So I think the schisms weren't all a step forward or all a step back.
No doubt, and you're right in pointing out that all of this obviously was connected to politics, power plays and so on.
However, the common "run-of-the-mill" view among protestants seems to be that the Catholic church was completely corrupt, and then along came Luther and bravely fought against this corruption, only to find himself with a schism because of the intolerant church. This simply isn't true, as far as I can tell: Luther was all about theology, he was a
fanatic obsessed with his own salvation. The corruption of the church and the political things going on obviously played a huge role in how this all unfolded, but this isn't what Luther was about.
Again, calling one faith better than the other can get you only so far, but I think there are some seeds in protestant doctrine that are important: "sola scriptura" being one of them, i.e. "let's get back to the bible as the only authority". That's the basis for fundamentalism and "literalism". It also does away with the tradition of having
both the bible and the ongoing dialogue and interpretation within the church as a source of authority - pretty radical and fundie!
As historian Eugene F. Rice Jr. writes:
The leaders of the Protestant Reformation, too, were sensitive to ecclesiastical abuses and wished to reform them. Yet the reform of abuses was not their fundamental concern. The attempt to reform an institution, after all, suggests that its abuses are temporary blemishes on a body fundamentally sound and beautiful. Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin did not believe this. They attacked the corruption of the Renaissance papacy, but their aim was not merely to reform it; they identified the pope with Antichrist and wished to abolish the papacy altogether. They did not limit their attack on the sacrament of penance to the abuse of indulgences. They plucked out the sacrament itself root and branch because they believed it to have no scriptural foundation. They did not wish simply to reform monasticism; they saw the institution itself as a perversion. The Reformation was a passionate debate on the proper conditions of salvation. It concerned the very foundations of faith and doctrine. Protestants reproached the clergy not so much for living badly as for believing badly, for teaching false and dangerous things. Luther attacked not the corruption of institutions but what he believed to be the corruption of faith itself. The Protestant Reformation was not strictly a “reformation” at all. In the intention of its leaders it was a restoration of biblical Christianity. In practice it was a revolution, a full-scale attack on the traditional doctrines and sacramental structure of the Roman Church. It could say with Christ, “I came not to send peace, but a sword.” In its relation to the Church as it existed in the second decade of the sixteenth century, it came not to reform but to destroy.
This goes back to Luther's other fundamental idea: "
sola fide": Basically, the catholic church (as well as the orthodox church) maintains that you attain salvation/justification by “faith and works”, i.e. faith
and goodness in one’s actions and deeds. Luther/the protestants, on the other hand, say that “faith alone” brings salvation. Only “faith in Jesus” counts and absolves you – not your good works, not the Church, not liturgy, not monastery life and so on. Luther was even more radical, saying basically that even good deeds by people who don’t accept Jesus are of the devil. That's the basis of all the "instant salvation by accepting Jesus" shtick in protestantism. It goes back (it seems to me) to a complete misreading of Paul by Luther based on wishful thinking - "Paul and the Stoics" gives a much better and more nuanced interpretation, which is much more in line with catholic doctrine than protestant doctrine IMO.
Maybe in a sense, this protestant Sola fide doctrine is a move away from a more Stoic philosophy that emphasized the right
conduct of life. The emphasis in Catholicism seems to be more on the “life in Christ”, “actively taking part in the body Christ” and so on.
Now, from this Sola fide concept, it follows that monasteries should be abandoned; that the church cannot absolve, that the saints have no special place etc. etc. So in this strange doctrine, the complete dismantling of the catholic church as we know it was already built in. (Remember that the concept of “Sola fide” was already present in Luther's 1517 “disputation”,
before the whole political things took off.)
Another thing with protestantism is that it does away with central authority and unity. What this means, of course, is that any old zealot can take half of the congregation and found his own church where
he is the head honcho. Hence all the splintering and so on. Catholicism and the orthodox church on the other hand have an authority similar to a state, with mechanisms for conflict resolution, checks and balances and so on (of course, they are not immune to pathological influences and takeovers, but at least in principle, they have something approximating a "council of elders").
You are right whitecoast that protestants understand some things metaphorically as opposed to the "classic" Christian faiths. But then again, they don't have any choice, because the doctrine denies everything the church said
after a certain (arbitrary?) point in time. What basically happened, it seems, is that protestantism branched into 2 major directions, based on the "sola scriptura" doctrine: the fundies, who take the bible literally and accept nothing but the bible, and the postmodern wishy-washies, who combine "sola scriptura" with the postmodern idea that you can interpret a text however you want - hence all this relativist and opportunist progressive crap in many protestant denominiations.
Hope this clarifies my current thoughts on this a bit.