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free church
Protestantism
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- Protestantism
free church, generally, any Protestant religious body that exists in or originates in a land having a state church but that is itself free of governmental or external ecclesiastical control. Examples of such free churches are the Baptists in Scotland, where the established church is Presbyterian; the Presbyterians in England, where the Anglican church is established; the Waldensian church in Italy, where Roman Catholicism was legally established as the state religion until 1985; and the Mission Covenant Church in Sweden, where the established church was Lutheran until 2000. In the narrower sense, the term free churches was first applied collectively ...(100 of 158 words)