Bourgeois Germans engaged with considerable urgency in religious debate in the public discourse of Imperial Germany. There were those who saw this religious conversation in a negative light. As socialist leader Wilhelm Liebknecht quipped, “Religious questions have been handled with greater fervor in no epoch of German history than in this moment. One feels oneself transported into the most befuddled times of the Reformation, so widespread is the incessant religious squabbling.”Footnote ¹ Bourgeois Protestants, the primary interlocutors in religious discourse, viewed the growing religious discussion of the world's problem more positively.

The focus of this essay is on this public Protestantism, and especially on Protestant mission, in the regional setting of the Thuringian states. Thuringian Protestants repeatedly pronounced their commitment to their religion, and expressed diverse ways religion mattered to them. Emil Polz—Weimar public school teacher, left liberal state parliament representative, and editor of Lehrer-Zeitung für Thüringen und Mittel-Deutschland Footnote ²—suggested that teachers, as members of the universal clergy, had the calling to oversee religious instruction in schools and that the school system's goal was to mold the character of its charges. Polz imagined the role of the public school as fundamentally religious and missionary: “The public school must and shall bring to the church individuals filled with moral-religious interest, [individuals] who will one day be active members of the Christian community.”Footnote ³ Paul von Bojanowski, National Liberal politician and editor of the Weimarische Zeitung in the 1870s and 1880s, considered Protestantism a central element of the modern state and society: “The modern state is certainly non-confessional, but does not thereby stop being, in its essence, a Christian one. It is upon the exalted teachings of Christ that the entire modern world is built.”Footnote ⁴ Bojanowski, whose vision of Christ's teachings was thoroughly Protestant, embraced secularization but did not see that as indicating a reduction of religion in public life. Similarly, Pastor Buß, speaking at a public meeting in the hall of the Weimar marksmen's club, maintained that the culture of Europe “rested in its deepest moorings on the spirit of Christianity.”Footnote ⁵ And a commentator in the Weimarische Zeitung wrote that the motivation of “the greatest minds” derived a great deal from Christianity, from “intellectual-spiritual matters and eternal powers.”Footnote ⁶ Thuringians saw their Protestantism as a foundational frame for the state, modernity, and culture.

This article will analyze a Protestant and liberal cultural project set in the context of recent literature on religion and the cultural projects of liberalism in Imperial Germany. Literature on the history of religion has moved beyond simplistic models of secularization to examine changes in religious practice, modes of religiosity, and the continuing though perhaps changing influence of religion on political and social phenomena.Footnote ⁷ Thomas Nipperdey offered a starting point in 1988 with his Religion im Umbruch, in which he wrote that religion was an autonomous force in the cultural world.Footnote ⁸ Olaf Blaschke has gone so far as to suggest the nineteenth century might be described as a second confessional age.Footnote ⁹ Helmut Smith and Chris Clark explain that the new literature shows “how widely and deeply religion was woven into the fabric of modern politics and society.”Footnote ¹⁰ There is nonetheless still much left to be done in a major reconsideration of religion in Germany, particularly with regard to Protestantism.

Recent literature on Imperial Germany's middle class has increasingly focused on its liberal civic engagement. There was a deeply moral aspect to this project. Jennifer Jenkins refers to the educational goals of liberal cultural reformers who sought to construct a “moral community of citizens.”Footnote ¹¹ Andrew Lees points out similarly that moral and social reform were often essentially one and the same.Footnote ¹² These historians' work refutes an older historiographical idea of a bourgeois retreat from politics into culture.

But historians have discounted Protestantism as an important source of social and civic activism in Imperial Germany.Footnote ¹³ Martin Greschat suggests that confessional and evangelical Lutherans focused their religious faith on inwardness and limited their religious interests to an internal space. Following from this, Wilfried Spohn suggests that, “Lutheranism assigned the social question to the state and left care for the inner spirit to the church.” Spohn is typical in his reading of Lutheran theology, which he suggests did not advocate “a religiously motivated commitment to the world.” Historians acknowledge that Lutheran social reform focused on efforts to influence state legislation. Organizations like the Protestant Social Congress and the Ecclesiastic Social Conference, as well as individual Protestants in government, lobbied the state to enact social legislation. Rüdiger vom Bruch argues that Protestant social reformers from Wichern to Naumann placed their hopes for social reform in the social obligation of a state grounded in Christian principles. According to vom Bruch's definition, social reform is “limited to state action in response to faults in the distribution process.”Footnote ¹⁴

A national focus can perceive only the national umbrella institutions' state-centered lobbying efforts, and it finds no significant mass engagement in faith-based social and civic activism. Protestant associations with a significant local base are too easily dismissed as part of an insignificant conservative and backward-looking fringe. What remains is an image of a Protestant bourgeoisie awaiting, or at best encouraging, state intervention in social issues. This has made invisible the social engagement of locally-oriented Protestant associations. An example from Thuringia is the compatibility and personnel overlap between the “National Liberal” Protestant League and the “conservative” Home Mission. Their common religious basis allowed their otherwise clashing politics to come together in Thuringia.

