Tag Archives: Heath Spencer

Review of Anita Rasi May, Patriot Priests: French Catholic Clergy and National Identity in World War I

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Review of Anita Rasi May, Patriot Priests: French Catholic Clergy and National Identity in World War I (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), X + 162 Pp., ISBN: 9780806159089.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

More than 33,000 French priests and members of religious orders served in the First World War. Although many of them were government-appointed or volunteer chaplains, the majority were involved in other ways—as stretcher-bearers, nurses, and combatants. Anita Rasi May draws on the memoirs, letters and biographies of thirty-three of these individuals in order to shed light on their subjective experiences. She begins with a survey of anticlerical policies during the prewar Third Republic, a “culture war” situation in which the French Catholic Church saw its status and privileges significantly curtailed. She follows up with analysis of the responses of French priests to the outbreak of war, the variety of ways in which they participated, and their perceptions of the war’s meaning for France and the church. As she assesses the consequences of the war on church-state relations, she concludes that “in the postwar period there emerged a new relationship between the priests and the people due in large part to the memory of the priests’ wartime service and to their key role in memorializing their many fallen comrades. This newly won respect provided the atmosphere in which both the government and church leaders worked out compromises in their ongoing relationship” (10).

The anticlerical policies of the prewar era provide an important backdrop for understanding the mentalities and motivations of French priests, bishops and members of religious orders during the war itself. From the 1870s forward, French political leaders feared that Catholic clergy and institutions “did not form patriots but rather encouraged loyalty to monarchical government and to an international organization, the Catholic Church, based in Rome” (16). They responded by dissolving the Jesuits and other religious orders, abolishing the military chaplaincy, and ending priests’ exemption from military service. The Catholic Church’s dubious role in the Dreyfus Affair provided the pretext for further anticlerical measures, including the abolition of church schools and the formal separation of church and state. The government’s open hostility to the Catholic Church was accompanied by a long, steady decline in religious observance, especially among people of the working class, and among men of all classes.

In light of such troubling developments, French clergy saw the Great War as an opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism and prove their worth to national community. Like their counterparts in other belligerent countries, French priests believed their nation’s cause was just, but an equally powerful motivation for supporting the war was the prospect of restoring the Catholic Church to its former prominence and reversing the secularization of state and society. May cites the example of a Franciscan seminarian who believed that the war would lead to a rebirth of “the France of years past, that is to say, the true Christian France” (50). As ordinary people flocked to religious ceremonies and cheered for priests who volunteered for war service, many clergy believed they were witnessing a revitalization of religious life and an end to anticlerical hostility. These hopes and expectations help explain why so many priests volunteered for combat and non-combat roles, why French bishops gave their assent, and why so few French clergy opposed the war and the phenomenon of the soldier priest.

May’s research gives us a glimpse into the inner world of those clergy who spent time at the front. For example, Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who went on to become one of the twentieth century’s most prominent philosophers, was a stretcher-bearer with the 8th Regiment of Moroccan Riflemen. He saw the war as a “baptism into reality” (52) and hoped his position would give him influence among the men with whom he served. A Franciscan chaplain named Édouard de Massat described the war itself as “a missionary whose voice is more eloquent than our own” and expressed the hope that France would emerge from the struggle “with a new soul” (56). As time went on, priests grew more realistic about the prospects of mass conversion and religious renewal, and their efforts at evangelizing gave way to an emphasis on pastoral care and service to their comrades in arms. This was as true of soldier priests and medical personnel as it was of chaplains.

May notes that most priests adjusted well to military life and found it easy to combine patriotic fervor and military service with their Catholic faith. This was also true of those who experienced combat. May provides numerous examples of priests who were promoted to officer status, led assaults on enemy positions, and participated actively and sometimes enthusiastically in killing. Although none of May’s thirty-three priests were pacifists, all were aware of the horrors of war (especially the damage it inflicted on their own countrymen) and occasionally struggled over the ethics of killing. Although May asserts that “in these memoirs, journals, autobiographies and biographies…there is no love of war for itself” (78), she also quotes a chaplain named Jean Lagardère who said of the front: “I am happy here: the friendship of the men, the rattling of arms, the noise of the cannon, the whistling of bullets, the view of the trenches, their infected mud delights me, thrills me, makes me quiver. I am only at home there, I only breathe there, I only do good there. I only feel myself a man there” (78). They knew the horrors of war, and some loved it anyway.

Priests’ reactions to the war were complicated and contradictory on a variety of levels. For example, they expressed contempt for men who refused to fight or mutilated themselves to avoid military service, yet some of them intervened on behalf of soldiers condemned to death for breaches of discipline. Some regretted killing the enemy, or regretted enjoying it, but few gave much thought to the humanity of the enemy. Most preferred to focus on the French soldier’s self-sacrifice rather than his role as a perpetrator of violence, and they made frequent comparisons with Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. A war sermon by chaplain Louis Lenoir was one of the more eloquent and revealing expressions of this blend of faith, war, and nationalist euphoria: “Like that of Christ, this ‘beautiful blood of France’ was today, as it has always been in history, ‘liberating blood’…spread across Europe and to the extremities of the earth to defend nations against injustice and support religious and social freedom…search all the corners of the world where violated liberty has called for help, everywhere you will find traces of French blood” (85).

Whether they were chaplains, medical personnel, or soldiers, French priests took their apostolic work seriously. They administered the sacraments, counseled individual soldiers, mailed or hand delivered letters, procured books and personal items, established social spaces where soldiers could relax, visited soldiers’ families when on leave, and conveyed gifts from those families to soldiers with whom they served at the front. They heard confessions, granted absolution, and gave communion before attacks, and in the aftermath, they performed last rites for the dying, presided over burials and masses for the dead, and helped with the mapping of cemeteries. Not surprisingly, the pastoral ministry of priests at the front seems to have been the role that was most widely appreciated and accepted, even among persons who had left the church and had no interest in returning.

