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The political, economic, and military turmoil of the twentieth century called into question the underlying order of communities, nations, and the world. The definition of in-groups and out-groups became a central concern for religious sects, political organizations, and nation-states as the old-world order dominated by empires and colonies gave way to the Cold War era, rising secularism, and the birth of neoliberalism as a political paradigm for organizing global capital. The significance of shifting religious and nationalist identities in Europe raises historical questions about the boundaries of communities, how they change over time, how they remember their own histories, and how identity is instrumentalized to transform the world. Grappling with the weighty real-world ramifications of the intellectual trajectories of Christian thought, politics, nationalism, and colonial legacies in Europe in the long twentieth century, Udi Greenberg’s The End of Schism: Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of Christian Life in Europe, 1880s-1970s and Brandon Bloch’s Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy explore the intellectual formations of religious and political alignments in postwar Europe. Through these shifting intellectual and ideological boundaries, we can map the varied pathways through which historical actors have cultivated dynamic constructions of Christian European identity and alignment, often in opposition to perceived external ideologies. This synthetic response will draw on each of these works and the interviews between the authors to argue that the history of religious identify formation and ideological boundary policing in an increasingly globalized world contains the path to both inclusion and exclusion, democracy and authoritarianism, hope and fear.
The Works
In The End of Schism, Greenberg analyzes the trends in anti-Protestant and anti-Catholic intellectual traditions to expand the historical timeline of the rise of ecumenism in Europe. In rethinking the origins of ecumenical thought from both Catholic and Protestant thinkers, Greenberg reveals the contradictory nature of tolerance and exclusion. Analyzing the print material culture of Christian intellectualism and the rise of ecumenism in Europe, Greenberg studies the public exchanges between intellectuals in writing, namely through “magazines, books, and conference proceedings” (10) to illustrate that many of the ecumenical project’s earliest aspirations were rooted in the preservation of religious hierarchy and authority. He explores the works of four groups of public intellectuals: Theologians, economists and social theorists, writers and thinkers, and missionary writers.
Geographically and confessionally narrower, Bloch’s Reinventing Protestant Germany analyzes how German Protestant intellectuals promoted elements of nationalist identity that centered Germany’s Protestant heritage and advocated for individual rights that strengthened West German democracy after the Second World War. Reinventing Protestant Germany is an intellectual history of public intellectuals, in which Bloch centers a cohort of historical actors in the emerging German Protestant public sphere born in the decades that straddle the turn of the twentieth century. For Bloch, this was the cohort of intellectuals who “constructed the discourse of Protestant national identity, and who sought to translate ideas produced within the Protestant public sphere into political and legal decisions” (15). Having neither fully embraced nor rejected the religious nationalism promoted under the Third Reich, Protestant postwar nationalism and democracy promotion were built on tenuous remembrances of World War II-era Protestant history in Germany. Bloch’s historical actors are lesser known and often absent from earlier scholarship. Notably, unlike many of the thinkers who have been the focus of earlier works on Protestant nationalism in Germany in the twentieth century, Bloch’s historical actors remained in Germany during the 1930s and 40s and their theologies and political beliefs were shaped by the experiences of the war at home.
The significance of shifting religious and nationalist identities in Europe raises historical questions about the boundaries of communities, how they change over time, how they remember their own histories, and how identity is instrumentalized to transform the world.
Considering these two works together allows us to see the national, regional, continental, and global formations of ideological alliances within and between Christian sects, political parties, and the colonizing and decolonizing states of the world. Complicating and expanding traditional debates around the interactions of religion, politics, and nationalism in Europe in the twentieth century, readers observe the shifting ideological boundaries that create a dynamic in-group/out-group ordering of European self-imagining, history, and the other. First and foremost, both books seek to expand the timeline for how historians, theologians, and religious studies scholars understand the religious and political landscapes of Europe in the twentieth century. They refute traditional historical timelines that root the rise of ecumenism in Europe and the construction of German Protestant nationalist identities in the postwar era. By extending the timeline of religious and political change into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both authors show that scholars can more accurately and more fully investigate the effects of social instability on changing perceptions of ideology and allegiance.
Likewise, the two works are in conversation with similar, yet distinctive, historiographies of religion, politics, and social organization. While both Greenberg and Bloch center the nexus of public Christianity, secularization, and the political sphere, they differ regarding geographic scope and the breadth of religious movements examined. Still, both authors see the experience of Nazism in Europe as central to the religious formation of the continent. In Bloch’s interview with him, Greenberg asserts that “During their early years, much of the Nazi rhetoric focused on topics that were of interest to many Christians, especially resistance to socialism and feminism. But one innovation they introduced was the claim that both Catholics and Protestants are equal members of the racial community.” Both works straddle the intellectual and the institutional, exploring idealized values in contrast to what is attainable by religious institutions. Historiographically, the two works are rich in the breadth of literatures that they engage and contribute to, including studies of labor, religion, politics, party systems, nationalism, decolonization, media and the press, public intellectualism, social movements, the Cold War, and the long twentieth century. This breadth of engagement will certainly spark further scholarship in many directions that examines the multitude of factors that shaped the genealogies of religious identity formation and religious nationalisms, pathways leading both towards and away from democracy.
