Brandon Bloch: Udi, I very much enjoyed reading The End of Schism: Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of Christian Life in Europe, 1880s–1970s and am excited for this opportunity to engage in conversation. You make a crucial intervention in the scholarship on religion and politics in modern Europe by bringing Catholics and Protestants into a common frame (still all too rare) and by constructing an argument that stretches across a vast span of time, from the French Revolution through the late twentieth century. Could you offer an overview of your key contributions? How do you see your book changing the field?
Udi Greenberg: Many thanks, Brandon. I, too, am grateful for the chance to have this exchange. In my book, I set out to answer the following question: How and why did Catholics and Protestants move from intense mutual animosity in the nineteenth century to peace and cooperation in the twentieth century? Unlike what one might think, this transformation was not a natural side-effect of modernization and secularization. The opposite was the case: anti-Catholicism and anti-Protestantism in fact intensified in the late nineteenth century, and, like antisemitism, they became popular frameworks for understanding the modern world. Thousands of best-selling publications attributed the spread of capitalism, imperialism, or mass politics to either Catholicism or Protestantism, and influential commentators insisted that only one confession could provide the basis for a prosperous and modern civilization. Early statisticians, for example, obsessively compared the rates of suicide and crime among Catholic and Protestant communities. The hugely influential German historian Heinrich Treitschke went so far as to wonder if the two groups descended from different races.[1] These sentiments were not confined to writers. They routinely spark considerable political and social mobilization, including harsh campaigns of discrimination.
The end of this schism, therefore, requires explanation. In my book, I argue that it was the result of three developments. The first was the convergence of Catholic and Protestant thought about inequality. During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, elites in both denominations—writers, church leaders, and lay politicians—were deeply anxious about new movements that called for equality. This was especially true regarding socialists, who in this period called not only for economic equality, but also for militant atheism. In their fight against what Marx called the “opiate of the masses,” many socialists actively encouraged workers to leave the churches and adopt alternative rituals (like cremation). As a result, Catholic and Protestant elites developed a shared social vision, which insisted that a truly “Christian” order could only prosper in a world premised on “natural” inequalities. At first, they mobilized against socialists, but they soon expanded their work to fight against feminists, who called for gender equality, and Afro-Asian resistance movements, which called for global and racial equality. Christian leaders were quick to recognize these overlapping concerns. And while they still viewed each other with deep suspicion, around the turn of the century, one can find some hesitant practical cooperation, such as inter-confessional labor unions or anti-feminist campaigns.
The second, and more important development, was the experience of Nazism. 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. Their founding document declared that both Catholics and Protestants are equal in what they called “positive Christianity,” a non-confessional and racialized idea of religion. This was a revolutionary new message, which no other major political party in Europe had advocated before. And once the Nazis had a meteoric breakthrough, first over Germany and then, through war, over much of Europe, many Christian elites felt the need to emulate it. Both those who sympathized with the Third Reich and those who viewed it as heresy suddenly began to argue that earlier animosities were a mistake, and that Catholics and Protestants in fact shared profound ideological similarities. This intellectual move, I argue, set the conditions for the large-scale cooperation between the denominations after World War II, when interconfessional parties became a dominant political force and helped shape Europe’s reconstruction.
Finally, Catholic-Protestant cooperation was a response to decolonization. Having enjoyed for decades the support of European empires, Christian missionaries and leaders were deeply anxious about the triumph of anti-colonialism in Asia and Africa. They especially feared that newly independent states would follow the model of China, where communist authorities expelled all Western missionaries in 1951. In an effort to forestall this scenario, missionary leaders of both denominations launched unprecedented cooperation, such as joint media operations or mutual advocacy for religious education. Most ambitiously, they launched large, interconfessional programs of economic development, such as modern irrigation projects. Through such work, the missions hoped to show their value for the post-colonial world. While the impact of these projects (like development schemes more broadly) was minimal, they signified the consolidation of interconfessional cooperation.
Brandon: One of the most impressive aspects of The End of the Schism is the array of authors and sources you cover, from the very well-known to the forgotten. Since my research dealt with a more delimited intellectual network, I was able to identify the key players through archival methods. Given that the trajectory you traced spanned multiple countries, confessions, and time periods, there is no single archive that encompasses your historical actors. How did you go about identifying your sources, and how did you determine that these sources were representative of broader trends?
Udi: I’m glad that you raised this question, since one of my goals was to offer a new perspective on Christian thought and politics. When writing about Christians in modern Europe, historians have often focused on a very narrow set of characters. Those have usually been church leaders, such as bishops and popes, or idiosyncratic theologians, such as the French Catholic Jacques Maritain. These figures, however, provide only a partial understanding of the Catholic and Protestant milieus, and at times even a misleading one. Proclamations by clerics, for example, were often cited selectively, if not outright ignored. Some theologians can acquire considerable prestige, but the implications of their abstract reasoning were not immediately apparent to most Christian readers.
To have a fuller sense of Christian concerns, therefore, my book reconstructs the vast commentary on concrete questions that animated Catholics and Protestants alike. This includes Christian economists and social theorists, who debated how believers should think about capitalism and class relations. I also look at marriage and sex experts, who explained to anxious readers what constitutes virtuous sexuality and what role the state should play in regulating it. The book reconstructs the works of missionaries in Asia and Africa, whose magazines and booklets were among the most influential publications to shape Europeans’ understanding of the colonial—and later decolonizing—world. And it similarly refers to Christian writings on other topics, such as politics or race. Ultimately, it was through shifts in Christian approaches to those spheres that the reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants became possible.