Protestant bourgeois public discourse established the importance of faith for bourgeois and national unity, and for the resolution of the “social question.” This discourse produced an essential marker—being a Protestant—for establishing the superiority of the middle class over its others, most importantly the German working class, non-European foreigners, and Catholics. Mission discourse established a parallel between savages of the Foreign Mission field and socialist workers at home: both were comprised of people who were not (or “not really”) Christians. This discourse offered an important axis for bourgeois unity against the rising electoral tide of socialism. Protestant Christianity became an increasingly important rhetorical element of election politics across the bourgeois political spectrum.

Anti-Catholicism was an important element in the construction of the Christianity of the bourgeoisie. Anti-Catholicism served especially as a rallying point for Protestant identity and community. The danger of Catholicism demanded Protestant unity, and Protestant freedom and good works were set against Catholic conformity and contemplation. The experience of the Kulturkampf reinvigorated bourgeois Protestantism: it served as a reaffirmation of the Protestant character of the nation; it revived an urgency in efforts to unify Protestants; it emphasized a connection between Protestantism and modernity, progress, and liberalism; and it sparked bourgeois civic activism. The Kulturkampf was a coordinated attack by liberals and the state on Catholic influence in Germany that flared up in 1870. The state began to disengage from the struggle after 1878, leaving the issue of the Catholic threat to the public sphere. After the Kulturkampf, particularly because of the perceived failure of the state in this cultural struggle, liberals came to focus more on efforts to change culture.Footnote ¹⁵

The conclusion of the Kulturkampf also coincided with rising perceptions of a serious danger from a degenerating working class. Bourgeois solutions to this problem were both material and moral. Protestant liberals thus pursued, within a cultural post-Kulturkampf national project, a mixture of continued anti-Catholicism, reinvigorated Protestantism, and an effort to educate, civilize, and police the masses. They aimed at national unification, national progress, and national Protestantism—the three were so intertwined that they can hardly be looked at independently. The parallel to Johann Hinrich Wichern's Home Mission triad of religious renewal, social regeneration, and national unification is palpable. Wichern's idea of Home Mission deeply influenced bourgeois religious activism in the half-century before 1914.

The Thuringian states offer to the historian a region of relative religious homogeneity in a small-city atmosphere that allows a clear view of a kind of bourgeois Protestantism. Thuringia housed an activist and vociferous Protestant bourgeoisie. The historian can see here religious connections between diverse conversations and activities. Part of the Protestant heartland in central Germany, over 95 percent of the population of the Thuringian states was Lutheran.Footnote ¹⁶ Because the Thuringian bourgeoisie was so homogeneously Lutheran, religion could serve to unify rather than divide as it often did elsewhere in Germany. Thuringia also held a central place in the nation, particularly in the Thuringians' perception of their regional and local identity and importance. The close relation of Protestant and cultural heritage is highlighted by School Inspector Konrad Weiß of Nürnberg, left-liberal candidate for both the National Liberal and the Progressive People's Parties for Weimar-Apolda, who said in 1907 that it was from Thuringia that were born “most of the powerful streams of spiritual and intellectual progress.” He associated Luther in the Wartburg with Herder, Goethe, and Schiller in Weimar: each in his way had “worked towards national unity and rebirth.”Footnote ¹⁷ Celebration of the great men and events of Thuringian-German history were reminders to the bourgeois public of the region's importance, and simultaneously served to connect German culture and German Christianity. Thuringians thus perceived the nation through their understanding of their own local history.Footnote ¹⁸

The diversity of Protestant activists in Thuringia is dizzying. The range of individuals drawn on in this essay will demonstrate the ubiquity of public Protestantism. Middle-class Thuringians typically spoke and acted in public as persons of faith; they espoused what they called an “idealistic” worldview, one that was strengthened by an attachment to the most non-materialist ideology—religion. They contrasted this religious idealism with the atheistic materialism of the Social Democrats, who, they explained, had no “ideal goals in the sense of our Kulturwelt.”Footnote ¹⁹ Thuringians saw in Protestantism the ideological roots of bourgeois and liberal society and the German nation, and the basis of morality in the modern world.