Transformations of Ideological Boundaries
Taken together, these two books expose processes of ideological boundary formation in Europe in the face of globalization, what Greenberg frames as responses to “anxieties and hopes.” This allows readers to interrogate the transformation of the systems that created the underpinnings of modernity/coloniality—Anibal Quijano’s construction that highlights the inherent link between the colonial world view and the ideas of the Christian enlightenment that motivated a universal understanding of the modern—in the moment of decolonization and global reordering. In line with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to provincialize Europe and European epistemes, this synthetic reading of ideological boundaries, the anxieties of leading Christian intellectuals, and the reshaping of ideological boundaries that these anxieties prompted, allows us to conceptualize Europe as one piece that is part of a larger whole.
At the center of both the rise of ecumenism and the promotion of democracy in German Protestant nationalist thought is a need to police ideological boundaries while also reinforcing hierarchical structures of power and authority—be that religious authority vested in individuals and institutions, the power of political leaders, or the maintenance of the patriarchy. Throughout both works, the authors illustrate extensive efforts by religious movements to define themselves in opposition to the ideologies of others. The frequency with which ‘anti’ phrases arise is striking: anti-Protestant, anti-Catholic, antisemitic, anti-socialist, anti-communist, etc. Self-definition in opposition to others in the early twentieth century insulated groups and created a network of ideological boundaries that could be policed and instrumentalized to support the inequalities of the status quo.
The sectarian division of Christian groups—Catholics and Protestants (although, admittedly, Protestant here is a crude umbrella term for significant variations in denominational and sectarian schools of thought and allegiances)—in the prewar and interwar periods was forced aside. The desire to counter a new wave of threats, deemed to be more insidious by the public intellectuals in these two works, required the boundaries to shift and realign. Some boundaries softened, new boundaries emerged, but rarely did existing boundaries dissolve completely. The primary realignment was the ecumenical movement’s effort to build relationships across the Catholic-Protestant divide. “By recognizing the similarities between Catholic and Protestant concerns,” Greenberg believes, “we can better understand how the two communities ultimately overcame the many asymmetries between them.” In setting aside sectarian differences, the two movements were able to unite in a common cause against a variety of new threats, including communism, secularism, decolonization, and feminism.
The largest threat to postwar Western Europe, from the view of Christian intellectuals, was the dual threat of communism and secularism. Communism’s interest in economic reordering and class-based revolution also promoted an anti-religious, secular worldview. This division over communist and anti-communist sentiment was particularly pronounced in Germany. West Germans, as Bloch notes, worked to maintain religious connections with their fellow Christians in Eastern Germany. These works present an alternate interpretation of the perception of the risks of secularism from those that have dominated recent historiography and religious studies discourse, most notably stemming from Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular. Asad argues that secularity was (and is) a political project rooted in Europe used to justify colonialism, capitalism, and the structures of the nation-state beyond Europe’s borders. In both Greenberg and Bloch’s investigations of the risks of secularism, an alternate view of the fear of secularity, one situated inside Europe, emerges. For Bloch’s historical actors, secularism was a threat to the Protestant beliefs that they conceptualized as core to German identity. Alternatively, for Greenberg, secularism’s equal threat to Catholic and Protestant thought created willingness to soften sectarian boundaries to unite against a common threat.
Europe’s willingness to overlook earlier divides that had separated Europeans shifted further in response to new equality efforts from the Global South and from inside Europe. As Adom Getachew’s Worldmaking after Empire illustrates, leaders of new nation-states, anticolonial nationalists, balanced nationalism and internationalism to reshape the post-colonial, postwar world using the UN, regional bodies, and the reordering of the international economic order to assert equality with their former colonizers on the global stage. The political threat to Christian Europe also came from within, especially during the period of National Socialist rule. One example of these debates originating within Europe is the internal debates among German Protestants in the early years of Nazism. “Doctrinal questions about church-state relations took on an existential nature at a time when the German Christians, the radically pro-Nazi faction favored by the regime,” Bloch argues “threatened to upend the autonomy of the Protestant churches altogether.” Church leaders also viewed feminism as a risk to order, authority, and hierarchy in Christian Europe. The movement for equality among genders created anxieties that spanned religious confessions and political networks. Both authors trace early rejections of feminist movements’ efforts to achieve equality leading to Christian leaders reluctantly relaxing their stances on other areas of tension in order to find common ground to uphold patriarchal structures. To oppose the rise of this series of movements for equality and secularity, ecumenism created an ideal type of religious practitioner who is also a Westernized, modern, rational, secular actor in opposition to the “communists of the East” and the “unmodern backward peoples” of the Global South.
