Liberal Protestantism Research Articles

Religion and state economic growth in the USA

This paper expands upon the recent literature on economic growth and religion. It investigates the influence that religious adherents have on cross-state differences in production growth in the USA. Following the capital stock apportionment procedures from Munnell (1990) and Garofalo and Yamarik (2002), and merging religious adherent data from both the Glenmary Research Center and the American Jewish Year Book, a unique three-period panel data set is constructed for the 48 contiguous states. The results indicate that the concentration of Jewish adherents has a positive and significant effect on interstate differences in economic growth. The concentration of Liberal Protestants tends to negatively influence economic growth. These findings support the arguments, first published by Max Weber over 100 years ago, that religion can have significant influences on regional economic outcomes.

Historiography and Theology

The interpretation of the different roles played by Christian theology during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich is deeply intertwined with current understandings of the nature and role of church and theology. This article is a critical discussion of the attempt of the "Munich school" centered around Trutz Rendtorff to liberate Protestant liberalism from the history writing of Karl Barth and the Barthian tradition. It discusses concrete issues of historiography dealing with Barth and liberal Protestants such as Ernst Troeltsch, Emanuel Hirsch, and Martin Rade, at the same time as it discusses how historiography is interrelated with theology, sociology, and politics.

American Liberal Protestantism and the Concept of Progress, 1870-1930

For too long, students of American religious thought have tended to interpret the views of liberal Protestants regard to human nature, human history, and the prospects of realizing the Kingdom of God from the perspective of some of liberalism's harshest critics. During the late 1920s and 1930s partisans of neo-orthodoxy chastised liberal Protestantism for its naive view of human nature, its uncritical embrace of the reigning culture, and its shallow, overly optimistic view of progress. Since that time, numerous historians have echoed that view. To be sure, some have attempted to provide more balanced perspective. In 1963, for example, William R. Hutchison demonstrated the existence of a vital and articulate tradition of liberal self-criticism throughout the period after World War I, and he urged readers to approach liberal Protestants with minimum of preconceptions about what these

Paper City and Southern Parish: American Catholics in Postwar Social Science Research

By the post-World War II era, the situation of much of the Euro-American Catholic population of the United States was in significant transition. Although on the surface Catholics appeared ensconced in a unified and “triumphal” Church, the slow but inexorable workings of broad social and cultural forces were reconfiguring the parameters of the Catholic engagement with American culture.1 The trajectory of Catholic assimilation in the United States through the latter half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century paralleled the emergence of the modern social and behavioral sciences. During this same period, scholars in fields such as psychology, sociology and anthropology finessed older theoretical perspectives and generated new ones (functional, conflict/consensus, interactionist). More sophisticated research techniques that imitated the methods and goals of the natural sciences developed as social science practitioners strove to become more value neutral in theory and method. By the 1920s, sociology, in particular, was moving away from a close alignment with liberal Protestantism and its impetus to ameliorate the social problems of an urban, industrial, and increasingly bureaucratized nation.2 One genre of early twentieth century social science research focused on American community studies. Scholars such as W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki,3 W. Lloyd Warner,4 Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd,5 H. Richard Niebuhr,6 Elin Anderson,7

Science, Myth and Eastern Souls: J. S. C. Schweigger and the Society for the Spread of Natural Knowledge and Higher Truth

In nineteenth-century Germany, it was rare to find a German Protestant intellectual who had much positive to say about the historical role of the Jesuit order. Branded as anti-scientific, obscurantist and anti-modern, the Jesuits were one of liberal Protestants favorite targets of criticism. When a German Protestant used the word “Jesuit”, it was generally safe to assume the label was meant as an insult. It is surprising, then, to find the chemist J. S. C. Schweigger, the son of a Protestant theologian and himself a doctor of theology, holding forth at the 1837 meeting of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Aerzte (the yearly annual meeting of German scientists) about the world historical importance of the early modern Jesuit missions to Asia. The birth of modern natural science, Schweigger claimed, was intricately bound up with the accomplishments of the Jesuits in the East; modern science had flourished in the seventheenth-century in no small measure because of the example the Jesuits provided of a successful marriage between theology and natural research.1 Much recent historical work has uncovered the importance of the Jesuit order for early modern science. For a German Protestant in the mid-ninetheenthcentury, however, this opinion was decidedly unusual, and previous research on Schweigger offers limited clues as to why and how he might have developed his idiosyncratic reading of the history of science. J. S. C. Schweigger (1779-1857),