In terms of long-term impact, the priests’ expectations only partly coincided with reality. When the war began, many of them believed they would have the opportunity “to evangelize men who were not the usual churchgoers in early twentieth-century France” (64). They also hoped to demonstrate that they were just as manly and patriotic—and as much a part of the national community—as other French men. Although the mass conversions did not occur, priests did develop “bonds of brotherhood” with many soldiers, “based more on mutual respect than on shared faith. They also found in themselves a capacity for violence and for being swept up into the exaltation of battle, which strengthened their feelings of brotherhood and empathy for their fellows” (109). As an institution, the French Catholic Church enjoyed a slight improvement of its status in the postwar era. The state and the education system remained secularized, but members of religious orders who had returned from exile to fight for France were allowed to remain there when the war had ended. The French government also restored diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and though anticlerical laws remained on the books, they were not always rigorously enforced. In fact, when the government of Édouard Herriot attempted to do so in 1926, veteran priests played an important role in the protests that forced the state to back down. May credits these successes to the fact that priests enjoyed a new level of respect and status due to their wartime service.

May’s book offers a fascinating glimpse into the fears, frustrations and hopes of Catholic clergy during the First World War. The priests themselves are a stark example of the “self-mobilization” that was so prevalent in the “war cultures” of Europe during this period.[1] At the same time, the book suffers from a number of shortcomings in terms of framing as well as the selection and interpretation of sources.

First, it relies too much on priests’ own perceptions of their impact without considering other kinds of data. For example, it would be helpful to see information on baptisms, confirmations and other indicators of religious observance before, during and after the war. To what extent did the war service of priests and the rapprochement between church and state disrupt or mitigate the long, steady decline in public, corporate worship? May also refers to wartime rumors and disinformation in “anticlerical newspapers and speeches” (116) but does not comment on the intensity of anticlerical discourses at different points in time. Tracking changes and continuities in the anticlerical press would be another way of assessing whether the priests’ war service had an impact on popular opinion (i.e. whether they achieved the respect and recognition they longed for or merely imagined it).

A second shortcoming is the fact that May engages the question of clerical violence on only the most superficial level. She notes that soldier priests killed and sometimes expressed regret for killing (or for enjoying it) and follows up with the claim that these experiences made it easier for priests to identify with and minister to other men who had been in combat. May does not explore the long tradition of Catholic theological reflection on violence, nor does she acknowledge that there were many other possible areas of shared experience (visiting brothels, for example) from which priests were expected to abstain. What made military violence different?

May’s temporal framework is also problematic. Her story ends in 1926 at what appears to be a comeback moment for Catholics in France’s culture wars—a happy ending of sorts. Extending the study to 1940 or 1945 would complicate things, as May would have to grapple with those segments of the Catholic Church that supported far right movements, cast their lot with the Vichy regime and celebrated the demise of the Third Republic.

Finally, May’s study adopts an exclusively national perspective with only the briefest references to other European states and the wider world. Comparative analysis across European cultural and religious landscapes would make it more difficult to affirm the validity of bargains in which clergy supported questionable regimes and policies in exchange for acceptance and influence. The response of many German clergy to their country’s “national renewal” in 1933 should serve as a cautionary tale. Likewise, May fails to incorporate insights from a large body of recent research on the global dimensions of the war. Though she notes the existence of colonial troops, she offers no meaningful discussion of their religious and cultural identities or their wartime experiences. Several of May’s priests (including Teilhard and Lenoir) embraced their role as missionaries and affirmed France’s “civilizing mission” throughout the world, but May does not indicate the context in which those efforts and assumptions played out. For example, the majority of France’s colonial soldiers were forcibly recruited through processes that did great violence to them, their families, and their communities. After arriving in Europe, they were deployed as shock troops in an effort to lower the death toll among white French soldiers.[2] We cannot understand the ideas and actions of priests like Teilhard and Lenoir apart from these realities. By neglecting them, May’s book remains confined to the same limited horizons as the priests’ own accounts of the war and its meaning.

 

 

[1] See John Horne, “Public Opinion and Politics,” in A Companion to World War I, ed. John Horne (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2004), 280-281.

[2] See Joe Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999).

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Article Note: Julio de la Cueva, “Violent Culture Wars: Religion and Revolution in Mexico, Russia and Spain in the Interwar Period”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

Article Note: Julio de la Cueva, “Violent Culture Wars: Religion and Revolution in Mexico, Russia and Spain in the Interwar Period,” Journal of Contemporary History 53:3 (2018): 503-523.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

In this article, Julio de la Cueva explores the role of anticlericalism in early twentieth-century revolutionary movements that saw “defeat of religion…either as a necessary condition for revolution or as an equally necessary result” (503).  He describes the antireligious violence that occurred in Mexico, Russia, and Spain during this period as the most extreme manifestation of a “second Kulturkampf” inspired by the French Revolution and the subsequent culture wars of the “long nineteenth century” (504).  As was true of their counterparts in those earlier conflicts, revolutionaries of the early twentieth century believed that organized religion was an obstacle to progress and the achievement of their goals, hence the “violent culture wars” embedded in these three revolutionary struggles.

Mexican revolutionaries alternated between attempts to reform the Catholic Church and get rid of it altogether.  During the period of war and violence that began in 1910, they confiscated church property, desecrated or destroyed sacred spaces and objects, and imprisoned or expelled priests and believers who opposed them.  The Constitution of 1917 significantly curtailed the public power and legal privileges of the Church, outlawed religious orders, secularized education, and gave state governments permission to limit the number of priests within their territories.  Vigorous enforcement of these measures by President Plutarco Elías Calles (1924-1928) and his successors led to armed resistance by devout Catholics in the Cristero War, in the course of which at least 70,000 persons were killed.  The state responded with a “defanaticization” campaign and attempted to suppress Catholic worship across much of Mexico.  After nearly a decade of intermittent religious war, President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) recognized the futility of the state’s approach and allowed churches to reopen and priests and bishops to return.  “By 1938, the savage confrontation between the Revolution and the Catholic Church had come to an end in Mexico” (510).