Both authors trace early rejections of feminist movements’ efforts to achieve equality leading to Christian leaders reluctantly relaxing their stances on other areas of tension in order to find common ground to uphold patriarchal structures.
In Germany, the Confessing Church’s use of faith as a bulwark against the threat posed by other ideologies and groups shifted over time. Considering the narratives of principled resistance by German Protestants to the Nazi regime, Bloch illustrates that principled resistance was a bulwark against the un-Christian, un-Protestant, and therefore—for the Protestant nationalists—un-German elements of Nazism. Yet, Bloch notes, the assertion of resistance undermined the ways in which German Protestant intellectuals and institutions largely remained quiet during the rule of the Third Reich. In the postwar period, this concept of faith as a bulwark against un-Germanness was recast as a bulwark against the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), which as a predominantly Catholic political party also carried the risk of not promoting the proper sense of Germanness that was central to Protestant nationalism being constructed by the Confessing Church.
However, while ecumenical movements in Europe were concerned about the growing influence of the formerly colonized world, Bloch notes that “West Germany’s Protestant public sphere was not closed off to outside influences. Encounters with individuals outside the German Protestant milieu challenged the tenets of Protestant nationalist ideology.” For Bloch’s cohort of thinkers, the interactions with ecumenical movements in Western Europe and the United States—most notably through the formation of the World Council of Churches—was critical to the public messaging around the historical role of Protestant German opposition to Nazism in Germany during the war, a partial history that did not fully acknowledge the role of Protestantism in supporting the Nazi regime in certain times and places. However, Bloch also notes that “transnational exchanges also enabled German Protestants to garner support for their own, self-serving narratives of the war.” Western Protestants outside of Germany were central endorsers of German Protestants’ revisionist understanding of the role of German Protestantism in the Second World War as a force against the Nazi expansion and the National Socialist project in Europe that paved the way for democratic governance postwar.
Where to Go from Here?
A central element of both books is that, for the most part, the intellectual projects they are tracing worked. For Greenberg, it is central to his understanding of contemporary Europe that the merging of Protestant and Catholic thinking, reshaping of Europe, and overcoming the Schism was successful. Similarly, for Bloch, the rewriting of history about the role of Protestants in opposition to Nazism was successful broadly with the German public, thus allowing German Protestants to shape a democratic nationalism rooted in adherence to Christian tenets widely accepted by Western Europeans and North Americans.
In our historical position, a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, one would not be surprised to think that religious nationalism tends to lead to exclusionary political rhetoric on the road to authoritarianism. This can be seen in rhetoric that favors authoritarian rule promoted by the Hindu nationalists of the BJP party in India, Evangelical Christian nationalists and the far-right in the United States, and the alignment of the Russian Orthodox Church with the political whims of the Kremlin in Russia. However, Bloch’s historical analysis offers an alternative pathway in which identity formation underpinned by religious nationalism becomes a pathway to democratization as a counternarrative to the experience of authoritarian rule. Bloch’s historical actors demonstrate that German Protestant nationalists were more interested in legitimating their place in German society in opposition to Germany’s National Socialist past.
Bloch’s historical analysis offers an alternative pathway in which identity formation underpinned by religious nationalism becomes a pathway to democratization as a counternarrative to the experience of authoritarian rule.
The epilogue to Reimagining Protestant Germany briefly explores the rise of Islamophobia in Europe, raising questions about how the roots of these studies continue to grow into contemporary religious and political discourse. It calls into question the policing of ideological boundaries in Europe and around the world that continue to create division. Given the centrality of Christianity to the construction of German and European identity in the postwar period, one cannot help but wonder how the reassertion of Christianity’s centrality is shaping contemporary political divisions, and whether there is a roadmap away from authoritarianism and back toward democracy in the historical lessons of these works. Take for instance the rhetorical use of pork as an essential element of German identity by Right-wing political influencers and politicians aligned with the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as part of a larger Islamophobic and xenophobic ad campaign for the 2017 elections. These ads explicitly attacked Muslims—notably, pork’s essentialness to Germanness excludes adherents of both Judaism and Islam who do not eat pork—and sought to deprive them of the opportunity to be German. In similar fashion to the external endorsements of ecumenical efforts and Protestant formations of German nationalism in the twentieth century, there is an internationalization of religious nationalist ideological formation in this more recent mobilization of religious nationalist politics. The marketing firm that produced the ad campaign for the AfD has also worked with Israel’s Likud party, Britain’s UK Independence Party, and the United States’ Republican party. Again, confronted with a reconciling of coexistence with a different religious population, how will Christian, secular Europe accept and interact with Muslim and Jewish populations? Is there space in the genealogies of religious nationalism for a roadmap away from authoritarian exclusion?
