There’s too much Great Man Theory in this thread.
There would be a lot less old women burnt for witch craft and a reduction in vicious anti semitism
As a matter of fact Luther’s early writings were remarkably tolerant towards the Jews. His change in opinion only really began to show in 1543 and then probably as a result of a personal crisis combined with calamities befalling the area around Wittenberg. During the Enlightenment, Luther’s early thoughts were used as an argument in favour of integration and toleration. He was even known as a protector of the Jews and his later anti Semitic works ignored or even hidden.
Jews had always been a convenient scapegoat for medieval society when unexplainable disasters struck. Indeed, there was little decidedly “Lutheran” (or revolutionary) about Luther’s later hatred for the Jews. For example, one of his foremost Catholic opponents, Johannes Eck, argued that the Jews ought to be driven out or burned since they murdered Christian children and drank their blood. Such works were commonplace in the middle of the 16th century - across the confessional divide. The 1543-works were only actualised in the 1930’s with the advent of Nazi rule. As such, the causality of Luther’s later antisemitism and the Holocaust is often detached from its historical context. Hitler did not undertake the industrialised slaughter of all the Jews of Europe because of Luther, but because of the latent prevalence of a deeply rooted and far more nefarious kind of antisemitism: One that Martin Luther certainly perpetuated in his later works, but not one that began with him.
To a certain degree, the same can be said about the spike in witch trials during and particularly after the reformation. Witchcraft had always been (granted, I’m speaking from a Scandinavian position) considered a criminal act, but following the reformation persecution was intensified. Yet this was more an example of confessionalisation and social-discipline than a particularly Lutheran theology. The evangelical and catholic confessions both sought to strengthen themselves against the other, in order to withstand the pressure from their rivals. This necessitated a strict internal adherence to whatever confessional doctrine the territorial lord in question had assumed. Naturally, those who fell short of this faced a horrible prospect of persecution. Thus, we see witch trials (or heresy trials on the Iberian peninsular) occurring across the confessional divide in early modern Europe.
In other words, many of the horrors committed during the Reformation period were the result of structural developments, which in turn were dependent on the historical context that went before.