Ecclesiastical and religious factors which preserved Christian and traditional forms of education for citizenship in English schools, 1934–1944

Participants in the public discourse pertaining to religious education and education for citizenship in English schools between 1934 and 1944 included many ‘Christian educationists’. They advocated a conservative and elitist form of education for citizenship as taught through indirect training, Arnoldian public school traditions and ecumenical, liberal Protestantism. This contrasted with the conception of education for citizenship promoted by the founder members of the Association for Education in Citizenship. They wanted pupils to be educated into a liberal, democratic and secular version of English citizenship by means of ‘progressive’ pedagogies and direct instruction. This article identifies the ecclesiastical and religious factors which preserved the Christian and traditional form of education for citizenship in English schools between 1934 and 1944. These factors included the revival of the Christian foundations of British national identity and citizenship, the development and acceptance of non‐denominational forms of Christian education, the increasingly positive response which an evermore coherent and professionalised cohort of Christian educationists received from the Board of Education and the Consultative Committee, and the political power of the Anglican Church within the dual system combined with the religious settlement agreed in the 1944 Education Act.

Spirit and Flesh in Twentieth-Century Welsh Poetry: A Comparison of the Work of D. Gwenallt Jones and Pennar Davies

In Poetry Since 1945, a masterly assessment of Welsh poetry between 1945 and 1970 published more than thirty years ago, the then-young literary critic Dafydd Glyn Jones described the impact the Penyberth incident--the Burning of the Bombing School--had made on Welsh literature up to that time. Penyberth in North Wales's Llyn peninsula and the heartland of Welsh-speaking Wales, was where the British War Ministry had decided, in the teeth of local and national opposition, to build a testing ground for its Air Force pilots in preparation for the impending European war. On September 8, 1936, three leaders of the Welsh Nationalist Party--an academic, a schoolmaster, and a minister of religion--took it upon themselves to block the government's plans by setting the place on fire; they each received sentences of nine months in prison for their pains. That most unexpected for freedom and dignity signaled a new phase in Welsh national consciousness, when those who were committed to Wales were challenged for the first time in the modern era to act radically in order to preserve their culture and their way of life. In response to that incident, the poet Robert Williams Parry in his sonnet Cymru 1937 (Wales 1937) had voiced an almost existential plea calling on his contemporaries, whether pious secular, to do something rather than to lament impotently on the demise of their nation: O'r Llanfair sydd ar y neu Lanfair Mathafarn Chwyth ef i'r synagog neu chwyth ef i'r dafarn. (Llwyd 129) From the Llanfair on the Hill the burial place of the Methodist revivalist and hymnist Williams Pantycelyn, or Llanfair Mathafarn, the Anglesey abode of his eighteenth-century contemporary, the dissolute poetic genius Goronwy Owen, blow him to the synagogue him to the tavern (my own translation). This wind, wrote Dafydd Glyn Jones, blown through Welsh poetry ever since, and--thanks largely to the powerful voices of the two Christian poets, Saunders Lewis and D. Gwenallt Jones, against whom the still small voices of Marxism and Humanism had no earthly chance,--it has blown, almost without veering, from Llanfair ar y Bryn (47). Even in 1971 this, in the world of literature, was a most unusual situation. The twentieth century had seen the progressive secularization of Welsh life, not least among its intelligentsia. The University of Wales, its first constituent College having been established in 1872, had taken its earliest strides at the exact time when Darwinism and other humanist ideologies had undermined, to an increasing extent, the older values and orthodoxies. If the liberal theology that became so pervasive among a section of the religious leaders at the turn of the century had been, for some, a means of preserving the integrity of Christian faith in the context of the modern age, for others it was all too easy to pass beyond liberal Protestantism altogether into a full-blown secular humanism. If Christianity was merely humanism with a pious tinge, what reason was there to stay Christian at all? Just as this was occurring among the intelligentsia, the great phalanx of the working class, and not just in the industrial south, was also traveling in a secular direction under the influence of socialism and the labor movement. By the first decade of the century, the older individualism was being superseded by a class-based politics that prized workers' rights much higher than religious faith; the people's utopia became a much more potent symbol than the Kingdom of God. Following the deep tragedy of the First World War, the feeling was that the new Wales would be a secular Wales with religion having been banished to the past. And so it was, a fact exemplified during the 1930s by the poets and the novelists of the Anglo-Welsh: Rhys Davies, Idris Davies, and Dylan Thomas. It was also true of the most creative artists who wrote in Welsh: T. H. Parry-Williams and Robert Williams Parry being cases in point. …