De la Cueva identifies several notable differences between the Mexican and Russian revolutions, including a much higher death toll and a more sustained and intense campaign to eradicate religion in the latter case.  Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks’ initial moves were similar to those of Mexico’s revolutionaries.  They nationalized church lands, transferred church schools to state control, “deprived the churches of legal personality,” and waged a propaganda campaign against religious institutions and traditions (512).  Physical violence against clergy and believers increased during the civil war but subsided by the end of 1922 as the state adopted a less aggressive approach and church leaders became more submissive to the new regime.  However, this “semi-tolerance” gave way to renewed persecution under Stalin; by 1941, fewer than 1000 churches were still open (of the 60,000 that existed before the revolution) and only 5,665 priests remained (in comparison with 112,629 in 1914).  Although the Soviet state had gone a long way toward dismantling the Orthodox Church, many Soviet citizens, especially in rural communities, remained committed to Orthodox Christianity.  De la Cueva sees parallels with the Mexican case in this respect as well.

Revolutionary anticlerical violence during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) bore a resemblance to what occurred in these other revolutions.  As in Mexico, Spanish revolutionaries drew on older traditions of elite and popular anticlericalism dating back to the late eighteenth century.  The proclamation of the Second Republic and the Constitution of 1931 were stridently secular, calling for the separation of church and state, secular education, and the dissolution of the Jesuit Order.  A wave of anticlerical violence in that same year led to the destruction of 100 religious buildings over a period of five days, and attacks on clergy began to increase as well.  The most intense period of revolutionary anticlerical violence occurred during the civil war, in which 6,733 priests were killed (71 percent of them between July and September 1936).  However, unlike the Mexican and Russian cases, much of this violence was initiated by local actors rather than central authorities.  It came to an end in 1939 when Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces defeated the Republican government and restored the church to a place of prominence in Spanish society.

De la Cueva notes that radical movements from the French Revolution onward have identified revolution with the suppression or destruction of religion, but he highlights the variations as well.  Attacks on church property and acts of iconoclasm were common across all three cases in this article, but only in the Soviet Union (and to a lesser extent Spain) did violence threaten to eradicate the clergy entirely.  In Mexico and the Soviet Union, the state played a central role in coordinating antireligious violence and anticlerical policies, whereas in Spain the initiative came from diverse local actors on the political left who shared a “powerful anticlerical identity” (516).  Despite Pope Pius XI’s emphasis on “atheistic communism” in his encyclical Divini Redemptoris (1937), communist ideology played only a small role in the anticlerical violence that occurred in Spain, and hardly any at all in the case of Mexico.  The encyclical correctly identified Mexico, Russia and Spain as epicenters of religious persecution but was overly simplistic in its assessment of the ideological and contextual factors that were driving it.

De la Cueva begins and ends his article with a call for additional transnational comparisons as well as the integration of “different explanatory models that have been offered of antireligious violence in each country” (503).  He hopes “to stimulate a dialogue between the histories and the historians of the early twentieth century revolutionary regimes” (523).  Contemporary church historians will also find his work helpful in terms of understanding the moral panic and political and cultural polarization that led many Christians to seek the protection of fascist and far-right regimes during the interwar period, an alternative that proved to be equally perilous for the churches and their members.

 

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Article Note: Heath Spencer, “The Thuringian Volkskirchenbund, the Nazi Revolution, and Völkisch Conceptions of Christianity”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)

Article Note: Heath Spencer, “The Thuringian Volkskirchenbund, the Nazi Revolution, and Völkisch Conceptions of Christianity,” Church History 87, no. 4 (December 2018): 1091-1118.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Recently, Heath Spencer of Seattle University has been investigating the connections and disconnections between German liberal Protestant thought and Nazi conceptions of Christianity. In this article, he tackles the question of why prominent Thuringian liberal Protestants in the Volkskirchenbund (People’s Church League) supported the pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen (German Christians) in the German church elections of July 1933. He argues that ideological affinity between the Volkskirchenbund and the German Christians was less important than pragmatic and strategic considerations, and that these liberal Protestants only supported German Christians reluctantly, once other options had been exhausted. “Their story,” Spencer writes, “illustrates one of the more complicated paths toward Christian complicity in the Third Reich” (1092).

The episode around which Spencer’s article revolves was the decision of the Volkskirchenbund—a liberal faction in the Thuringian Protestant synod—not to run their own candidates in the July 1933 church election, but rather to recommend to their members that they vote for the list of candidates put forward by the German Christian Movement, the leading pro-Nazi faction. The result was that the Volkskirchenbund disappeared from the synod and became a study group (Arbeitsgemeinschaft), while the German Christians went on to capture 46 of the 51 seats in the synod and proceeded to make Thuringia a bastion of Nazi Protestantism.

Spencer critiques the view offered by Karl Barth and promulgated by members of the theologically conservative Confessing Church that the rise of the German Christian Movement was the product of two centuries of theological modernism. Thuringian Volkskirchenbund leaders, he suggests, “did not rush into the arms of the Deutsche Christen in July 1933; anxiety and resignation were prominent alongside of cautious optimism and occasional expressions of enthusiasm” (1094).

Tracing Thuringian church politics from 1918-1933, Spencer argues that the Thuringian church constitution of 1924 gave rise to diverse church-political factions, including the Volkskirchenbund, which represented the political left, over and against the right-leaning Lutheran Christliche Volksbund (Christian People’s League) and the centrist Einigungsbund (Unification League). The Volkskirchenbund aligned itself with other German liberal Protestants who “called for democratic governance, theological pluralism, and churches that stood above political parties and narrow class interests—all key elements of the liberal Protestant Volkskirche ideal” (1098). Heinrich Weinel (professor of New Testament in Jena) was a key figure in the Volkskirchenbund, working with other liberal Protestant leaders to advocate for modern theology, innovative adult education programs, and interdenominational elementary schools to broaden the reach of liberal Protestantism (and liberal politics) in the region.