While the texts and writers that populate my book are largely forgotten today, they enjoyed tremendous popularity at the time. I especially focused on texts that clearly resonated with readers: some of the booklets I highlighted were real blockbusters, selling dozens of thousands of copies, and appeared in multiple languages. I similarly tried to emphasize texts and ideas that dominated Christian discourse. Poring over magazines, sermons, and conference minutes, one begins to notice which author or concept recurs as a shared reference point. Perhaps most importantly, my book focuses on ideas that inspired concrete action. We can see which concepts found their way from publications to energetic campaigns of activists and politicians, who founded Christian labor unions, launched anti-pornography campaigns, or designed postwar welfare policies. I tried, in short, to illuminate how Christian discourse helped shape the lives of many Europeans who lived beyond the churches’ orbit.
Brandon: A crucial finding to emerge from this vast field of discourse is the symmetry of anti-Protestantism and anti-Catholicism. By shifting our focus from theologians to lay authors, you deemphasize confessional differences and instead show how Protestant and Catholic writers leveled almost identical accusations against one another. I wonder, though, whether your research also uncovered instances of confessional asymmetry. I’m thinking in particular of the Christian response to the rise of Nazism in Germany, which you describe as a key catalyst of ecumenical reconciliation. I have understood “positive Christianity” as a concept that appealed mainly to Protestants, especially given longstanding efforts by German Protestant liberals to interpret Protestantism as a source of national culture that transcended the confessional divide. There were pro-Nazi Catholic priests and writers, but no Catholic mass movement equivalent to the (Protestant) German Christians; Protestants voted for the Nazi Party at about twice the rate of their Catholic counterparts. Are these differences still relevant, or do they fade against the larger history of inter-confessional cooperation?
Udi: Rather than symmetry, the similarities I trace were meant to highlight overlapping anxieties and hopes. You are absolutely right that, through much of the century that the book traces, Catholic and Protestant communities did not have similar social and political status. This was true not only from the late nineteenth century and to the 1930s, when modernizing nation states often treated Catholicism as a problematic—if not outright subversive—force. It was also true in the post-Nazi period, when the tables had turned: the inter-confessional “Christian Democratic” parties that so influenced reconstruction were overwhelmingly Catholic, both in the composition of their leadership and their electoral base. The two communities’ response to certain political projects therefore sometimes diverged. As you show in your own book, for example, in the 1950s, a small but vocal Protestant minority kept its distance from the Christian-Democratic parties. Some commentators even depicted them as a “foreign” tool of the Vatican, drawing on an old anti-Catholic trope from the nineteenth century.
Catholics and Protestants understood each other vis-à-vis new movements that sought to transform economic, gendered, and colonial orders.
Yet as important as these differences were, they can obscure some fundamental dynamics. The relationship between the two denominations was not forged just through their direct interactions with each other or through their shifting relations to nation-states. It was also shaped through a series of triangles, which have received less attention: Catholics and Protestants understood each other vis-à-vis new movements that sought to transform economic, gendered, and colonial orders. For example, one of the first organizations to bring activists from both denominations together was the Interconfessional Association against Public Immorality, founded in Germany in 1898. Its members believed that the shared goals—to force the censorship of erotic publications, suppress prostitution, and limit sexual activity among the youth—overrode whatever suspicions they felt towards the other religious community. By recognizing the similarities between Catholic and Protestant concerns, therefore, I believe that we can better understand how the two communities ultimately overcame the many asymmetries between them.
Brandon: Both of our books conclude by describing new exclusions that emerged through postwar transformations of Christian thought and politics, in particular the rise of Islamophobia. Alternatively, did your research on Protestant-Catholic reconciliation uncover any models of interreligious dialogue that might prove salutary in our intensely polarized moment?
Udi: Yes, the last chapter of The End of the Schism explores how thinkers and activists in the 1960s and 1970s sought to reorient the intra-Christian alliance, away from its historical focus on hierarchies towards a new commitment to inclusivity. Inspired by the New Left, many young Catholics and Protestants argued that the core of Jesus’ message was animosity to conformity and inequality. In their minds, this meant that the bond between Catholics and Protestants had to be premised on resistance to all forms of domination and injustice. For some, the first priority was discarding the churches’ suspicion of socialism. The Interconfessional Working Group, for example, which was founded in Germany in 1968, mobilized in support of radical redistribution. For others, the main challenge was the dismantling of the patriarchy. Catholic and Protestant feminists joined together in the fight for abortion rights, while in France, the David and Jonathan associations was founded in 1972 to combat homophobia. Many also argued that the Catholic-Protestant alliance should be mobilized against the persistence of global inequality. Figures like the French Protestant writer Georges Cassalis used interconfessional organizations to advocate for the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and to fund anti-colonial guerilla movements in Mozambique. And many figures in those circles also took on antisemitism and Islamophobia, claiming that interconfessional reconciliation should be extended to other religions.
I think it would be going too far to say that these endeavors can provide a model for us today. They were all very much the product of their specific moment, and like the New Left as a whole, they never resonated beyond small circles. But they do offer a hopeful reminder that intellectual projects can be reinvented and channeled towards egalitarian goals, even in surprising places.
[1] Heinrich von Treitschke, “Races, Tribes, and Nations,” Politics, vol. 1, 270-301.
