Yes, Protestants Failed Too — And Here Is the Paper Trail
When a Witness is pressed on Watchtower history — 1914, the 1933
Declaration of Facts, the Malawi-Mexico double standard, the Australian
Royal Commission findings — a common move is to deflect: "Protestants
did terrible things too. Luther against the peasants. Apartheid. Slavery.
Colonialism. The Holocaust. Why single out us?" The deflection is
partly true (Protestants HAVE failed on all these counts) and partly
a category error (the comparison doesn't ask the right question).
This argument exists to disarm the "Protestants failed too" deflection BEFORE the substantive comparison. It is not a debate tactic — it is an honest conversation opener that builds credibility.
Open by conceding each failure specifically and by name. Do not minimise. Do not generalise. Do not say "but we're different now." Name the failure, name the reform mechanism, cite it, move on. Then ask the question about the direction of response.
- Luther against the peasants (1525). In the German Peasants' War, Martin Luther published 'Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants', urging princes to strike down rebellious peasants as mad dogs. An estimated 70,000 to 100,000 peasants died. Luther never formally retracted the pamphlet. The reform mechanism is historiographical: five centuries of open Protestant scholarship have repudiated the tract, most recently in Lyndal Roper's 2025 Oxford biography 'Summer of Fire and Blood' (winner of the Cundill Prize). Standard Reformation historiography treats it as one of Luther's most indefensible writings. No Protestant tradition has required you to pretend it did not happen.
- Dutch Reformed Church and South African apartheid. From the 1940s, the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk provided the primary theological scaffolding for apartheid, arguing from Genesis 11 and that God ordained separate national-racial destinies. The reform mechanism is documented and dated. The 1982 World Alliance of Reformed Churches declared apartheid a heresy and suspended the NGK. The Belhar Confession was drafted in 1982 and adopted in 1986, confessing unity, reconciliation, and justice against apartheid theology. In 1986 the NGK itself reversed course at its synod. The 1990 Rustenburg Declaration brought the NGK, the South African Council of Churches, Catholics, and evangelicals together in formal confession of apartheid as sin and a call for restitution. Named signatories, dated documents, surviving texts.
- Antebellum American Protestant slavery. The Southern Baptist Convention was literally born from a pro-slavery split in 1845, after Southern churches separated from the American Baptist Home Mission Society over its refusal to appoint slaveholders as missionaries. The Methodist Episcopal Church, South (1844) and the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States (1861) split on the same fault line. Southern theologians including James Henley Thornwell and Robert L. Dabney produced extensive biblical defences of slavery. The reform mechanism is on the record: the SBC's 1995 Resolution on Racial Reconciliation, adopted at its 150th-anniversary meeting in Atlanta, explicitly lamented and repudiated "historic acts of evil such as slavery" and apologised to all African Americans. The United Methodist Church had reunified in 1939/1968; the PCUSA issued multiple statements across decades. The document is public. The name is 'Resolution On Racial Reconciliation On The 150th Anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention', June 1995, sbc.net.
- Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (October 1945). Six months after the end of the Nazi regime, the newly reconstituted Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, meeting in Stuttgart with representatives from the ecumenical movement, issued a formal confession. Eleven signatories including Bishop Theophil Wurm, Martin Niemöller, Otto Dibelius, Hans Asmussen, Hanns Lilje. The text reads, in part: "Through us infinite wrong was brought over many peoples and countries... we accuse ourselves for not standing to our beliefs more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently." The declaration was criticised by some Germans as humiliation and by some victims as insufficiently specific about the Holocaust — but it is the foundational public corporate confession by a German Protestant body. It opened the door to the EKD's reintegration into the ecumenical movement and to a continuing decades-long reckoning with German Protestant complicity under Nazism.
- Protestant missionary-colonial entanglement. Nineteenth-century Protestant missions were deeply entangled with European imperial projects — David Livingstone's own phrase was "Commerce, Christianity, Civilization." Many missions travelled on colonial shipping, accepted imperial land grants, and participated in suppression of indigenous languages and ritual. The reform is diffuse rather than document-anchored: the 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference surfaced early critiques; the post-World-War-II three-self indigenous church movement accelerated decolonisation; the World Council of Churches' 1963 Mexico City assembly reframed mission as "from everywhere to everywhere"; and African, Asian, and Latin American theologians including John Mbiti, Kwame Bediako, and Teddy Sakupapa have produced substantial critique from within the tradition since the 1970s. Several mainline Protestant bodies (including Mission 21 /Basel Mission and the United Church of Canada) have issued specific formal apologies. Concede that this is the diffuse case of the five — there is no single headline confession document like Belhar or Stuttgart — and say so honestly.