I. Public Protestantism

Over the course of the nineteenth century the heart of Protestantism shifted away from traditional practices confined to an institutional church space apart from civil society and toward practices within the public sphere. Nineteenth-century Protestant theology offered the German bourgeoisie a modern authority for faith-based activism and identity. Among the contributions of the Enlightenment to religion was a faith in the perfectibility of mankind and in an individual's boundless potential for spiritual progress. As a consequence of Christian faith in progress and improvement, bourgeois Protestants felt called to engage in moral and social work in this world.Footnote ²⁰ Schleiermacher saw Protestant faith as the basis of the modern individual and of modern community. And Jena theologian Karl von Hase argued that Christianity points toward the highest human development (Bildung).Footnote ²¹ Albrecht Ritschl's theological ethics saw God's grace as the basis of Christian freedom. Ritschl pushed for an ethical, a moral, even a cultural concretization of faith. He argued against the idea of uniquely religious goals, as conceived by monks and pietists, of retreat from the world, of simple individualism of the soul, of clericalization. Practical moral community was what mattered, and religious action should be carried out through fulfillment of duty and loyalty to one's calling. A Christian emphasis on Beruf in the sense of a calling as encouragement to work for society within the bounds of one's proper place was a call to the middle class—in light of its understanding of its superior position—to come to the aid of the unfortunate and less capable.Footnote ²² Bourgeois Protestants felt called to express their faith in the actions of their daily lives.Footnote ²³

In Imperial Germany Protestantism was a part of civil society, and religious culture blossomed. Festival events included speeches and lectures, church services, plays, museum exhibits, mementos, incessant public singing, and grand parades. Thousands upon thousands attended a number of historical Luther plays and other theater pieces taking a lead from the Catholic counterpart, the Oberammergau Passion Play. The importance of public Protestantism was reflected in public discourse and in the reporting of news. What someone said in the sermon on Sunday morning was seldom newsworthy, whereas what was said at the meeting of the mission association was of great interest: newspapers like the Weimarische Zeitung gave a great deal of space to reporting on the activities and debates of the mission associations. The press went beyond reporting the facts in its commitment to religion. Long-time Weimarische Zeitung editor Paul von Bojanowski, for instance, insisted that while the paper “endeavored to judge the actions of the Catholics and the Protestants in the interest of confessional peace with impartiality,” it nonetheless never let “true Protestant interests fall into the background.”Footnote ²⁴

But perhaps most importantly, Protestant associationalism enjoyed, alongside its secular counterpart, a remarkable expansion. In voluntary associations, bourgeois activists came together as Protestants to socialize, celebrate their religion, and work to improve society.Footnote ²⁵ Perhaps church attendance and communion statistics were declining in Imperial Germany,Footnote ²⁶ but the Protestant bourgeoisie found the popular religious services of the time in public Protestant rituals and the meetings of Protestant voluntary associations.

The mission associations sponsored meetings that brought together the bourgeois public in a religious context. These gatherings served to inform that public of the ongoing efforts of the associations and to educate them generally about the pertinent mission field. They were offered a sermon, heard a local chorus perform, and sang hymns together. They offered alms to the collection plate. Lectures, usually given by clergymen or teachers, most commonly reported on the activities of the missionary associations or covered church history or other issues of public interest. In addition to urging the audience to greater faith and participation, speakers related stories of the heroes of the Protestant faith: first and foremost Martin Luther, but also Philipp Melanchthon, Duke Johann Friedrich the Magnanimous of Saxony, Swedish King Gustav Adolf, and many others.

The mission associations were deeply imbedded in community life. Religion commanded attention and respect in the various forums of the public sphere, including the press, published essays, speeches and sermons, and bourgeois election materials. It was a matter of course that newspapers would draw public attention to their activities, that the local singing club would perform at association gatherings, that schoolchildren accompanied by their teachers would decorate halls, sing hymns, read prayers at meetings, that city councils or local social associations would offer space for meetings.

Voluntary associations were a catalyst for middle class formation and a focus for localized bourgeois social power. One of the key ideas of the importance of associations for middle class formation is that they offered a space where individuals came together, at the local level, to pursue common missions.Footnote ²⁷ Protestant associations were importantly different; the Christian context deeply imprinted the sense of community that was generated in them and the worldview and ideology that emanated from them. Protestant individuals, acting together in local and regional voluntary associations pursuing religious mission, increasingly came to establish moral values, to define religious reality, and to set the agenda for religious discussion. Protestant mission associations set the tone for public discussion of and popular involvement in religion. They thus controlled to a great degree the public representation of religion, of Lutheran tradition, of the nature of popular religiosity—in short, of Protestant identity.

