Proponents of dozens of conflicting visions of reformed Christianity coexisted uneasily in sixteenth-century Strassburg, forcing debate on the permissible limits of religious diversity. Thanks to the astonishing variety of opinion in Strassburg, to its magistrates' reluctance to punish people for their beliefs (and also perhaps to the loss of most of its judicial records), Strassburg regularly appears in general histories of the sixteenth century as a model of religious tolerance towards individuals, or even toleration of faiths, an exceptional polity in an age that is often thought rarely to have hesitated before killing dissenters. While the rarity of executions for religious crimes does point to a relatively tolerant policy, Strassburg's Reformation history encompasses a well-documented array of other forms of intolerance: official and familial bullying of nuns in the 1520s and again in the 1590s, the pursuit and harassment of suspected Anabaptists that peaked between the mid-1520s and the early 1540s, the demonstrations against Catholic services and priests in the 1540s and 1550s, and anti-Calvinist displays of the 1580s and 1590s. Coercion was everywhere part of the sixteenth-century's religious politics, and recognition of this has moved historians of Strassburg to become increasingly attentive to discord and repression in the city. For the city's secular rulers, arbiters of repression or tolerance, diversity of religious opinion constituted a complex political problem that threatened to bring their new duties to defend the city's evangelical confessions into conflict with more traditional measures of their honour as magistrates.

Officially Catholic until 1529, Strassburg's magistrates thereafter maintained a collective identity as evangelicals.