I know everything is told from a perspective, but I find the Marxist “aristocrat / bourgeois” lens rather tired and severely anachronistic. This is told as if Luther and the Magisterial Reformers were just “siding with the aristocracy” and didn’t have any other reasons for opposing a violent uprising on anarchy. The Reformers were trying to effect spiritual and theological change. But when the magistrate, who was supporting the Reformation, encountered radicals who used those ideas for violence and their own ambition, the Reformers had a conundrum. Carl Truman writes in his book “Luther in the Christian Life” (Crossway, 2015), ‘This latter concept, often known as “the priesthood of all believers” or “the general priesthood of all believers” was explosive in Luther’s day because it struck at the very structure of medieval piety. … The problem became acutely significant for the Reformers, and especially Luther, in 1525, with the Peasants’ War. At that time, radicals used Luther’s language of freedom as part of the rhetoric of rebellion, for understandable reasons. Such language resonates powerfully with the oppressed and disenfranchised in every age. The problem, of course, was that Luther was using such words in a manner that assumed their refraction through the cross. The same applied to the language of universal priesthood: the obvious democratizing tendency of the language was popular with those seeking more social equality. Yet the anarchy of the war placed Luther in an impossible position: he was no democratizing radical; he needed to reassure his secular lords that reformation did not mean revolution; and he needed to make sure that his teaching was clearly understood.’ The simple Marxist interpretation is rubbish — the situation was far more complicated than oppressor / oppressed.