Protestant associational life offered a space for the Protestant bourgeoisie to conduct religiously-based conversations about itself, its others, the problems it perceived in the world, and the projects it pursued. Christian mission provided an institution for bourgeois civic and social activism. Mission activists employed a moralizing, pedagogical discourse parallel to (and in Thuringia often indistinguishable from) that of bourgeois social reform. Medical professionals, for instance, developed a “discourse on disease, mortality and health” and thereby “established the authority of the bourgeois norms of domesticity, individualism and self-control.”Footnote ²⁸ The “professionals” of Christian mission propagated a discourse on spiritual disease, mortality, and health—that is, immorality, Godlessness, and salvation. And the public expression of Protestant culture communicated these norms to their clients—“heathens” abroad or at home—via a similar pedagogical welfare.

Four areas of Protestant mission are of particular importance. Each was an important space for popular engagement in mission work and for expression of a Protestant discourse. The Foreign Mission sought to export a national Protestant culture to the “heathens” and “savages” abroad. The goals of this Protestant mission of cultural education, as expressed by the Thuringian Foreign Mission Conference in 1903, included the “liberation of the primitive peoples from their weaknesses and bad habits,” as well as “their intellectual and moral improvement, the awakening of their slumbering good natures and powers, the development of an intellectual maturity and independence and spiritual growth.”Footnote ²⁹ The Gustav Adolf Association defended the outposts of Protestant Germany—primarily against German-speaking Catholics. At the 1903 annual festival of the Saxe-Gotha Association Pastor Küttner explained that the Association's mission—pursued “out of strong faith, and full of sincere love”—was “to champion our evangelical compatriots in the diaspora.”Footnote ³⁰ The Home Mission and the Protestant League focused their energies largely on mission work at home in Germany. These last two will receive closer attention below.

II. Popular Involvement in Mission Work

The extensive bourgeois involvement in mission work demonstrates an important characteristic of Protestantism in bourgeois culture. Leadership of the mission associations was a veritable “who's who” of bourgeois society. Many of the same names appear in the different branches of mission work. Leaders included politicians, government officials, judges, schoolteachers and administrators, university professors, bank officers, businessmen, and the publishers Hermann Böhlau, Gustav Fischer, and Andreas Perthes.Footnote ³¹ Böhlau, a National Liberal and city council representative, served on the governing board of the Association for Home Mission in Thuringia. Fischer was a leader in planning the Jena Lutherfestspiel in 1883. Perthes served as an organizer of the local Home Mission, and joined Böhlau on the governing board of the Thuringian Home Mission. Leadership ranged the political spectrum from left liberals to National liberals and conservatives. The Gustav Adolf Association of Eisenach is emblematic of the political integration of Christian associationalism: local leaders included the National Liberal judge Julius Appelius, the conservative First Mayor Georg Eucken, and the left liberal chairman of the city council, Commercial Councilor Dittenberger.Footnote ³² Appelius was mayor of Eisenach and state parliament representative from 1871 to 1897. Eucken served as state representative from 1894 to 1902. Dittenberger, a contributor to a publication of the Association for Social Policy (Verein für Sozialpolitik), was also active in various other religious associations and events. In Thuringia, however, liberals were particularly prominent. They were men like businessman and National Liberal leader Louis Döllstädt of Weimar, a guiding figure in the Home Mission's efforts to fight against begging and to establish hostels for itinerant workers, and District Administrator Karl Baumbach of Sonneberg, a leader of left liberalism in Thuringia and a board member of his local Home Mission.Footnote ³³ Döllstädt was one of the leading men in the administration of the city of Weimar and served on the public school board. Baumbach organized the new Liberal Union in Thuringia in 1880 and acted as a driving force in the formation of the Thuringian branch of the German Freethinkers Party in 1884.

