 Beginning in 1588, Count Palatine Johannes I forced all his subjects to convert to Reformed belief as espoused by John Calvin.In the Saxe-Cobourg Principality of Lichtenberg and later on, in the Prussian Rhine Province, the Protestant church establishment in Ruthweiler found its way into today’s Evangelical Church in the Rhineland (a full member of the Evangelical Church in Germany).The Duke of Saxe-Cobourg decreed the merger of the two Protestant denominations in 1818, and the decision handed down by a synod in Baumholder in 1820 instituted the “complete union” of the two denominations, Lutheranism and Calvinism.