And what's wrong with Protestant thinking? I think what you and Lark were getting at earlier is the idea of "one God by many names." My take on faith is that whether I believe in the Catholic concept of God, the Protestant concept of God, the Muslim concept of God, the Jewish concept of God, even the or even the Pagan concept of God, a hybrid of many concepts of God, or my own concept of God derived from tenets of different religions and my personal experiences, it's really all the same God, all one God. There are many ways to conceptualize God/a higher power and many ways to honor him. In my mind, pretty much any religion that values human life and holds ideals of respect and compassion is completely valid. Many roads to the same destination.
Well, if you consider it literally protestant then the thinking is nothing but a spirit of protest, righteous indignation, its pretty reductivist I know but I do think its accurate since there where and are schisms before and after the reformation from the RCC.
Hilaire Belloc wrote about this in his book on The Great Heresies and probably in his other books on the reformation but I've not read them all. I dont agree with him entirely and I just know from reading his books that there'd be a personality clash between myself and him if we'd ever met. On the other hand I kind of know what he's talking about when he characterises the protestant spirit as a sort of radical, unflinching, throwing the baby out with the bathwater contrarianism.
I didnt used to feel this way but reading Erasmus and Luther's Discourse on Free Will totally knocked me for six and I couldnt see anything good about the reformation from then on if I could judge what was happening at a popular, public level was in any way like what happened in that exchange at the level of theologians and scholars.
The pattern, which I associate with the Reformation, of overthrowing an authority but then erecting an equally authoritarian order in reaction to the unleashed chaos (Luther's attack on papish, then support for principalities contra the peasant war) or creation of an alternative polar power which then tries to out do the horrible actions of its opponent, real or imagined (Calvin's Geneva) is something which I think has been repeated in almost every single revolutionary upheaval since, almost regardless of context or epoch, with the exception of the US revolution, perhaps because it was a big country and was more of a seperatist struggle.
This is something I'm very wary of discussing because of the capacity for unintended offense to friends, I really hope I've not offended you.