Let me begin by thanking Rosario Forlenza and Bjørn Thomassen for their generous and insightful review of Reinventing Protestant Germany. Their response demonstrates that our books are wrestling with a shared set of questions about the place of religious actors, networks, and worldviews in Western Europe’s mid-twentieth-century transition from fascism to democracy. I will reply to their questions in reverse order, building toward the largest conceptual stakes.

Like Italy’s Christian Democracy, Reinventing Protestant Germany is framed as a national study. I wholeheartedly endorse Forlenza and Thomassen’s call for comparison, and future scholarship could productively explore how other national Protestant churches, whether in Britain, the Netherlands, or Scandinavia, addressed their tumultuous histories during the Second World War. At the same time, my book does take seriously the degree to which West German Protestants were embedded in transnational networks. The premise behind the reviewers’ question, I suspect, is that greater attention to transnational exchanges would complicate the book’s argument about post-1945 continuities in German Protestantism. The evidence I have found, however, is mixed. Some transnational religious encounters powerfully disrupted nationalist mythologies. Pastoral dialogue across the Iron Curtain prepared the ground for the German Protestant Church’s 1965 “Eastern Memorandum,” which called for the recognition of Germany’s postwar territorial losses. But just as often, German pastors used such encounters to promote their own, self-serving accounts of the Nazi era. Representatives of the ecumenical World Council of Churches were key popularizers of the narrative of German Protestant resistance.

The relationship between theology and historical memory is an equally important issue, one that I acknowledge is not fully captured by the book’s framing around political events. A study with an alternative chronology could explore the shifting reception of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other Confessing Church dissidents by a later generation of Protestant activists, who invoked Bonhoeffer’s legacy to envision a socially engaged church. Indeed, I would readily agree that my own analysis is “shaped by a larger memory politics” deriving from the critical reckoning with the Nazi-era churches that took off in the 1980s. My book cannot but be informed by four decades of scholarship that painstakingly unearthed the ways in which the Protestant churches, well beyond the overtly pro-Nazi German Christian movement, aligned with much of the National Socialist ideology and political program. But as Forlenza and Thomassen recognize, my intervention goes beyond pointing out the limits of postwar memory. Instead, I show how postwar Protestants deployed flawed narratives of the Nazi past to rethink their relationship to the West German state, and ultimately to articulate a vision of democracy.

This brings me to the reviewers’ final question about whether my emphasis on continuity understates the “transformative power of historical experiences” in periods of crisis. The question, I think, reflects a productive tension between my interpretive framework and that of Forlenza and Thomassen. To what extent can historians access the internal experiences of their subjects, beyond the words they wrote and the actions they performed? Living through the traumas of Nazism, war, military service, and (for some of my actors) imprisonment undoubtedly challenged central tenets of German Protestant nationalism—including the conviction that the Germans were a divinely chosen people, and that authoritarian leadership was ordained by God. But the postwar church’s political campaigns, and the languages in which these campaigns were justified, also reveal powerful legacies of the Protestant nationalist tradition. New discourses of human rights and democracy were anchored in older assumptions about the centrality of the Protestant church for articulating the shared values of German politics. Whatever the subjects of Reinventing Protestant Germany believed about their own conversion experiences, their writings and actions suggest limits to those conversions that the historian must also consider.

While the two books differ in their interpretive approaches, together they exemplify the ongoing vitality of religion as a field of analysis for rewriting twentieth-century European history. I look forward to following Forlenza and Thomassen’s exciting future projects.