After 1924, however, both Thuringian parliamentary politics and church politics became more conservative. In the Protestant synod, the rise of leftist Religious Socialists was matched by the emergence of a new völkisch group, Bund für Deutsche Kirche (League for German Church), which began introducing “church legislation that promoted racial purity, hardline nationalism, and the removal of ‘Jewish elements’ from Christianity” (1105). Because liberals in the Volkskirchenbund promoted theological pluralism, they professed openness towards both these new groups. Indeed, Heinrich Weinel and others became increasingly engaged with the Christian-völkisch movement in Thuringia, combining “gestures of toleration, criticism of ‘excesses,’ and partial affirmation” in their responses, even proving willing to “recognize race and nation as the God-given foundations of all human life and all human love,” as Weinel put it (1106).

By the beginning of the 1930s, as the völkisch movement grew dramatically in both the Thuringian state and church, the Volkskirchenbund (now led by Hans Heyn) remained open to it as an important expression of Christianity among German people, criticizing only those aspects that liberals deemed overly divisive, including some of the anti-Jewish elements of the Bund für Deutsche Kirche.

Ultimately, though, a völkisch wing emerged within the Volkskirchenbund itself, particularly among younger members who were animated by the ways in which German racial nationalism seemed to unite society and church. By the time of the Nazi seizure of power and the 1933 church elections, four new developments pushed the Volkskirchenbund to capitulate to völkisch Protestantism: the rise of the German Christian Movement, which polled strongly in the January 1933 church elections; the frustration of Volkskirchenbund leaders over their failure to attract more younger followers; their fear that theological conservatives would seize control and make Thuringia too sectarian; and their lack of money to run a proper campaign in the July 1933 church elections (1111-1112). In the end, leaders in the Volkskirchenbund decided that the German Christians best represented the church-political goals of the Volkskirchenbund, sent around an official announcement of their support for the pro-Nazi Protestants, and effectively closed up shop on their own movement.

Spencer’s article illuminates the way theological liberals in the Volkskirchenbund—committed to pluralism and unity—brought themselves to support the German Christian Movement. They hoped to ensure that the church did not miss its chance to “to rescue an embattled and divided nation, to remedy the mistakes of the past” and “to meet the needs of the hour” (1118). “Ironically, their dream of a free, democratic, and culturally relevant Volkskirche led them to support—at least momentarily—an authoritarian group determined to impose its militant and racist ideology on the church and its members” (1118).

 

 

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Review of Wolfgang Thielmann, ed., Alternative für Christen? Die AfD und ihr gespaltenes Verhältnis zur Religion

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

Review of Wolfgang Thielmann, ed., Alternative für Christen? Die AfD und ihr gespaltenes Verhältnis zur Religion (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2017). Pp. 192. ISBN: 978-3-7615-6439-4.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

This book is a collection of short chapters by Protestant clergy, lay leaders, journalists and public intellectuals on the fraught relationship between Christianity and Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing populist party that has gained significant momentum in state and national elections since its founding in 2013. The editor and most contributors argue that the AfD and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible, though they also recognize that church members are attracted to the party and its program to roughly the same extent as the broader population. For this reason, they recommend dialogue with AfD supporters and sympathizers, though always with the goal of limiting its impact in church and society.

Among the incompatibilities cited by the authors are the AfD’s denigration of vulnerable groups (especially migrants and Muslims), its insistence on a homogeneous German Leitkultur, its political strategy (deliberate provocations and insults, distortions and “alternative facts,” manufacturing or intensifying anxieties), and its invocation of Christianity as an element of national identity rather than a universal faith and system of values. Nevertheless, they recognize that individual Christians have played a key role as founders and leaders of the party (including Frauke Petry, Bernd Lucke, and Konrad Adam on the Protestant side and Jörg Meuthen on the Catholic side). The group “Christen in der AfD” is another indicator that the party has made inroads among Christians, though very few pastors and priests have endorsed the AfD and many have been outspoken in their opposition.

The contributors’ calls for dialogue take different forms. Pastor Ulrich Kasparick of Hetzdorf (Uckerland) stresses the need for outreach to rural parishioners who rely on the internet and social media for much of their information about the wider world. Pastors and church councils must use those same channels to counter AfD positions and explain where they transgress Christian norms. Pastor Sven Petry (formerly married to Frauke Petry) argues that church leaders should listen to the concerns of Germany’s Wutbürger (enraged citizens) even as they challenge the misconceptions and scapegoating promoted by the AfD. Christina Aus der Au defends the decision to invite Anette Schultner (leader of the group “Christen in der AfD”) to participate in a panel discussion at the Protestant Kirchentag in Berlin and Wittenberg in 2017. Aus der Au, who served as president of the Kirchentag that year, appeals to the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for whom the highest priority was not looking heroic, but the survival of the coming generation. It would be better, she argues, for Christians “to get their hands dirty than to wash them in innocence” (83).

Of course, dialogue does not mean moral relativism, nor does it mean that an opponent’s views will go unchallenged. Superintendent Ilka Federschmidt (Wuppertal) welcomes a clear “no” to the AfD on the part of the churches, but like Kasparick she sees a need for ongoing dialogue and active engagement with church members who lean toward the AfD and its agenda. Law professor Jacob Joussen, an elder at the Bonhoeffer-Gemeinde in Düsseldorf, weighs the options available to lay leaders if a member of a church council declares allegiance to the AfD (as Hartmut Beucker did in Wuppertal in 2017). Joussen could find no legal justification for excluding or removing an elder based on party affiliation but argued that non-AfD parish leaders had an obligation to wage a vigorous and public campaign against the ideas of their wayward colleague if such a case were to arise.