HAUERWAS'S WITH THE GRAIN OF THE UNIVERSE1 AND THE BARTHIAN OUTLOOK: A Few Observations

ABSTRACTThis article has two main divisions, the first consisting in parts 1–3, the second in parts 4–8. The purpose of the first division is to assess Hauerwas's contentions regarding what he takes to be serious debilities in modern theological culture. The objects of Hauerwas's criticism are: (1) natural theology; (2) reason as it is represented in the structure of the modern university and in the “Enlightenment Project”; and (3) liberal Protestantism—the latter particularly as it turns up, by his account, in Reinhold Niebuhr's theology. The article will offer a defense of natural theology and an alternative approach to Niebuhr's theology while showing how Hauerwas's contentions concerning these two matters are mistaken. Parts 4–8 are theological studies. These studies concentrate on selected though main aspects of Hauerwas's outlook. Part 4 concerns a problematic implication of the notion, mainly from Barth, of divinity's humanity; Part 5 a note of difficulty from William James about the idea of the theistic God and its pertinence to the Barthian or Hauerwasian God; Part 6 the relation between belief and witness; Part 7 theology's discourse and analogy; Part 8 the Barthian‐Hauerwasian theology as a metaphysics. Part 1, concerning natural theology, stands over both divisions. These observations are not in the main intended as textual studies, though in certain passages the analysis is closely attentive to Hauerwas's text. Also, the paper does not offer the sort of account that would come from a historian, intellectual biographer, or social or cultural analyst or critic. Its focus is philosophical‐theological criticism.

‘Vain are the thousand creeds’: Wuthering Heights, the Bible and Liberal Protestantism

This essay reconsiders Emily Bronte's place within the theological history of the early nineteenth century. I argue that there is a complex system of biblical hermeneutics embedded within the narrative of Wuthering Heights. In the first part of the essay, I locate Bronte within the key theological and denominational contexts of her family life. In the second part, I offer a comparative reading of Wuthering Heights and Friedrich Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith and argue that Bronte's use of the Bible is founded upon a liberal hermeneutics that privileges personal, intuitive experience of the divine over traditional canonical authority.

Teologinis bioetikos diskursas: bendrosios ir konfesinės skirtys

This essay is devoted to the problem of theological discourse in bioethics. We focus both on general positions shared across major existing religions and substantial confessional differences among them. Among the major categories determining relationship between bioethics and religion we studied the following: “image of God” (imago Dei), casuistry, primacy of procreation, “playing God”, artificial procreation and others. After analyzing Christian, Jewish and Islamic positions on the theological interpretation of the reproductive technologies and human cloning, we came to a conclusion that differences in views depend rather on orthodox, conservative, traditional or liberal viewpoint within a given church than on differences between particular religions. Despite substantial faith-related differences, occasionally, views on reproductive technologies and other problems of bioethics seem closer between liberal Protestants and liberal Judaists than between orthodox and reformist Judaists. Â

Trends in Religious Stratification: Have Religious Group Socioeconomic Distinctions Declined in Recent Decades?

