Protestant History/schism

In 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther published 95 Theses—a text that criticized certain acts of the Pope and protested some of the practices and priorities of the Roman Catholic church.^[1] However, the Protestant movement did not officially begin until 1529. It was during this year that the "Protestation" was published by German princes who wanted the freedom to choose the faith of their territory. This led to what was called the Reformation which spread across northern Europe, and into the UK by the mid reign of Henry VIII. The beginning of the Protestant Reformation was attended by an outburst of iconoclasm. Iconoclasm is the removal of statues and images from churches. Protestants, believing that Roman Catholics had largely wandered from the centrality of the Bible, removed what they saw as distracting and superstitious paintings, statues, and other images that had been substituted for God's word.^[2] Protestants called an individual interpretation of Scripture and religious freedom.^[3] There are many thousands of protestant sub-denominations. The main sub-groups are Baptist, Lutheran, Anglicanism, Methodism and Reformists. These in turn each have hundreds of breakaway groups