The book also makes room for two prominent AfD voices via Hartmut Beucker’s essay “Warum ich für die AfD kandidiere” and a partial transcript from the 2017 Kirchentag, in which Anette Schultner squared off against Bishop Markus Dröge (Berlin-Brandenburg-Schlesische Oberlausitz) and journalist Liane Bednarz. Both Beucker and Schultner are fairly predictable in their opposition to “uncontrolled” migration, “Islamization,” abortion, and gender mainstreaming as well as their promotion of tighter restrictions on immigration, defense of the “Jewish-Christian foundations” of German culture, and “traditional” families. Equally noteworthy is their invocation of the fifth thesis of the Barmen Declaration to argue that the churches should steer clear of politics (i.e., criticism of the AfD), along with their strategy of representing themselves and their party as the true victims of intolerance, hatred and hysteria. When asked to comment on those who feared the AfD because its proposals threatened to restrict their rights, Schultner avoided answering directly and instead accused those who were frustrated over the existence of the AfD of being “undemocratic” (187).

Among the limitations of the book are its lack of historical depth and its minimal engagement with a growing body of research on populism, far-right political parties, and their points of connection with religious communities and identities. Also regrettable is the lack of Catholic contributors and the tendency of several of the Protestant authors to congratulate themselves for wading into the morass of dialogue, unlike their principled but risk-averse coreligionists who had refused to give AfD members access to the podium at the 2016 Katholikentag in Leipzig. A third issue, though admittedly unavoidable in such a work, is that some of the information it relays is quickly outdated. For example, Anette Schultner abandoned the AfD in October 2017, only a few months after defending it at the Kirchentag, because in her view extremists had taken over the party. In May 2018, AfD representative Volker Münz was allowed to speak at the 101st Katholikentag in Münster.

Despite these drawbacks, the book is a fascinating source for contemporary church historians in that it shows German Protestants (in the larger regional churches as well as the smaller free churches) reflecting on and responding to right-wing populism in real time. Though the players and the circumstances are different in many respects, one cannot help but contrast the nearly unanimous opposition of church leaders to the AfD with the collaboration or complicity of church leaders during the Nazi era. Equally important are the ways in which that earlier history serves as a reference point for contemporary antagonists as they frame the debate and define their positions within it.

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Article Note: Heath A. Spencer, “From Liberal Theology to Völkisch Christianity?: Heinrich Weinel, the Volkskirchenbund, and the Church Struggle in Thuringia”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 1 (March 2018)

Article Note: Heath A. Spencer, “From Liberal Theology to Völkisch Christianity?: Heinrich Weinel, the Volkskirchenbund, and the Church Struggle in Thuringia,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 30, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 328-350.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In this interesting article, Heath A. Spencer explains how Heinrich Weinel, professor of New Testament and systematic theology at Jena University from 1904 until his death in 1936, could combine “theological liberalism, progressive politics, and humanitarian ideals” (328) with support for the pro-Nazi German Christian Movement in Thuringia. As Spencer notes, in many respects, Weinel was something of a conundrum. He defended “Protestant freedom” against conservative theology, but supported the idea of a Protestant Volkskirche (people’s church). He strove for peace and disapproved of the “national religion” of the First World War era, yet volunteered for military service and promoted “total mobilization” towards the end of the war. During the Weimar period, he was one of the minority of Protestant clergy who supported the new republic, but as the völkisch movement grew stronger through the later 1920s, he called on his fellow religious liberals to work with those on the right (328-329).

Spencer argues that Weinel’s story helps us understand how not only ideology but also “situational factors” drew German Protestants towards völkisch Christianity. Further, it reveals the motives, decision-making processes, and hopes of Protestants (especially in 1933), while illustrating the importance of local and regional factors in the history of the German churches under Hitler (330).

Weinel believed in German exceptionalism and Germany’s cultural mission in the world, and in the importance of Christianity to both. Indeed, it was his fear of losing the völkisch movement to organized religion—just as the educated elites and the industrial working classes had been lost—that drove him to want “to combine Christianity and the völkisch movement together in the right way” (335).

As Spencer explains Weinel’s journey through the war, the Weimar era, and the early years of the Third Reich, what emerges so clearly is Weinel’s tolerance for and desire to understand and even work with those of differing religious and political inclinations. Though he criticized aspects of Nazism, he approved of Hitler’s “national renewal.” Similarly, though he disapproved of the German Christians’ antisemitism and elevation of German-ness over the Gospel, he chose to set aside his long participation in the Thuringian Volkskirchenbund and to support the German Christians in the 1933 Protestant church election. His rationale was that the German Christians were a dynamic force that was winning the hearts of the masses and that they were the party that could establish a centralized Protestant Reich Church, a cause Weinel championed but knew that religious liberals could not accomplish (339).

In the final section of the article, Spencer explains how Weinel’s support for the German Christians entangled him in the antisemitic politics of Nazi Germany. Though Weinel had positive things to say about historic Judaism and though he criticized the antisemitism of the völkisch movement, he also favoured ethnic segregation, celebrated the nation as a creation of God, and failed to speak in defense of Jews and Jewish Christians who were suffering under Nazi political rule and German Christian ecclesiastical rule. Ultimately, though Spencer argues that Weinel’s support for the German Christian Movement was largely a tactical decision born of “frustration and desperation,” he also concludes that “Weinel’s story is a depressing reminder that intelligent, devout, compassionate people can make disastrous political and moral choices” (344).