The clergy, too, was prominent in bourgeois associational life.Footnote ³⁴ In Weimar, Bernhard Hesse—the Grand Duchy's highest-ranking clergyman and a religious and political liberalFootnote ³⁵—was active in the leadership of Foreign Mission efforts in Weimar.Footnote ³⁶ He served Weimar as a delegate to the national convention of the Gustav Adolf Foundation in 1883.Footnote ³⁷ He chaired the Pauline Foundation, an association to support young women servants,Footnote ³⁸ sponsored an association to aid paroled prisoners, and was a leader in the campaign in Weimar to establish a hostel for itinerant workers.Footnote ³⁹ This latter effort was spearheaded by Weimar's Association to Uplift the Moral and Religious Life of the People,Footnote ⁴⁰ founded by Bernhard Hesse, who also led the committee charged with planning Weimar's Luther festival in 1883.Footnote ⁴¹ Prominent clergymen active in Gotha's Home Mission were General Superintendent Felix Kretschmar (the state's senior churchman, who founded and for many years led the Gotha Home Mission), Church Councilor Gustav Rudloff, and Superintendents Reinhard Müller and Hermann Müller.Footnote ⁴² Rudloff, who served as secretary of the board of the Saxe-Gotha Protestant League, was also active in politics. He ran for the Reichstag in 1893 as a National Liberal. Kretschmar, too, was energetically engaged in the Protestant League.Footnote ⁴³ Such dual membership signifies the overlap of the associations' religious goals. Deacon Winter joined school teachers and business and political elites in Sonneberg (Saxe-Meiningen) in running the local Home Mission.Footnote ⁴⁴ Winter's engagement with the Sonneberg elite brought him into close working contact with leaders of one of the Empire's strongest bastions of left liberalism. All of this involvement evidences both the bourgeois public engagement of the clergy and the religious tone of bourgeois public discourse.

III. Two Mission Associations

The Home Mission, whose focus was on solving moral and social problems at home, bound together diverse community efforts including the distribution of good literature, organization and administration of Raiffeisen savings and loan associations, tutelage of the maturing youth, and the housing and policing of itinerant workers and vagabonds.Footnote ⁴⁵ Women's branches provided childcare for working mothers and care of the sick, invalids, and the poor (the three often grouped together as one area of welfare). Through the Home Mission, activists sought to uplift the lower classes and to construct or re-construct a harmonious national community free from class or party strife. Thuringian Protestants saw this as a moral and a spiritual question. They intended the Home Mission to heal rifts in society by helping those who had lost their way to embrace appropriate values.

The Home Mission was decentralized and often quite informally perceived and organized. It was as much an idea of Christian social action, as it was an institution. Lists of Home Mission efforts regularly included groups and activities not formally associated with the institutional Home Mission. Efforts of the Home Mission included all works of Christian charity to which it gave the stimulus, or to whose advancement the Home Mission wished to draw its members' attention. In a clarification printed in the Weimarische Zeitung in 1884, a spokesman explained that if the Home Mission included in their annual reports efforts not flowing strictly from the association, it certainly did not seek to take credit for those works. Its goal was to make known the yearly growth of the scope of these works of “eminent practical importance.” The Home Mission also sought to offer itself to these independent institutions as helper and as “representative of the thought behind them, helping charity in the spirit and with the power of evangelical Christianity.” Religiously motivated charity at home was, by definition, home mission; consequently, social reform and efforts to build the Kingdom of God were inseparable.Footnote ⁴⁶

A closer look at three fields of mission work—Raiffeisen savings and loan associations, the effort to fight vagabondage, and the mission to delinquent children—serves to reveal the nature of the Home Mission. Local clergymen working through the Home Mission were the driving force in the establishment of Raiffeisen savings and loan associationsFootnote ⁴⁷ in Thuringia, a movement that blossomed in the late 1880s.Footnote ⁴⁸ Pastor Menzel of Haina stood at the lead of the Gotha union of Raiffeisen savings and loan associations that included 23 branch associations.Footnote ⁴⁹ The chairman of the Jena district Raiffeisen organization was a town pastor.Footnote ⁵⁰ Clergymen in Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, too, founded Raiffeisen associations.Footnote ⁵¹ A report from Meiningen emphasized the institution's religious roots: “Since in our state the organization of the Raiffeisen savings and loan is a child of the Home Mission, it is to be greeted with special thanks that in great numbers the clergymen of the affected parishes have taken on the founding and leadership of these associations.” The Meiningen Home Mission expressed the hope that those who drew benefit would remember the church roots of these organizations.Footnote ⁵²

The activists of the Raiffeisen movement perceived in these institutions a religious and social institution to improve society and to generate community. Pastor August César of Wiesenthal, speaking on welfare in rural areas at the annual conference of the Saxe-Gotha Home Mission, called Raiffeisen associations an “educator to community spirit.”Footnote ⁵³ The Meiningen Home Mission agreed; the institution would positively affect community morality. Through them, resentment and hate—which endangered social peace, and gave advantage to the Social Democrats—would be avoided.Footnote ⁵⁴ Here again a close connection between evangelization and social activism is evident in an institution that would otherwise not obviously come to be associated with religion.

