I am reading the introduction to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and I bumped into this phrase which I've never heard before. The sentence reads:
Weber located the origins of freedom not in the Enlightenment, but in the Puritan Anglo-American tradition; the struggle to establish liberty of conscience and worship, he argued, was the cornerstone of all other human rights. The vanguard of that struggle was the Protestant sects—Baptists, Quakers and others—whose influence in Germany had been eclipsed by the Lutheran Church and its "aura of office." Weber acknowledged that Lutheranism began as a radical movement, but he viewed its trajectory as moving in an increasingly illiberal direction, endorsing state power against individual freedom and, allegedly like Catholicism, encouraging passive adaptation to existing conditions rather than soliciting innovation and risk.