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Article Note: Samuel Koehne. “Religion in the Early Nazi Milieu: Towards a Greater Understanding of ‘Racist Culture’”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Article Note: Samuel Koehne. “Religion in the Early Nazi Milieu: Towards a Greater Understanding of ‘Racist Culture,’” Journal of Contemporary History.  Prepublished January 1, 2016, DOI: 10.1177/0022009416669420.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

While many recent studies of religion and Nazism begin with religious institutions and work outward from there, Samuel Koehne’s research begins with the early Nazi milieu and assesses its openness to various religious options within or outside of well-established traditions. To do so, he examines the religious orientation of key figures within the German-Socialist Party (Deutschsozialistische Partei, hereafter DSP), a relatively under-researched movement with numerous connections to the Nazi Party in terms of ideology and membership. Through his analysis of the DSP party conference in 1920 and DSP visions of “religious revival,” he identifies a spectrum of otherwise heterogeneous views united by antisemitism and a “racial spirituality that amounted to a kind of ‘ethnotheism’” (1).

Koehne’s demonstration of numerous connections between the Nazi Party and the DSP serves as a justification for using the latter to shed light on the former. Continue reading →

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Article Note: Todd Weir, “The Christian Front against Godlessness: Anti-Secularism and the Demise of the Weimar Republic, 1928-1933”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Article Note: Todd Weir, “The Christian Front against Godlessness: Anti-Secularism and the Demise of the Weimar Republic, 1928-1933,” Past and Present 229 (Nov. 2015): 201-238.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

Though historians have long been attentive to the role of organized religion in the demise of the Weimar Republic, Todd Weir argues that they have failed to recognize the full significance of anti-secularism in the political developments that brought Hitler to power. In contrast, Weir sees a close relationship between campaigns against godlessness and the Nazi Party’s electoral breakthrough with conservative Protestant voters beginning in 1930.

To make his case, Weir employs M. Rainer Lepsius’ conceptual model of four “mutually hostile” social-cultural milieux (socialist, Catholic, liberal Protestant, and conservative Protestant) among which Germans had been divided since the late nineteenth century (207). The socialist milieu, represented by the Communist and Social Democratic parties in the Weimar era, was decidedly secular in comparison with the others, and its members were prominent in the German Freethought Association as well as the periodic church-leaving campaigns. From 1929 onward, the communists’ displays of anti-clericalism grew increasingly provocative as they tried to draw ardent secularists away from their more moderate social democratic rivals. Catholic and Protestant clergy and lay organizations—most often aligned with the Center Party and the German National People’s Party, respectively—responded to these threats with energetic campaigns against godlessness. Their domestic mobilization dovetailed with widespread concern over the persecution of Christians in Mexico and the USSR, leading many Christians in Germany to conclude that their “defensive campaigns against German secularists” were part of a larger “global battle with unbelief” (202).

A side effect of this escalating cultural conflict was that it further undermined the position of Heinrich Brüning of the Center Party, who was Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932. Although Brüning suppressed communist freethought associations and banned a high-profile Jugendweihe (secular confirmation ceremony) that communists had planned for 2000 youth in Berlin, he was derided by conservative Catholics and Protestants for tolerating socialist freethinkers and the Center/Social Democratic coalition that governed the state of Prussia. Disappointment with the Center Party’s ‘tepid’ responses to secularism gave the National Socialists an opening to present their party as a more aggressive and effective champion in the struggle against godlessness. Their strategy seems to have been most effective among Protestants on the far right.

Weir’s article demonstrates a positive correlation—though not necessarily a causal relationship—between heightened concerns over godlessness and conservative Protestant support for the Nazis. Expressions of outrage over anti-clericalism and governments that appeared to tolerate it were certainly part of the toxic mix that undermined the Weimar Republic. However, Weir’s neglect of the liberal Protestant milieu and its role is puzzling. Members of this subculture also opposed godlessness, though many of them considered the ‘Catholicizing tendencies’ of conservative Protestants to be an equally grave threat to German culture. Consideration of this milieu would not necessarily negate Weir’s central argument, but it would provide a more nuanced representation of Christian responses to organized secularism at the end of the Weimar era.

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Article Note: Ján Liguš, “Obedience or Resistance: The Legacy of Bonhoeffer”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 2 (June 2016)

Article Note: Ján Liguš, “Obedience or Resistance: The Legacy of Bonhoeffer,” European Journal of Theology 24:2 (2015), 173-182.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

In this article, Ján Liguš offers a brief overview of Bonhoeffer’s theology with a focus on church-state relations, submission to legitimate authorities, and conditions under which Christians might practice passive disobedience or actively resist the state. Liguš notes that even before the Nazis came to power, Bonhoeffer was already exploring the boundaries of church and state and emphasizing God’s sovereignty over both. In Das Wesen der Kirche (1932), Bonhoeffer drew a distinction between the Church as a visible institution and the Kingdom of God that transcends it and “includes in itself all races, cultures [and] religions” (175). He also reflected on the limits of secular authority, asserting that “if the state prevents the proclamation of the Word of God, conflict will arise and the Church can criticise and disobey the state” (176). Similarly, in The Cost of Discipleship (1937) and Life Together (1939), Bonhoeffer stressed surrender and submission to the will of God, which might require civil disobedience but precluded rebellion. Liguš describes this position as a “pacifist theological-ethical orientation” that Bonhoeffer later gave up (178). Not until Ethics, which Bonhoeffer began writing in 1940, does Liguš find a theological-ethical justification for resistance. By that point, Bonhoeffer’s understanding of freedom and responsibility, inspired by Jesus’ voluntary acceptance of guilt due to his love for a sinful humanity, allowed him to take on the guilt of participating in a conspiracy that included an attempt to kill the head of state. Here, Liguš follows the interpretation of Larry Rasmussen’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Reality and Resistance.

Liguš’ aim is not only to explain what led Bonhoeffer from his earlier pacifism to participation in an assassination plot, but to identify elements in Bonhoeffer’s theology that were helpful to Eastern European Christians under communist regimes and that continue to offer hope in the present moment, when “the vast majority of people regard the church as irrelevant” (180). The article begins by comparing Bonhoeffer to reformer and martyr Jan Hus and ends with Bonhoeffer’s confidence that “the day will come” when Christians “will once more be called so to utter the word of God that the world will be changed and renewed by it” (Letters and Papers from Prison, quoted on 180).

