conceptual oneness must fully coincide (i.e., overlap) with concrete, visible oneness.
Devoid of the usual marks by which identity persists, Protestantism cannot rightly be called a unity. It is, in the end, a plurality.
Protestant Self-Contradictions in Unity and Identity
Protestantism is unclear about its own identity and inconsistent on its view of other Protestants. Each communion typically regards itself as a legitimate expression of the one true Church—if not its only representative—but the differ sharply on how to view one other, not to mention Catholicism.
Among Protestant denominations, responses to one another vary widely. Where the prevailing culture is humble and gracious, differences are downplayed, and the ecclesiastical status of others is generously presumed. Where that culture is absent, suspicion and even condemnation take its place. Each posture tends to anathematize the other: those who prioritize unity and humility reject the cold, narrow vision of the rigid sectarian, while the rigid sectarians view any compromise—however small—as a betrayal of truth. Beneath these contrasting impulses lies a deeper, unresolved tension: how can each Protestant communion affirm its own authenticity while surrounded by so many others making the same claim?
Protestant communities face a structural inconsistency: each claims to be a legitimate expression of the one true Church, yet each is surrounded by others making the same claim with markedly different doctrines and practices. To resolve this tension, Protestants generally adopt one of two stances toward doctrinal difference and ecclesial legitimacy: (1) differences ultimately matter, and those outside our institutional boundaries or doctrinal configuration are not part of the true Church; or (2) differences ultimately don’t matter, and diverse configurations can be tolerated within the one Church. But in either case, the implications are sobering: by statistical and logical necessity—given the sheer number of doctrinal configurations and the uneven distribution of adherents—the vast majority of Protestants have demonstrably failed to choose the “correct” one, whatever that is presumed to be. Let us now examine each approach more closely.
Option 1: Sectarian Exclusivism (“We and only we are right, the rest be damned”)
As a Protestant, I found this mentality deeply troubling, though I was not sure why. Having become Catholic, I find it even more so. These groups take a magnificent truth—that there is one, true Church—and corrupt it through misapplication. The problem isn’t simply that all but one of these groups must in principle be mistaken and damned (by their own criteria). The deeper concern is their failure to account for the wide-ranging freedom and work of the Holy Spirit and the reality that genuine believers exist outside their narrow bounds. Rigid exclusivism diminishes the breadth of God’s mercy, and a narrow and condemning spirit is sadly common to these “churches”. While the temptation to answer judgment with judgment is real, Catholic ecclesiology calls for a different posture—one of patient sorrow and prayerful hope for unity. We are called to look upon such communities not with disdain, but with the sorrowful yearning of Christ, who longs to gather all his people into one.
Still, we can learn from them. Their core instinct—that there can be only one true church—is sound. So too is their conviction that truth plays a vital role in identifying and delineating that church. The problem lies not in the insight itself, but in the rigidity and binary absolutism of its application. Vatican II offers the antidote: a more nuanced framework rooted in analogy and participation, through which such truths can be applied without denying either doctrinal integrity or ecclesial openness.
As trunk is to branch, the Catholic Church is to other Christian communities—for the Catholic Church is the visible mediation of Christ to the world. All ecclesial life flows from this trunk, even if indirectly. While this may sound arrogant to some, it offers a more beautiful and more coherent vision than its alternatives. It honors the doctrinal truths discussed above, affirms the integrity and preeminence of truth itself, respects the creedal affirmations about the Church from at least the fourth century onward, acknowledges the freedom of the Spirit to work beyond formal boundaries, and recognizes the mystery that other communities may validly participate—however partially and irregularly—in the one Church. Branches receive their life from the trunk in various ways and to different degrees, yet whatever life they have, they receive from the trunk. As Catholics, we do not know the full extent to which any particular Protestant church shares in the one Church, but we can be optimistic, affirming, and hopeful, even as we call all Christians into the fullness of unity Christ desires for his Church.
Option 2: Doctrinal Relativism and the Illusion of Unity (“Most of us are wrong, but our differences don’t ultimately matter”)
Gavin contends that Protestantism is better equipped than Catholicism to advance the Church’s catholicity. But this view faces several serious challenges.
First, if Protestantism lacks a coherent identity (as argued above), how can it claim to better serve the Church’s catholicity? It cannot act as a unified agent, and any such judgment presumes agreement on what “catholicity” actually entails.
