The stand

IN THE summer of 1974, a 26-year-old Mayan villager lay drunk in a town square in the Guatemalan highlands. Suddenly he heard a voice that was to change the course of his life and that of his home town, Almolonga. “I was lying there and I saw Jesus saying, ‘I love you and I want you to serve me’,” says the man, Mariano Riscajche. He dusted himself down, sobered up and soon started preaching, establishing a small Protestant congregation in a room not far from the town’s ancient Catholic church.

Half a millennium earlier, a 33-year-old German monk experienced something similar. At some point between 1513 and 1517, Martin Luther had a direct encounter with God and felt himself “to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise”. His moment of being born again was private. The day on which he is said to have nailed a list of 95 complaints about ecclesiastical corruption to the church door in Wittenberg, Saxony—widely thought to have been October 31st 1517—made the private public and, soon, political. A mixture of princely patronage, personal stubbornness and chance led what could have ended up as just another minor protest in a remote corner of Europe to become a global movement.