This study examines the degree to which religious group socioeconomic differences have declined during the period from 1972-2000. There has been some debate in the literature regarding the blurring of religious group socioeconomic distinctions, and this paper will outline the conflicting positions on this issue. An analysis of national survey data reveals some improvement in the relative socioeconomic positioning of Black and Conservative Protestants from the 1970s through the 1990s. However, Liberal Protestants and Jews continue to rank highest in income, education, and occupational prestige. Catholics and Moderate Protestants score near the national mean on these measures, and Black Protestants and Conservative Protestants rank lowest on socioeconomic indicators. The most noteworthy change includes a decline in the relative socioeconomic standing of those with no religious preference.

A Long Eclipse: The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920-1970, and: Knowledge Matters: Essays in Honour of Bernard J. Shapiro (review)

Reviewed by: A Long Eclipse: The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920-1970, and: Knowledge Matters: Essays in Honour of Bernard J. Shapiro Len Findlay (bio) Catherine Gidney . A Long Eclipse: The Liberal Protestant Establishment and the Canadian University, 1920-1970 McGill-Queen's University Press. xxvi, 246. $70.00 Paul Axelrod , editor. Knowledge Matters: Essays in Honour of Bernard J. ShapiroMcGill-Queen's University Press. xviii, 132. $75.00, 27.95 While Canada's political leaders show signs of turning their attention once again from health to education, and amid intensifying interest in post-secondary education as the best guarantor of the nation's global competitiveness, attention to the history of Canada's universities and their changing mandates becomes all the more necessary. Large organizations like AUCC, CAUT, and the two main national student bodies lobby assiduously while the federal granting councils strive to document the return on federal and provincial investment. But individual faculty and students need to be engaged too in making the argument for public support of post-secondary education, and one of the ways they can do so is by writing about the policies and practices that have brought us to where we are. The two quite different books under review here show that there is a wide range of ways in which debate can be enlivened and public understanding enhanced, even though neither work is as radical as some might like. Catherine Gidney's contribution to the McGill-Queen's series Studies in the History of Religion is valuable and timely. Universities and colleges across Canada are faced with regular attempts to inject religious considerations into the activities of academic teaching and research, often in ways that are framed (and inflamed) by the media as a radical departure from Canada's secular and sober academic traditions. But faith and facts, revelation and reason have shared university and college space in Canada from the earliest days. A reality not at all surprising, given the political prominence of faith-based learning, Clergy Reserves, Protestant/Catholic tensions, and the distinctive traditions of France and Britain in further education. A Long Eclipse reveals how gradual has been the shift from Protestant hegemony to secular reason in the Canadian academy, and how demographic and social change directly and indirectly affects institutions that hate to be hurried into change, even though their connection to change (in the form of progress, growth, prosperity) is one of the most important bases of their self-esteem and public appeal. In the course of eight well-researched and effectively sequenced chapters, Gidney shows how faith in education entwines with religious faith so as to invigorate and constrain the activities of both, and how liberal Protestantism was a powerful and persistent 'public voice' inside and outside Canadian universities until the 1960s. She also shows how mistaken it is to equate 'religious' with 'conservative,' to think of Protestantism as a loose synonym for 'decline, ' or to link modernization and secularization too closely. The changing face of Canada is attended by changes in its communities of faith, including [End Page 415] those whose faith is more informally spiritual or zealously secular. There are important continuities between the social gospel of the early twentieth century, the radicalism of the 1960s, and global justice movements today. Gidney's work reminds us of the social and moral functions, or even missions, of the university, and that much current anxiety about its politicization would seem naïve or plain silly to large numbers of students and faculty who lived through the realities and consequences of two world wars and the great depression. Gidney might have said more about what university presidents presume and promote today, and faced up more explicitly to the limited liberality of Protestants towards 'counter-culture,' and, more importantly, towards First Nations and Métis people. But she tells her story well. An important series of insights into current academic leadership and the best course for the contemporary university have been elicited by Paul Axelrod to mark the retirement of Bernard Shapiro from McGill (and his move into the even more difficult waters of parliamentary ethics). The range and eminence of the contributors reflect Shapiro...

Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism Gillis J. Harp Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.237 pp. $80.00

Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism Gillis J. Harp Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.237 pp. $80.00

Sunday Newspapers and Lived Religion in Late Nineteenth-Century America

Everyday meanings and practices show how religion is actually lived. Understandings can become varied and sometimes contradictory as people do creative cultural work with sacred matters. Actions can reveal resistance and ways to innovate.1 Blue laws and the customs of the Puritan were supposed to provide nineteenth-century Americans with a day of rest and religious concentration, but other conceptions of what to do with the time were emerging. Antebellum reformers and freethinkers used the day for meetings and lectures. By mid-century, the continental of drinking and popular entertainment had been introduced by immigrants from Germany, Ireland, and elsewhere. In the final third of the century, liberal Protestants argued that opening libraries and museums and allowing some secular pastimes on Sunday could be beneficial for moral development and democracy. They contended that uplifting cultural activities and innocent diversions could direct attention to the community, the family, and nature in a society that was increasingly

The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945 (review)

Reviewed by: The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945 Doris L. Bergen The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945. By Richard Steigmann-Gall. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xvi, 294.) As Richard Steigmann-Gall points out, "the insistence that Nazism was an anti-Christian movement has been one of the most enduring truisms of the past fifty years" (p. 266). In The Holy Reich, Steigmann-Gall seeks to correct that view. National Socialism had many connections to Christianity, as Steigmann-Gall demonstrates. There were personal ties—Nazi leaders who considered themselves good Christians and were active in their churches, including some, like Wilhelm Kube and Erich Koch, who held high offices in the Protestant Church. There were institutional links too, from Hitler's early attempts to unify German Protestants into a national, Nazified church, to women's organizations that used the rhetoric, methods, and even personnel of church groups to serve the Nazi state and its goals. Most important in Steigmann-Gall's analysis, there was ideological common ground. Members of the Nazi elite—even "paganists" like Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler—used biblical allusions in their private and public pronouncements; retained an affection for Jesus and found a place for him in their world views; and supported a Christian social ethic of sacrifice, service, and charity. We cannot understand the Nazi movement, Steigmann-Gall concludes, without admitting its close, if ambiguous, relationship to Christianity. [End Page 841] Steigmann-Gall's first chapter analyzes the Nazi concept of "positive Christianity" and introduces some of its key proponents within the Party, particularly in the years before Hitler came to power in 1933. Many scholars dismiss "positive Christianity" as an opportunistic slogan coined to conceal Nazism's intrinsic hostility toward the churches. Using the words of leading Nazis, Steigmann-Gall shows that, to the contrary, many Nazi spokesmen saw their movement as pred-icated on a specific kind of Christianity: anti-Semitic, socially engaged, and committed to German unity. These "Nazi elites" showed by their examples that it was not only possible but desirable to be both a loyal Christian and a devout follower of Adolf Hitler. This attempt to delineate Nazi views of Christianity is the most original part of Steigmann-Gall's book. A subsequent chapter describes Nazi efforts to bridge the confessional divide between Germany's Protestant majority and substantial Roman Catholic minority. Here Steigmann-Gall returns to well traveled ground to address relations between Hitler's new regime in 1933 and Germany's Protestant churches. Hitler's initial efforts to "co-ordinate" German Protestantism were not products of antagonism or precursors to an eventual destruction of Christianity in Germany, Steigmann-Gall argues. Instead such initiatives—from support of the "German Christian" movement in 1933 church elections to attacks on confessional schools—reflected the anti-doctrinal nature of "positive Christianity" and expressed Nazism's "clear ideological preference for Protestantism over Catholicism" (p. 84). Indeed, Steigmann-Gall contends, with their admiration for Martin Luther, their suspicion of Ultramontanism, and their anticlericalism, Nazi leaders built on liberal Protestantism in the preceding century. Even nominal Catholics such as Hitler and his propaganda master Joseph Goebbels revealed affinities for Protestantism that sharply contrasted their vituperations against their own faith tradition. Some readers may be pleased to see how easily Steigmann-Gall lets Catholicism off the hook—especially after recent, more critical studies of Catholic anti-Semitism, Catholics in the Third Reich, and the papacy and the Holocaust (by Olaf Blaschke, Michael Phayer, Oded Heilbronner, Kevin Spicer, Beth Griech-Pollele, Susan Zucotti, Daniel Goldhagen, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, and others). But before heaving a sigh of relief, one should note that Steigmann-Gall pays much more attention to German Protestantism than to Catholicism, as his notes and bibliography reveal. Engagement with Catholic issues would not explode the book's main argument, but it would add nuance to Steigmann-Gall's claims about Nazism and Christianity. The remaining chapters focus on neo-paganism within National Socialism, which Steigmann-Gall shows was neither as powerful nor as anti-Christian as outside observers have assumed; on the Party's turn away from Protestantism by 1937 after failure to create a national church...