Contemporaries understood vagabondage to be not simply a social but also a religious and a moral problem.Footnote ⁵⁵ This is evidenced, for example, by a speech given by Church Councilor Förtsch of Buttstädt at the 1883 annual festival of the Association for Home Mission in Weimar. Förtsch explained that the association sought to care for the spiritual and moral well-being of the people, and that “the fight against vagabondage” was a part of that care.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Weimar Area Home Mission Association thus described the system of support in kind, in connection with a network of hostels and a workers colony, as an institution of general benefit to the community, one that held great moral and social significance and that rested on a Christian foundation.Footnote ⁵⁷

The religious nature of the anti-begging campaign is demonstrated by its close connection with the Home Mission. The mission field drew inspiration, support, and personnel from the Home Mission. Leaders of the Home Mission all over Thuringia and Germany either founded hostels and associations themselves or encouraged others in the community to do so. The Weimar Association for the Uplifting of the Moral-Religious Life of the People (Home Mission), for instance, was the driving force in the establishment of the local hostel. The Home Mission in the Eisenach highland maintained hostels in a number of towns.Footnote ⁵⁸ There was significant overlap in personnel on the boards of the Home Mission and the associations against vagabondage.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Home Mission and the vagabond associations cooperated closely. The Weimar District Association for Home Mission gave active support to the local anti-vagabond association, especially through co-oversight of its hostels.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Weimar Home Mission even distributed a circular to clergymen in towns with a hostel, urging them to cooperate in the supervision of the stations.Footnote ⁶¹ The Home Mission in some towns, including Jena, sponsored journeymen's associations in connection with local hostels.Footnote ⁶² Finally, many hostel house wardens received their training at Home Mission institutions like the Rauhes Haus in Hamburg.Footnote ⁶³

The workers colonies, too, were presented as religious institutions, and the influence of the Home Mission is evident. It was, for instance, the Weimar District Association for Home Mission that urged the construction of a workers colony for Thuringia, “the crossroads land in the heart of Germany.”Footnote ⁶⁴ And it was school director Dr. Füllner of Gotha, member of the governing board of the Association for Home Mission in Thuringia, who, in November 1884 in Weimar, called the first meeting of the Central Committee for the Establishment of a Workers Colony for Thuringia.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Association for German Workers Colonies, meeting in Berlin in early 1884, demonstrated this commitment at the national level when it resolved that hostels should stand under the oversight of men who would ensure that they exercise a “religious-moral influence” on their visitors. The assembly passed a resolution that urged both Protestant and Catholic Church governments to support workers' colonies and hostels.Footnote ⁶⁶ This view drove the reporting of the opening of the workers colony at Geilsdorf, where the Weimarische Zeitung correspondent called the colony “an achievement of ‘practical Christianity’” and concluded his essay with the poem inscribed over the colony's entrance: “Bestow Your peace on this house / and on all who live within; / In faith unite them!”Footnote ⁶⁷

Care for delinquent youth was the earliest work of the Home Mission.Footnote ⁶⁸ Protestant youth care also perceived its mission field as a combination of social (poverty) and religious-moral (sin) issues. The motto of the Salzungen (Saxe-Meiningen) education association demonstrates this:

The motto underlines the Christian duty placed at the heart of the youth salvation campaign. The problem of youth delinquency was clearly perceived as both social and moral—social deprivation compounded by moral delinquency. The solution to the social and moral ills of youth delinquency was both social and moral-religious. Through the efforts of these associations, delinquent children were to come “under the influence of a healthy Christian life.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The advocates of this effort looked back proudly on the pioneering work of Johannes Falk, who founded a home for boys in Weimar in 1813. These youth care associations organized, funded, and administered reform schoolsFootnote ⁷¹ and placed less delinquent children with foster families, where they remained under the supervision of the associations. The effort experienced a surge of new activity beginning in the 1880s, parallel to the explosion of “secular” associations.Footnote ⁷² As a report of the Education Association in the Meiningen District, founded 1880, explained, “No other branch of the Home Mission in our land has developed so quickly and has found such general participation and approval.”Footnote ⁷³ The youth care associations found a large, solid core of members, while “generous donations” flowed into their coffers.Footnote ⁷⁴

