July 31, 2026
Part of this paper was presented at the European Academy of Religion, Rome, 2026.
When the V-Theo Project set out to examine how religious traditions negotiate pluralism, the working group on Protestant Christianities immediately encountered a methodological difficulty: can one meaningfully speak of a Protestant approach? The working group has explored this question at three distinct but interrelated levels. The first concerns pluralism within the Protestant traditions themselves—the theological and institutional diversity that characterizes a family of churches and the role of women. The second concerns pluralism between Protestant communities and other Christian confessions, in the ecumenical encounters through which traditions have learned to recognize one another across historic boundaries. The third concerns pluralism vis-à-vis other religions, and the theological resources Protestant traditions bring to questions of religious diversity in increasingly multi-faith societies.
What emerges from working across these three levels is that Protestantism does not offer a single, settled answer to any of them. Diversity is not merely one of its characteristics; it is constitutive of its historical form. My argument is therefore not that Protestantism offers a solution to the tension between individual freedom and collective authority. Rather, it offers a tradition that has learned to live with that tension by continually reopening it—a dynamic that becomes particularly visible in two areas that have profoundly shaped my own research: the recognition of women in ministry, and the reception of migrants within European Protestant communities.
It is possible to argue that the story of Protestantism does not begin in Wittenberg in 1517. It begins in Lyon, around 1170, with Valdo, a merchant who distributed scripture in the vernacular and sent ordinary believers, including women, to preach without ordination. The Waldensian movement anticipated in practice what Luther would later formulate theologically in To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520): that Christian dignity derives from baptism, not ordination. This became one of the defining principles of Protestant theology—the priesthood of all believers—and, at first glance, an unmistakably egalitarian vision of the church.
Yet history immediately complicates the picture. Sola scriptura has inspired prophetic critiques of ecclesiastical hierarchy and, simultaneously, sustained resistance to reform. Galatians 3:28—"there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus"—has generated remarkably different institutional conclusions depending on whether "equality" is read as a soteriological claim or also as a social and ecclesiological one. That ambiguity is not a weakness of Protestant theology; it is precisely what has required every generation to ask again what equality before God means in the life of the church.
This persistent irresolution reflects the structure of Protestantism itself. As Max Weber argued, the Reformation relocated religious responsibility from sacramental mediation to the conscience of the individual, transforming authority relations across modern Western societies. More immediately, the absence of a binding magisterium means that Protestant communities encounter pluralism not only in relation to other religions but already within themselves. Reform tends to emerge locally before it becomes collective—a congregation experiments before a synod decides—and denominational asymmetries are structural features of a tradition that has never had a mechanism for achieving uniform outcomes.
This structural diversity is best understood by comparing distinct Protestant traditions. The Waldensian and Methodist churches in Italy exemplifies the synodical route: authority is distributed among deliberative bodies, and change leaves a formal institutional trace. The Waldensian Synod's decision to ordain women in 1967, after more than a decade of debate, is paradigmatic. The theological premise had been available since the Reformation; its institutional recognition arrived four hundred and fifty years later.
Pentecostalism offers a contrasting trajectory. The Azusa Street revival of 1906, led by William J. Seymour, grounded equality not in synodical deliberation but in pneumatological authority: Joel 2:28—"your sons and your daughters shall prophesy"—provided the warrant. Authority bypassed ordination structures entirely. Yet as Pentecostal movements institutionalized, many retreated from the founding egalitarian impulse, reproducing conventional patterns of leadership and gender relations—a regression that paradoxically mirrors the slower pace of mainline reform through entirely different institutional logic.
Mainline Protestant churches in northern Europe and North America present yet another configuration. Many have formally affirmed gender and racial equality and embraced theologically pluralistic positions. Yet Willie James Jennings' critique remains indispensable: as he documents in The Christian Imagination (2010), doctrinal universalism and demographic homogeneity coexist with remarkable ease. Some of the most theologically egalitarian mainline denominations remain among the least racially diverse. Spiritual equality and institutional redistribution are not the same claim. What emerges from this comparison is not a simple spectrum from conservative to progressive, but a set of different institutional logics—synodical, pneumatological, liberal-universalist—each generating its own characteristic patterns of inclusion, deferral, and regression.
Axel Honneth's framework of recognition is illuminating across all three cases: recognition is never complete because it has been declared. It becomes real only when communities create practices and institutions that embody it across relational, juridical, and social dimensions simultaneously.
My own fieldwork in Italian Protestant congregations has made the texture of these dynamics visible in concrete terms.
On gender: even after the 1967 Waldensian Synod formally opened pastoral ministry to women, my interviews revealed the persistence of a subtler gap. One recurring pattern was what sociologists call the "two-person single career": the ministry of many male pastors was quietly sustained by wives whose work was acknowledged socially but not economically. A woman pastor working in a multicultural congregation described feeling expected to marry and have children before her authority was fully recognized: ordination had opened the door; the social architecture inside had not changed. Formal access to ministry and structural equality are not the same achievement. A remark from one Ghanaian community leader to a German-born woman pastor captures the intersectional dimension precisely: "You are very loved as a pastor... but remember: you are a woman, and you are white." Recognition, as Patricia Hill Collins argues in her analysis of the matrix of domination, does not operate along a single axis: the same person may simultaneously occupy positions of privilege and vulnerability depending on the relationship and social context in question.
On migration: when African, Asian, and Latin American Christians began reshaping Italian Protestant congregations in the 1990s, the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy (FCEI) responded by developing the Essere Chiesa Insieme (Being Church Together) project and vision. Rather than establishing separate congregations by language or national origin—as many European contexts have done—the FCEI chose to remain one Church, drawing on Miroslav Volf's participatory ecclesiology and the Ephesians 2:14 image of the "dividing wall of hostility" destroyed in Christ. The encounter with migrant communities is understood not as an occasion for hospitality but for mutual transformation. Yet every welcome has an architecture. Liturgical languages, governance norms, access to leadership, teaching and training of the next generation are practices that need to be negotiated at every step.
Distinguishing what is cultural and what is religious is essential; being aware that sharing the same denomination is not a guarantee of sharing the same religious habitus is indispensable in negotiating and shaping the new community. The challenge of building a church together lies in going beyond the welcoming phase and recognizing the co-ownership of the church by all its members. A further and often underestimated challenge concerns gender roles and the position women have occupied within the Italian "indigenous" congregations—a tension that migrants and established members alike are called to navigate.
Protestant history consistently reveals that equality is never simply proclaimed, nor finally achieved. It is a set of practices—synodical deliberation, congregational discernment, local experimentation—for living with disagreement without abandoning shared commitment. It is continually renegotiated through the institutions and relationships that enable diverse communities to remain communities despite their differences. Theological breakthroughs open new possibilities; they cannot guarantee their own institutional endurance. More than five centuries after the Reformation, that work of renegotiation continues—within Protestant communities, across Christian confessions, and in encounters with the wider religious world.
Alessia Passarelli is a researcher in socio-anthropological sciences at FSCIRE (Foundation for Religious Sciences (Bologna)) and coordinator of the Protestant working group of the V-Theo Project. Her research focuses on the intersections of migration, religion, and integration. She is also principal of the Liceo Valdese in Torre Pellice.
