Imagine that you have just been given a new technology that allows you to respond almost instantaneously to critics and opponents. Imagine too that you find yourself in a highly charged situation where attacks and counter-attacks are a regular occurrence. The temptation to use the technology to counter-punch is quite strong, and the temptation to counter-punch in the heat of the moment stronger.

I am not talking about President Donald Trump’s Twitter account. I’m talking about the printing press and the possibilities that it opened up for polemics and popular debate in the sixteenth century. During the middle ages, disputations were a common part of university education, but they were conducted among university theologians. Reformation polemics were published and distributed broadly, and were often written specifically with lay Christians in mind.

In this heated polemical situation, and given the possibilities that the printing press made available, the polemics were often more vigorous than thoughtful, and it was easy to play to the crowd, to simplify, to construct straw men, to reply to insults with insults. Gentle answers weren’t popular.

Polemics turned “the fragmentation of divergent understandings into stark oppositions. Polemic promulgated the practice of reading simple acts as signals” (Lee Palmer Wandel, The Reformation, 134). If a friend or brother prayed the rosary, it was a signal that he was a papist “subservient to the Antichrist, and therefore the exact opposite of a true Christian” (134). This was true even if the person praying the rosary was a Catholic advocate for reform (135).

Evangelicals and Catholics both “constructed opposing camps” in their polemics, even though on the ground things were much more confusing and complicated. “True” religion was the religion advocated by the pamphleteer, and “false” religion was anything diverged. Polemicists implied that “there were two ‘religions,’ the one true in all that it said and did, the other false in all that it said and did” (135). Polemic “lent itself to representing bipolarities: black and white, left and right, top and bottom” (135). Polemicists tended to treat members of opposing camps as different “in essence”: “What one did was an expression of how one entered the world: Those small signals—praying in Latin, eating meat on Friday—were the external markers of someone ‘not us’” (135).

Both Catholic and Protestant writers used spectacularly vivid imagery to characterize their opponents. During the 1520s, “tales and images circulated of ‘Turks’ slicing Christian children in half, at once invoking the biblical take of the slaughter of the innocents and representing the fear of losing one’s children to enemies whose antipathy was religious in foundation. In 1529, the Catholic polemicist Johannes Cochlaeus linked Luther to the Turk: One of Luther’s doctrinal positions mirrored Muhammad’s repudiation of the divinity of Christ.” Protestants responded in kind: “In images that blurred the differences between the Sultan’s turban and the Pope’s tiara, evangelical polemicists linked the papacy and Islam. So too, Lutheran polemicists linked Reformed Christians to Turks, through tales of Reformed Christians who fled the Empire and converted to Islam, drawn by the affinities, the Lutherans claimed, they found between two ‘religions.’” And just as Ottoman swords sliced Christian children, other Christianities put innocent lives at risk” (135, 137).

Cannibals provided another evocative, terrifying set of associations. Huguenots attacked Catholics as cannibals: “With the word, cannibal, Huguenots attached the physicalities of every human body—its weight, its mass, its sinews and tissue, muscles and bones, blood and skin—to the act of collective worship of al Catholics” (137-8). Catholics were “ingesting human flesh” and as a result “their own matter itself changed in substance by that consumption, their nature no longer common even with those who might share the same mother.” Catholics were “barbarians” “because they practiced a preeminent marker of barbarism” (138).

The charge of Catholic cannibalism extended to accounts of Catholic persecution of Protestants. According to Huguenot Jean de Lery, “During the bloody tragedy that began in Paris on the twenty-fourth of August 1572 . . . among other acts horrible to recount, which were perpetrated at that time throughout the kingdom, the fat of human bodies (which, in ways more barbarous than those of the savages, were butchered at Lyon after being pulled out of the Saone)—was it not publicly sold to the highest bidder? The livers, the hearts, and other parts of these bodies—were they not eaten by the furious murderers, of whom Hell itself stands in Horror? Likewise, after the wretched massacred of one Coeur de Roy, who professed the Reformed faith in the City of Auxerre—did not those who committed this murder cut his heart to pieces, display it for sake to those who hated him, and finally, after grilling it over coals—glutting their rage like mastiffs—eat of it?” (quoted, 139).

Today, we tend to laugh at the severity of Reformation polemic. But the Reformers and their Catholic opponents weren't laughing. They were fighting for souls and the future of the church, and their rhetorical zeal hardened lines of opposition and first made reconciliation harder, then virtually impossible.