Claim. Divine Principle’s analysis of the “Preparation for the Messiah” period extols populist, free-church Protestant movements — Pietism, Wesley’s Methodism, the Quakers (George Fox), Swedenborg’s spiritualism, the Great Awakenings — and does not extol the magisterial state-church reformers Luther and Calvin (whose state-church model maintained denominational structures and parish-based involuntary membership).
Elaboration. Per preparation-for-the-messiah. Hendricks corrects a common Unificationist misreading — the assumption that DP’s praise of the Protestant Reformation is praise of Luther and Calvin specifically. It is not.
DP’s actual praise targets the free-church radicals, not the magisterial side. Per EDP 356–7 (footnote 75): “the Abel type view of life guided modern people to seek God in a deeper and more thoughtful way… Pietism, Methodism, Quakerism and communication with the spirit world… in these diverse ways, the Abel-type view of life was maturing to form the democratic world of today.” Luther receives scant praise; Calvin is criticized over predestination.
The distinction matters because the magisterial reformers maintained the very features Hendricks’s populist-church thesis identifies as growth-blocking: state-church alliance, parish boundaries, involuntary infant-baptism membership, tax-funded clergy, doctrinal centralization. The populist features DP affirms — flat organization, voluntary membership, lay-led house churches, mystical experience over ritual, anti-establishment leadership — are what survived from the free-church side of the Reformation.
For Hendricks: this means DP is doctrinally aligned with his thesis at the level of which Christian heritage UC should claim continuity with. UC is heir to Wesley, Fox, the Pietists, the Great Awakening revivalists — not to Lutheran or Calvinist state-church traditions. This grounds uc-began-on-populist-organizational-model in DP’s own historical narrative.
See also. populist-church