Key questions regarding “catholicity” include: (1) What is its relationship to ecclesial identity?; (2) What is its relationship to unity?; (3) Can its meaning develop over time? (4) How does it relate to its lexical roots? (5) To what domains does it apply, and how are these discerned? (6) Has its meaning varied across Christian history? And (7) What did the Nicene framers of the four marks intend by “catholic”?
These important questions—each bearing directly on Gavin’s claim—cannot be answered here.
Still, one insight may help clarify the issue. The term catholic comes from two Greek words that mean “according to the whole” or “throughout the whole”—emphasizing the idea of wholeness. Even many theologically educated Protestants often claim catholic means universal. While not entirely incorrect, this definition is incomplete. While universal captures one dimension of wholeness, it overlooks the integration that true wholeness requires—a concept that naturally overlaps with unity. A whole cloth is not torn into fragments.
The Protestant equation of “catholic” with “universal” typically serves two purposes. First, “universal” is taken to mean that the Church exists everywhere, and thus any local church—by virtue of its existence—is assumed to be part of the whole. Second, the term provides a strategic disassociation from Roman Catholicism, defusing concerns about identifying with it. While this move may be understandable, it risks undermining the very wholeness the term was meant to convey. If geographic presence alone qualifies one as part of the catholic Church, then Roman Catholic churches, too, meet that criterion. But doesn’t the haste to disassociate from them reveal a deeper discomfort with the implications of true ecclesial wholeness?
Moreover, isn’t the Protestant assertion of participation in the one Church—even when grounded in geography under the banner of catholicity—effectively a reaffirmation of the Church’s oneness, or at least its necessary corollary? Even the Reformed Protestant organization Ligonier Ministries affirms something similar: “The word catholic means ‘universal,’ and it reflects the early church’s belief that the church encompasses people from all nationalities. The catholicity of the church is a necessary consequence of the church’s unity.”1
If this is true—if the Church’s catholicity flows from its unity—then unity is the more fundamental category. And if this is the case, shouldn’t Scripture’s teaching on unity be central to our ecclesiology? Is it not presumptuous, then, to assume that “my church” belongs to the one, true Church without seriously reckoning with what unity requires for such a claim to hold? Oneness and catholicity must be taken together—each correcting, clarifying, and completing the other.
Second, Gavin appears to conflate his ecumenical vision with Protestantism itself. His personal vision might well promote catholicity better than some alternatives, but it is difficult to see how Protestantism as a whole can. Even setting aside the question of unity for a moment, for Gavin’s vision to surpass the Catholic one in fostering catholicity, it must assume that all churches hold equal status as representatives of the one, true Church—and that the Church is fundamentally invisible, defined by spiritual affiliation rather than concrete form. But as noted earlier, any vision that elevates one ecclesial mark (such as catholicity) at the expense of another (such as unity) risks becoming theologically imbalanced. The four Nicene marks should not be assessed or addressed independently. They must be held in harmony, each interpreting and restraining the others.
Third, the ecumenical vision Gavin reiterates from Philip Schaff is far from universally accepted among Protestants. Only certain strands of Protestantism would embrace it—certainly not those falling under Option 1 above. More fundamentally, even if Gavin hopes to represent or foster a broad Protestant consensus, there is no authoritative structure within Protestantism capable of producing concrete, unified action. Protestantism consists of thousands of decision-making bodies, none of which can speak for the whole. Thus, the kind of Protestantism Gavin envisions—one that embraces and unites every “valid” expression of the faith—not only does not exist; it cannot exist. The absence of centralized authority resists coordinated ecumenical efforts and precludes any general agreement about what qualifies as a “valid” Christian expression. Who decides what is or isn’t orthodox? Or what the standard should be for Protestant identity itself? While Protestants may coalesce in opposition to Catholicism, there remains no definitive mechanism to determine who is “in” and who is not. The label “Protestant” encompasses every imaginable doctrinal, liturgical, and moral position—and there is no way to contain that diversity.
Fourth, what Gavin is selling is not an identity, nor a Protestant consensus, but only a vision of unity that legitimizes many versions of Christianity. This segues to another problem. Such a vision is a form of religious pluralism. It claims that, in our great doctrinal and practical diversity, our differences must ultimately impact neither our common identity as the true church nor our mutually-pursued salvation. For if it were otherwise—if a church with a different opinion, by virtue of that opinion, would close the pathway to salvation, such a church must surely forfeit its claim to represent the one, true church.