The Home Mission understood care for delinquent youth to be part of its mission field; it thus urged the founding of youth-care associations, and offered them generous assistance.Footnote ⁷⁵ Thus the impulse to found the Meiningen District Education Association came from the 1879 meeting of the Thuringian conference for Home Mission, held in Meiningen. So, as Major von Schweder—chairman of the Education Association and a board member of Saxe-Meiningen's Home MissionFootnote ⁷⁶—put it: “Our association is truly a child of the Home Mission, or, to speak plainly, of free Christian associationalism.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The association recognized this connection explicitly in its appeal to the public in January 1880. Association leaders wanted thereby to emphasize the association's Christian roots. This was further demonstrated in the expressed mission of foster parents, who were bound to hold the child true “to church, school, and fear of God.” Von Schweder believed that every association member without doubt shared this sentiment.Footnote ⁷⁸

The Christian mission to save delinquent youth similarly combined a social and moral-religious objective in seeking to instill faith, character, and values. The Tiefenort reform school sought to educate delinquent children to a “living fear of God and Christian love” and to help them become “morally competent and socially useful people (sittlich tüchtige und bürgerlich brauchbare Menschen).”Footnote ⁷⁹ The objective was one of social reform: “Children from the neediest conditions, through upbringing and education, were led to a better path of life and a higher social position, and torn from hereditary poverty.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Youth activists sought to teach children to be good Christians and to mold them to fit into bourgeois society.

The family offered a uniquely Christian pedagogical tool. Saxe-Meingingen's Saalfeld area association, for instance—affirming its roots in the Home Mission—began its statutes with the statement: “The association has the goal to place children lost to delinquency in orderly families, in which prevails a Christian discipline (Zucht).”Footnote ⁸¹ The Sonneberg association also placed endangered children only with good families that practiced Christian discipline.Footnote ⁸² Similarly, reform schools, modeled after Johann Hinrich Wichern's Rauhes Haus, were intended to be “communities with educational, religious, and economic functions, communities of families.” The reform school at Tiefenort, for instance, hoped to positively influence children through discipline and order, through moral habituation, and through the influence of an ordered intellectual and physical activity, but above all through “the development of the strength of character (Gemüthskräfte)” within the scheme of “a family life based in Protestant faith.”Footnote ⁸³

Protestant youth-savers consequently sought to attach troubled youth to a “family.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Activists here reemphasized the fundamentally Christian nature of the family. In foster homes children would gain a feeling for the blessings and the sanctity “of a good German home.” The Meiningen association held steadfastly to its basic precept that “the foundation of every healthy society” was “the morally ordered family, this humanity in miniature, this ‘church of God in miniature,’ as Luther called it.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The Salzungen association expected that in their foster homes, children would come “under the influence of a healthy Christian life.”Footnote ⁸⁶

The Protestant League has often been only partially understood. The League has received a good deal of attention from historians, who have focused on the anti-Catholic and nationalist aspects of the organization.Footnote ⁸⁷ The League was founded as the Kulturkampf was being laid to rest by the German state. It became an organization that drew support from a large number of German liberals and nationalists who continued to see the Catholic Church as a danger to the unification of the German people.Footnote ⁸⁸ In one sense, the Protestant League was an anti-Catholic institution, a continuation of the Kulturkampf by other means. Historians also recognize the League's support for the National Liberals after the turn of the century.Footnote ⁸⁹ For most historians who have examined the League, its Protestantism took a distant second place to its anti-ultramontanism and its national focus.Footnote ⁹⁰

Historians who have interpreted the Protestant League in this manner have failed to recognize the degree to which the League was also a religious institution. The League sought to reawaken Protestant faith, to reinvigorate a sense of Protestant community, and to unify the different branches of German Protestantism. German liberalism was thoroughly Protestant in its worldview, so League support for National Liberalism was consistent with religious engagement. And the Kulturkampf was always more than an attack on Catholicism; it was equally an effort by Protestant liberals and nationalists to modernize Germany. In a press release in early May 1887, League founders explained that they sought not only to defend Protestant interests in the fight with Rome, but also “in the face of the indifference and faithlessness of the times to strengthen Christian-Protestant community feeling, in the face of crippling party politics to nurture inner-Church peace, [and] against the state-church division of Protestant Germany to encourage and increase interrelations between the members of the individual state churches.”Footnote ⁹¹ Part of the problem in the historiography of the Protestant League is that most studies have overlooked its local and regional vitality. Nationally, the league represented the Protestant middle ground theologically and church-politically, and was thus centered on political anti-Catholicism.Footnote ⁹² At the national level the League may have had to try to appeal across the political and Protestant theological spectrum, and thus to simplify to the lowest common denominator. The League was, however, highly decentralized—as were other Protestant mission associations.