Unfortunately, Liguš fails to integrate his assessment of Bonhoeffer’s theology with recent historical research on Bonhoeffer and the German churches during the Third Reich. The result is an oversimplification of the “church struggle” as a contest between Nazism-free orthodoxy and Nazism-infused heresy. For example, Liguš’ claim that the German churches “departed from the heritage of Martin Luther” (174) during the Nazi era fails to address the fact that many Protestant National Socialists were inspired by Luther and believed they were carrying his work forward. A more subtle version of the same argument is apparent when Liguš writes that Bonhoeffer was “initially influenced by the biblical scholar Adolf Schlatter” but “had to deal with prominent liberal theologians Adolf von Harnack and Reinhold Seeberg” (174, emphasis mine).

The article also suffers from a lack of attention to other dimensions of Bonhoeffer’s life that contributed to his uniqueness—even within the Confessing Church—as well as his decision to participate in the conspiracy. There is little discussion of the political orientation of his family (of which four members were in the resistance), the fact that he had a brother-in-law of Jewish ancestry, or the impact of his experiences living abroad. Some statements are also misleading, as when Liguš emphasizes the piety of Bonhoeffer’s mother but fails to mention that the Bonhoeffers were not a church-going family. Robert Ericksen, by way of contrast, has suggested that Bonhoeffer’s limited exposure to Christianity as a child might have been an advantage, given that so many church-going Protestants ultimately supported Hitler (see Ericksen, Complicity in the Holocaust, 112-114). Finally, there is very little attention to Bonhoeffer’s responses to (and at times neglect of) the “Jewish Question,” even though Bonhoeffer’s famous essay on this topic in 1933 considers the possibilities of criticism, amelioration, and resistance to state policy on the part of the Church.

The strength of Liguš’ article is that it takes seriously both the pacifism and the resistance of Bonhoeffer. However, the search for a second Jan Hus is best served by a close examination of Bonhoeffer in his historical context, with full awareness of its complexity and ambiguity.

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Article Note: Todd H. Weir, “The Specter of ‘Godless Jewry’: Secularism and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Article Note: Todd H. Weir, “The Specter of ‘Godless Jewry’: Secularism and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Central European History 46 (2014): 815-849.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

Todd Weir’s article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on Imperial Germany that explores how the “Jewish Question” was imagined and articulated across the ideological spectrum, particularly in secularist and anticlerical movements associated with the political left.  He finds that conservative defenders of the confessional state and their liberal opponents shared an assumption that integration required Jewish self-transformation, though they differed in terms of what kind of transformation was required.

Weir draws on examples from the “Berlin Antisemitism Controversy” that began in 1879 to show that “the conflation of modern Jewry with worldview secularism was a unifying feature across the political and religious spectrum of the emerging antisemitic discourse” (823).  He concludes that racial thinking did not replace religious antipathy but recast it by associating Judaism with national degeneration along with atheism and the erosion of Christian society.  Although this part of the article focuses on the usual suspects (Adolf Stöcker and Heinrich Treitschke), Weir adds a significant twist with his claim that “modern antisemitism must be understood in the context of the struggle over secularism” (821).

Even more important is Weir’s observation that philosemitic defenses of Jews were often accompanied by hostility toward manifestations of Jewishness.  For example, the Union of Free Religious Congregations welcomed individual Jewish members but refused to accept Free Religious Congregations that identified with Judaism.  In such cases, the unity of Jews and non-Jews required “exclusion of Jews as Jews from this unity” (831).  Likewise, Freethinkers tended to be “intolerant of the survival of any religious dogmas alongside their humanistic, monist, natural-scientific Weltanschauung” (838).  Jews were welcome to join, but they were expected to “convert” to secularism.

Jewish secularists like Wilhelm Loewenthal, founder of the Berlin Freethought Association Lessing in 1881, resisted such pressure and tried “to find a means of overcoming confessional division through science that did not eradicate the right to subjective affiliation with religious and cultural communities” (842).  The German Society of Ethical Culture promoted a similar kind of pluralism, in which a “science of ethics” served as a basis for cooperation among various confessions (844).  Yet philosemites like Wilhelm Foerster also complained about “Jewish separatism” and admonished Jews: “do not organize among yourselves, rather join with us against all evil, also in your own ranks, against German and against Jewish nationalism” (845).

Weir’s study is limited to a comparison of conservative Protestant, free religious and secularist subcultures in Imperial Germany.  Catholic and liberal Protestant approaches to the “Jewish Question” are not part of his analysis.  Nevertheless, he provides an important corrective to earlier scholarship that reduced the story to a two-dimensional contest between conservative antisemites and liberal proponents of emancipation.  Racism, religious bigotry, and fears of “godless Jewry” may have been part of a “conservative-nationalist cultural code” (847), but secularist philosemitism was not necessarily the antidote to this poison, for even as these secularists condemned antisemitism they also demanded “Jewish assimilation within the secularist fold” (847).

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Article Note: Luke Fenwick, “The Protestant Churches in Saxony-Anhalt in the Shadow of the German Christian Movement and National Socialism, 1945-1949”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 20, Number 3 (September 2014)

Article Note: Luke Fenwick, “The Protestant Churches in Saxony-Anhalt in the Shadow of the German Christian Movement and National Socialism, 1945-1949,” Church History 82, no. 4 (December 2013): 877-903.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

In the years immediately following the Second World War, the denazification of the German churches exhibited many of the same shortcomings as denazification in the broader society.  Church leaders rarely acknowledged the complicity of their institutions during the Third Reich, and many former supporters of Nazism remained in positions of authority in the postwar era.  The broad contours of this story are well-known, but there is still a need for further research on regional and local variations, and this is where Luke Fenwick’s article makes an important contribution.  His close analysis of the postwar “self-purification” of two regional Protestant churches in Saxony-Anhalt reveals diverse motives and priorities among key players as well as the continuation of the “church struggle” under new circumstances.