While a view that embraces many different Christian communions is attractive, attractiveness does not make it true.
Appeal to a common Protestant identity may seem to legitimize the diverse doctrines and practices of Protestantism in the shadow of a common Catholic enemy, but the presumption of a common Protestant identity is without foundation. The commonalities that do exist in temporary and subset forms do not stem from any real, coalescent identity, nor do they offer tangible means for unity. The sad fact is that Protestantism remains theologically, liturgically, and practically divided, and it is getting worse, not better.
If Protestantism cannot keep itself together, how can it take on the unification of an even greater diversity? If Protestantism cannot govern itself, how can it help in the governance of an even greater diversity? What unity does it have that it can loan out? If Catholicism and Protestantism were represented by rocks, how unstable would it be to perch the largest and heaviest boulder atop a number of rocks of inconsistent shapes and sizes? Would you want to stand under it?
Whatever the “Protestant identity” to which Gavin refers is, it is surely of a different sort than the identity meant by Jesus when he calls for a concrete ecclesiastical unity that the world can see (John 17).
In sum, Protestantism lacks the structural, doctrinal, and historical cohesion required to constitute a common identity. It does not function as a unified body, nor does it possess a consistent internal logic that could sustain a visible unity. While individual Protestant denominations may exhibit internal organization or embody rich ecclesiological visions, Protestantism as a whole is not an “it” but a “they”—a scattered plurality held together more by shared negations than by a common essence. Any attempt to treat it as a unified ecclesial agent overlooks this basic reality.
It may be objected that Catholicism, too, displays disunity—whether in dissent from moral teaching, confusion at the parish level, or divergent liturgical practices. But these do not amount to structural disunity. The Catholic Church possesses a universal and visible teaching authority that defines doctrine and disciplines error. Dissenters are identifiable as such because there exists a normative standard to dissent from. Protestantism, by contrast, lacks such a visible locus of interpretive authority. Disagreement in Protestantism often becomes indistinguishable from diversity, since no singular magisterial body defines the boundaries of orthodoxy across its traditions.
Even leading Protestant thinkers have acknowledged the crisis of identity. Stanley Hauerwas—longtime professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School and widely regarded as one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the last fifty years—has written about it with striking frankness. Reflecting on the legacy of the Reformation, he writes:
“Winning is dangerous — what do you do next? Do you return to Mother Church? It seems not: Instead, Protestantism has become an end in itself, even though it’s hard to explain from a Protestant point of view why it should exist. The result is denominationalism in which each Protestant church tries to be just different enough from other Protestant churches to attract an increasingly diminishing market share. It’s a dismaying circumstance.”2
Elsewhere, Hauerwas seems to identify the critical transition: “When Protestantism became an end in itself, when Protestant churches became denominations, Protestantism became unintelligible to itself.”3
The loss of a unifying telos and the proliferation of denominations reflect not merely historical complexity but a deeper structural unraveling. These are not caricatures offered from without but confessions from within—signs that the problem of disunity is not merely a Catholic critique but a Protestant wound. Such fragmentation is not a peripheral issue; it lies at the heart of Protestant identity formation.
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- See “True Catholicity” at https://learn.ligonier.org/devotionals/true-catholicity, accessed December 8, 2024. The article reiterates the Reformers’ view that catholicity is undermined by limiting it to those in communion with the bishop of Rome. I cannot deal in depth this here, but if unity is the governing category for catholicity, or at least belongs beside it equally as a mark of the church, then they must be interpreted together, not addressed independently. ↩︎
- Stanley Hauerwas, “The Reformation Is Over. Protestants Won. So Why Are We Still Here?,” Washington Post, October 27, 2017, at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-reformation-is-over-protestants-won-so-why-are-we-still-here/2017/10/26/71a2ad02-b831-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html, accessed: July 21, 2025. ↩︎
- Stanley Hauerwas, “After the Reformation: How to be Neither Catholic Nor Protestant,” Stanley Hauerwas, November 1, 2017, at: https://stanleyhauerwas.org/after-the-reformation-how-to-be-neither-catholic-nor-protestant/, accessed: July 21, 2025. Article appeared slightly earlier in ABC Religion and Ethics, at: https://www.abc.net.au/religion/after-the-reformation-how-to-be-neither-catholic-nor-protestant/10095238. ↩︎
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