The role of religion in the Dutch fertility transition: starting, spacing, and stopping in the heart of the Netherlands, 1845–1945

This contribution investigates how religion retarded the Dutch fertility transition by looking at how denominations were associated with the timing of first births (starting), the length of birth intervals (spacing), and the timing of last births (stopping). First, we apply a simple descriptive model of starting, spacing, and stopping to life-course data from the province of Utrecht. Then, we apply multivariate regression to assess the independent effects of religious denominations, net of socio-economic status, on stopping behaviour. The results indicate that liberal Protestants were more prone to adopt stopping behaviour than orthodox Protestants and Catholics.

The Timing of First Marriage

Using survey data from a nationally representative sample, this article explores how marriage timing varies across major religious denominations. Survival analysis indicates that net of statistical controls, Catholics, moderate Protestants, conservative Protestants, and Mormons marry significantly earlier than their unaffiliated counterparts. This holds true for women and men. However, no statistical differences emerge between Jews, liberal Protestants, and the unaffiliated. As surmised, auxiliary statistical tests reveal additional religious subcultural variations: (a) Jews tend to marry later than Catholics, conservative Protestants, and Mormons; (b) Catholics also marry later than conservative Protestants and Mormons; (c) no statistical difference surfaces between Mormons and conservative Protestants; and (d) differences between Catholics and liberal Protestants as well as between Jews and liberal Protestants are statistically negligible. These findings systematically support the denominational subcultural paradigm in the case of marriage timing.

The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany (review)