In his analysis of the Church Province of Saxony, Fenwick notes that in 1946, 170 of the approximately 1400 pastors and other church employees were former members of the German Christian Movement or the Nazi Party.  The regional church administration dismissed only four of these pastors, while four others were placed on probation, six were transferred, and ninety were encouraged to participate in re-education seminars.  Not surprisingly, state authorities found these measures to be insufficient.  However, religious leaders insisted that the Church Province had been a bastion of resistance against Nazism, the state had no right to interfere in church affairs, and church policy had to be oriented around forgiveness rather than vengeance.  Fenwick argues that an additional, unacknowledged motive was simply the need to maintain adequate staffing at the parish level.

The State Church of Anhalt had a different history and followed a slightly different path forward.  About half of the pastors in this regional church had belonged to the most radical faction within the German Christian Movement.  The postwar church administration established a commission to determine which of those clergy had been “activists” and which had been purely “nominal” affiliates, and by May 1946 it had dismissed ten pastors and transferred six others.  In addition to mandatory re-education for former members of the German Christian Movement, church authorities required individual declarations of repentance from those who hoped to remain in office.  Overall, denazification in Anhalt was as lenient as in the Church Province of Saxony, yet in this case state authorities expressed their approval rather than their displeasure, because they had been consulted throughout the process.

Fenwick draws a number of important conclusions from his study of these two regional churches.  He confirms for the Soviet zone what Doris Bergen (Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich)found to be true in the American zone—that a more accurate description of clerical denazification would be “de-German-Christianization.”  Though both regional churches were now controlled by former Confessing Church members, these postwar leaders were willing to leave former German Christians in office for the sake of church unity, pastoral care and evangelization—so long as they submitted to the new church regime and its theology.  However, church unity was elusive.  On the one hand, Confessing Church pastors complained that former German Christians were still in the pulpit.  Some also invoked their Confessing Church credentials to gain advantage when competing for positions or when in conflict with other clergy.  On the other hand, ordinary parishioners were inclined to protest the dismissal or transfer of clergy, for personal rapport often mattered more to them than whether their pastor had supported the German Christian Movement.

Fenwick’s article focuses primarily on the highest levels of authority in the two regional churches, but some of the most provocative illustrations revolve around individual pastors and their parishioners.  For example, we see Pastor Erich Elster (Dessau-Ziebigk) explain his former affiliation with the German Christians in such a way as to satisfy the Anhalt church council, and we see Pastor K. at the church of St. Martin continue to preach nationalistic sermons and use the German Christian hymn book until he is transferred in 1946 (much to the dismay of his congregation).  The local particularities and variations revealed by such examples suggest that additional research on denazification at the parish level would yield important insights.

 

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Article Note: Manuel Borutta, “Genealogie der Säkularisierungstheorie. Zur Historisierung einer großen Erzählung der Moderne,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36 (2010): 347-76

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2012

Article Note: Manuel Borutta, “Genealogie der Säkularisierungstheorie. Zur Historisierung einer großen Erzählung der Moderne,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36 (2010): 347-76.

By Heath Spencer, Seattle University

Many assume that secularization is a fundamental aspect of modernity and that religion is – or at least should be – a private matter, best kept separate from other spheres like politics, economics, and scientific inquiry. Manuel Borutta is among a growing number of scholars who raise questions about such assumptions and explore their origins. Borutta, of Ruhr-Universität Bochum, specializes in anti-Catholicism, culture wars, and secularization theory and is the author of Antikatholizismus. Deutschland und Italien im Zeitalter der Europäischen Kulturkämpfe (2010) and Religion und Zivilgesellschaft. Zur Theorie und Geschichte ihrer Beziehung (2005). His recent article in Geschichte und Gesellschaft historicizes secularization theory, arguing that it was invented by European liberals in the midst of the culture wars of the nineteenth-century. Liberals of this era demanded “eine Differenzierung von Politik und Religion, eine Privatisierung der Religion, eine Unterordnung der Kirche unter den Staat” (351), and they asserted that their own vision of the proper role of religion in society was nothing less than a fundamental law of modernity.

Borutta analyzes the writings of politicians and academics like Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Heinrich von Sybel, and Heinrich von Treitschke as well as images and articles in Berliner Wespen, Kladderadatsch, and Die Gartenlaube. In these sources, religious institutions and expressions of popular piety (especially Catholic) were often represented as relics of an age that had passed, or as brief flare-ups of medievalism in the midst of otherwise modern cultures. Anything that elevated faith above science or challenged the notion of autonomous spheres for religion and civil society was incompatible with the modern world and therefore illegitimate. Borutta also draws attention to the gendering of church and state that was common in liberal discourse. It was essential for the state to be “Herr im eigenen Hause” (359). However, rather than a separation of church and state, most liberals imagined a properly ordered marriage of church and state, one that was both complementary and hierarchical. The church (feminine, nurturing, emotional, partial) was to be confined to the private, domestic sphere, whereas the state (masculine, rational, scientific, universal) would oversee both the public and private spheres. In the end, liberal culture-warriors fashioned a master narrative in which modernity conformed to their own ideals. Beginning with Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, this model was institutionalized in the sociology of religion, and only recently has it faced serious challenge.

Although Borutta takes note of the transnational and transconfessional character of Europe’s culture wars, most of his examples are drawn from Germany and Switzerland. However, within this limited scope, his article raises awareness of the extent to which current conceptions of ‘modern Western society’ draw their inspiration from the conflicts of this era. It also makes an important contribution to recent scholarship that explores how narratives about religion and even definitions of ‘religion’ can privilege certain cultural preferences and configurations of power, as in works like William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (2009).

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