The Tangled Web(105)

Nils Brahe's other meeting featured wine rather than beer, and a sumptuous lunch that had stretched well into the afternoon.

The longer he lived in the Rhineland, the more he appreciated wine rather than beer.

Derek Utt leaned back. "What do you think of this business with Wamboldt von Umstadt and Calixtus, by the way? Is it anything we'll have to worry about up in Fulda, since we've already worked things out with Schweinsberg? Do I need to bring it up with Wes?"

Nils Brahe stretched his lanky legs out somewhat farther under the table. "As Duke Ernst explains it to me—we correspond extensively—you are all sectarians. You have embraced 'universal sectarianism' as a way of life, the Catholics and Calvinists as wholeheartedly as the sectarians themselves, there not being enough Lutherans or adherents of the Church of England among you to make a significant difference. And, yes, I have heard that your wife's grandmother is a most fervent adherent of the Church of England."

"So's Mary Kat, actually." Derek Utt laughed. "Not quite as gung-ho as her grandma, who is busily restoring the abandoned Episcopalian church building and recruiting for a priest, but definitely pretty much committed. There were more of them up-time. More of them in the United States of America, I mean, not just in the whole world. Millions of them, Lutherans and Episcopalians. Several million of each. Maybe four, five, six million of each."

"In an overall population that was how large?"

"Umm. About two hundred eighty million, I think. They were just starting to take the new census the year of the Ring of Fire, but that's somewhere in the range of what they were predicting."

"Sects," Nils Brahe said firmly. "They were sects. Our best estimate of the population of the USE now is somewhere between twelve and fifteen million. It should be toward the larger end since the emperor's campaigns of last month in the northwest. Using a fifteen-million population base for the USE, proportionally, that would mean that we would have . . ." He paused for mental calculations. ". . . somewhere between two hundred thousand and a quarter million Lutherans in the USE, rather than, probably, eight to nine million. Up-time, Lutherans and Episcopalians were sects as much as your Methodists and your Baptists just as much as your Mormons and your Pentecostals. Just as much as our Mennonites and Socinians. Muselius in Grantville sent Duke Ernst a fascinating book by an up-time German named Ernst Troeltsch, found in the library of the Baptist pastor named Green. It's being reprinted in Jena and Muselius managed to get an advance copy. I've ordered one myself. Troeltsch maintained . . ."

Derek cocked his head to one side. "Just exactly how has Duke Ernst come to define the concept of 'universal sectarianism'? It's not something I've ever heard of."

"I believe he formulated it himself, based on various comments by Troeltsch," Brahe admitted. "Also after multiple readings of the proceedings of the Rudolstadt Colloquy. It doesn't just involve your concepts of separation of church and state—though, as a good Swedish Lutheran myself, I have to say that's drastic enough. Rather, there is the ingrained cultural concept—cultural, not a matter of constitutional law—as the up-time Lutheran speaker Gary Lambert phrased it at one point in the discussions, that 'everybody has the right to go to hell in his own way.' Which seems to be the fundamental religious belief among you—that you bear no responsibility for the salvation of anyone beyond the bounds and borders of your own 'denomination.' Which defines you all as sectarians, from his perspective, and mine, and the emperor's, no matter how you think of yourselves."

"And we are talking about this because?"

Brahe refilled his wine glass. "It's terribly Mennonite, really—it's a quintessentially sectarian perspective. There is the question of what we are going to do about it. No one can doubt that it is arising in everyone's mind."

"Perhaps not everyone's," Derek said. "Only consider Sergeant Garand."

Brahe snorted. "In the mind of every aware politician, let us say then. No matter how influential Michael Stearns is at present, the fact remains—there are only about three thousand of you up-timers in the USE's new population of fifteen million or so, and your three thousand are divided into multiple sects. There are three or four million more people at the emperor's disposal if one adds in all of Scandinavia, which it is only reasonable to presume that we may do since Ahrensbök and the revived union     of Kalmar, all Lutheran, add weight to the several million in Germany. So. Given that Wettin, also, is Lutheran and may become prime minister after the upcoming election, what is to prevent the establishment of Lutheranism as a state church throughout the USE? Please do not say, 'Larry Mazzare.' "