Having conceded all five, ask the question: "Each of those failures produced a public mechanism — a confession, a resolution, a repudiated pamphlet, a synod reversal, a historiographical reckoning. Someone named the failure, someone signed the document, the text is on the internet. My question isn't whether Protestants failed. My question is about the direction of the response after the failure. The Southern Baptist Convention in 2022 commissioned Guidepost Solutions to audit its own abuse handling, then voted to publish the report unredacted — naming its own failures in front of its own members. The Stuttgart Declaration was signed within six months of the war ending. The Belhar Confession was signed in 1986 — in the middle of apartheid, not afterwards. What is the Watchtower equivalent of any of those documents? Who signed which paper and when, conceding the 1914 generation teaching, or the 1925 predictions, or the 1933 Declaration of Facts, or the Mexico arrangement that Malawian brothers paid for with their lives?"
Let the question sit. That is the only point. Direction of response, not whether failure occurred.
The "Protestants failed too" deflection is partly right and therefore worth conceding fully. Five concrete failures — Luther's 1525 pamphlet, Dutch Reformed apartheid theology, antebellum American Protestant slavery justification, German Protestant complicity under Nazism, and 19th-century missionary-colonial entanglement — all have public reform mechanisms with names, dates, and surviving documents. The Watchtower's distinguishing feature is not that it has failed (every institution has) but that it has not produced the parallel documents. Concede freely, then ask about the direction of response, and let the silence answer.
Those reforms took decades — why do you expect the Watchtower to move faster?
The Stuttgart Declaration was signed six months after the war ended — not decades. The Belhar Confession was signed in 1986, in the middle of apartheid, not after it collapsed. The speed isn't the argument. The argument is that a reform document exists at all, with names and a date. What is the Watchtower's dated document conceding the 1914 generation teaching? What is its signed confession for the Malawi policy? The question isn't how fast — it's whether the paper exists at any speed.
But those were denominations admitting political failures, not doctrinal failures. Our doctrine is from Jehovah.
The Dutch Reformed Church's apartheid theology was presented as a biblical doctrine of separate national destinies from Genesis 11 and . The Southern theologians who defended slavery in 1845 were making exegetical arguments from Philemon and the household codes. These were not 'merely political' — they were failed doctrinal readings of Scripture by bodies that sincerely believed God was guiding them. The reform mechanisms conceded them as doctrinal failures and said so in the confession texts. The Watchtower's distinguishing claim — 'our doctrine is from Jehovah' — is precisely the claim that makes a reform document impossible to write, because conceding a prior teaching requires conceding that Jehovah was not guiding that teaching. That's the self-immunisation the divine-guidance claim produces. It is not a point against any individual brother; it is a structural observation about how the authority claim works.
Protestants can't represent Protestantism because there is no one speaking for all of you. The failures you listed weren't confessed by anyone with real authority.
The Belhar Confession was adopted by the synod of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church — the same polity structure that had produced apartheid theology in the first place. The Stuttgart Declaration was signed by the elected Council of the EKD. The SBC 1995 resolution passed at an annual meeting of messengers — the highest decision-making body in Southern Baptist polity. These weren't rogue individuals; they were the same bodies that had produced the failures, now reversing themselves publicly. The distributed Protestant polity is not the obstacle you might think — each body confessed within its own authority structure.
You're using historical trivia to distract from whatever I said.
You are right that it could come across that way. The reason I raised the five examples is because the 'but Protestants failed too' deflection almost always comes up in conversations like this, and I wanted to put it on the table first rather than have it ambushed later. If you already accept that Protestants have failed and reformed, we can drop the whole list and go back to whatever your point was. The only thing I want to preserve is the distinction: every institution fails; not every institution produces a public reform mechanism. Does that distinction matter to you, or does it feel like a dodge?
Do not use this argument as a gotcha or a debate-trap. It is specifically designed NOT to sound like one. If the JW senses you are listing historical embarrassments to score points, the whole move backfires. Lead with genuine concession — 'these really did happen, and I think they matter' — and mean it. Do not minimise any of the five; they were real and the human cost was real. Do not claim Luther never wrote the 1525 pamphlet or that the DRC never defended apartheid. Do not cite topics you cannot back up with a specific name, date, or document — if you cannot remember whether it was the 1986 Belhar Confession or the 1990 Rustenburg Declaration, look it up before you speak, or skip the topic. Do not deploy all five at once; pick the one or two that fit the conversation. Do not stretch the question beyond 'direction of response' — that is the only point. Do not call the Governing Body liars or hypocrites; the argument is structural, not moral.
Read the full text of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (October 1945) — it is about one page long and available online at marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu. Then read the 1995 SBC Resolution on Racial Reconciliation at sbc.net. Then ask: what would the equivalent Watchtower document look like for the 1925 predictions, or the 1914 generation teaching, or the Malawi policy? Not 'could it be written' — what would it SAY, and who would sign it?