Reviewed by: The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany Michael B. Gross The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany. By Róisín Healy . [ Studies in Central European Histories.] ( Boston and Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. 2003. Pp. xii, 263. $145.00.) There was a specter haunting Germany—not of communism but of Jesuitism. This at least is what bourgeois Protestant opponents of the Society of Jesus believed, according to Róisín Healy's The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany. The title echoes that of Friedrich Heyer's article "Das Jesuitengespenst der deutschen Protestanten" of 1977, but the fascinating topic of anti-Jesuit fanaticism has waited for a sustained and serious study. This book is both an examination of the Jesuit Feindbild (enemy image) and the legislative history of the Jesuit Law of 1872, which banned the order from the new German empire. The hysteria directed against the Society of Jesus extended well beyond opposition to the activities of the 634 Jesuits living in the German empire in 1871. It included hostility toward what liberal Protestants called "Jesuitism": the fantastic conspiracy to subjugate the world to the rule of the Pope and to convert Protestants back to Catholicism. In the introduction, Healy argues that anti-Jesuits exhibited the characteristics of the "paranoid style," a mode of political behavior coined by the American historian Richard Hofstadter in a seminal article published in 1964. Accordingly, anti-Jesuits imagined themselves persecuted by subhuman Jesuits with superhuman powers. Unable to recognize the advantages they had as the religious majority, anti-Jesuits were hardly the victims they made themselves out to be. The opening chapter demonstrates that the anti-Jesuits of imperial Germany inherited the traditions of the Jesuit Feindbild that dated back to the foundations of the order in 1540. Anti-Jesuit rhetoric across Europe slandered Jesuits as megalomaniacs, traitors, snakes and lizards, robots and sorcerers, and sexual deviants. Anti-Jesuits of the imperial period then adapted these tropes to their own particular circumstances including the proclamation of papal infallibility, unification, and the Kulturkampf, the campaign to break the power of the Catholic Church in Germany. They achieved a major victory with the Jesuit Law of 1872, which closed the Society of Jesus in the empire and restricted the activities of individual Jesuits. The Catholic Center Party repeatedly assembled majorities in the imperial parliament in favor of repeal. Full repeal, however, was not achieved until 1917, when the Prussian state recognized the need to boost Catholic morale for the sake of the war. Healy describes in careful and unprecedented detail the origins of the law, the role of pressure groups, the passage of the legislation, and the campaigns for and against its repeal. In three chapters, Healy argues that anti-Jesuits developed historical, moral, and intellectual critiques of the order that provided the on-going support for the Jesuit law. Based on a historical narrative of the order's loyalty to the pope, anti-Jesuits claimed that Jesuits would never support the new empire. Leading liberal and Protestant historians catalogued the nefarious intrigues of the Jesuits as a warning. According to the moral critique, Jesuits violated the border between [End Page 383] the public and private spheres that anti-Jesuits believed was central, Healy argues, to the proper balance of personal autonomy and discipline. According to anti-Jesuits, the Jesuits concentrated their attack on sites at the borders: the school which they infected with perverted pedagogy and the confessional which they used to establish intimacies with women. By dictating to the family on moral matters, Jesuits infiltrated the home and substituted their own authority for that of the husband. In the intellectual critique, Jesuits represented the worst case of Catholics who polluted the public with dogma. Anti-Jesuits believed that the Jesuits, with their rejection of scholarly objectivity and their reputation for duping the masses, were hostile to Bildung, the cultivation of the autonomous self both for its own sake and for the sake of participation in public life. These critiques allowed anti-Jesuits to claim their right to social and religious leadership and applaud their own contributions to the nation. Although Healy follows the "paranoid style" of the anti-Jesuits throughout the Wilhelmine period, she...

Reinhold Niebuhr: Impact and Implications

Reinhold Niebuhr's realistic theology and ethics provided a stark contrast to the optimistic Protestant liberalism of a previous generation. His success in reshaping the political theology of his contemporaries has led some recent critics to dismiss him as simply an echo of a cultural consensus which he in fact did much to create. The quite different realities of our time suggest, however, that we cannot be Niebuhrian realists simply by repeating his insights. Realism at the beginning of the 21st century has to shift its attention from the center of established moral and religious traditions to the growing edges where new institutions are being formed and new understandings of the human good are coming into focus. Such thinking runs the risk of what Niebuhr would call "utopianism," but a Christian realist in the 21st century will be someone who takes all of those possibilities seriously, in contrast to 20th-century realists who attempted to deal with the pace and unpredictability of change by returning all political questions to the management of the nation-state system.

The Post-war Reformed Church in face of the Holocaust

Christian churches both Catholic and Protestant experienced a renewal of their theology and a revival of their impact on society in the interwar period; and they could count on the continuous good will of the conservative Horthy regime. Convinced that the leading role of Jewish intellectuals in the 1918-1919 revolutionary upheaval resulted the near ruin of the traditional society and amidst the shock caused by the collapse of historical Hungary, some leading members of Protestant churches endorsed various forms of political anti-Semitism, including the acceptance of some type of curtailment of religious equality, which had once been acclaimed as a significant achievement of nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism. While maintaining their sympathy for the Horthy regime till the very last, the leaders of the churches opposed the persecution and deportation of Hungarian Jews, which began escalating after March 1944. This paper will discuss some of the possible contexts of the Reformed Church's public statem...