At the local level, where religious community might be much more homogeneous, the League could and did hold a more positive religious vision. Such was the sentiment behind Saxe-Meiningen League's declaration that its purposes were not only to “defend Protestant interests in all respects against the growing power of Rome” but also to “strengthen Protestant community awareness.”Footnote ⁹³ Richard Lipsius addressed an assembly of the Preachers' Association in Weimar meeting to discuss the founding of a local branch of the Protestant League. After an attack on Catholicism, Lipsius lamented the fact that the Protestant Church suffered from divisions in state churches and theological parties, and from the “irresponsible laxness and indifference” of many of its members. The Protestant League, as an apolitical institution, would preserve and strengthen “awareness of the high value of Protestant faith.”Footnote ⁹⁴

These declarations of religious intent were born out by activities of the local and regional associations. The League organized popular public events that convened large numbers of people in a religious context and popularized the public preaching of the gospel. A main activity of the local Protestant League associations in Saxe-Gotha was the staging of public lectures. Church history predominated as topic without precluding the discussion of current events and the “Christian endeavors of the present.” Occasions for celebration were also offered by the 400th birthdays of Philipp Melanchthon (1897) and Katharina von Bora (1899) and the 350th anniversary of Luther's death (1896).Footnote ⁹⁵ A public assembly in Jena in 1890 featured diatribes against the ultramontane threat, but it also provided a worshipful atmosphere.Footnote ⁹⁶

Local associations of Saxe-Weimar's State Association of the League sponsored frequent public meetings and family evenings. Arch-Deacon Grimm, speaking on “Piety and Morality,” preached “love, charity, and active works full of joy in accomplishment” toward all “God's children,” who are through Him all brothers.Footnote ⁹⁷ Privy Church Counselor Förtsch, speaking “to the heart,” urged that “it is necessary, particularly in our times, for every Protestant to stand fast and resolutely to his Protestant faith and to recognize ever more clearly and feel ever more thankfully what rich blessing he receives from the Reformation.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Deacon Arper asked, “What do we have of our Protestant Church and what should she have of us?” His answer was, “She is our mighty fortress and we should be her faithful and courageous citizens!”Footnote ⁹⁹ Chairman Jacobi was proud of the Saxe-Weimar League's progress. He said in 1909 that “In the communities of our state it seeks to awaken ever more interest and participation in its mission: the defense and care of Protestant life.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The Weimar League sponsored annual celebrations on Luther's Birthday. The celebration usually included sermons, lectures, and music. A report on a Luther evening in 1911 suggested the evening's activities had dispelled the common perception that the League too often “wields the sword,” and “sees its mission only as the struggle against Rome.” The reporter explained that the League sought to bring to and uphold for the German people “the inexhaustible richness and the living power of Protestantism, the ever emerging treasures of Lutheranism.” In this, he continued, the League saw its highest calling and vowed that to fight for this the League would “shy away from no sacrifice.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ At the local level in Thuringia the public presence of the Protestant League was marked more than anything else by this emphasis on community building and evangelization.

IV. The Public Discourse of Protestantism

Concern appeared in the pages of the Weimarische Zeitung over the large sections of the nation that were falling away from the Christian religion, but the paper embraced a conviction that the majority had not and would never lose its faith.

In the idea of a “heavenly Heimat,” the Kingdom of God and a nineteenth-century idea of the German nation were fused. The Weimarische Zeitung saw such a spirit of faith as invaluable to the nation's fortune: “Yes, if only this spirit of its heroes was ever alive in the German people!”Footnote ¹⁰² The association of German-ness and Christianity emerged in a number of contexts. Voters heard that a true German must naturally embrace Protestantism, and “a German-feeling man” must, as a matter of course, turn from socialist teachings of “the degradation of religion to a private enjoyment.”Footnote ¹⁰³ And mission enthusiasts learned that they should emulate Paul Gerhardt—a composer of hymns—by being “truly German, deeply pious, true to the faith,” and by fighting “for right and truth.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Bourgeois Protestants celebrated the role of mission work in creating community. Hugo Kieser explained that “the interest in mission can serve as the pulse of Christianity and give witness of the inner life of the congregation of the Lord.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Engagement in the mission fields was an essential aspect of being part of a Christian community. As Pastor Leberl, speaking to a crowd gathered for the Tiefenort Foreign Mission festival in 1884, explained, “The Home Mission, which brings the gospel to the suffering and poor and those estranged from God, and the Foreign Mission, which proclaims the word of God to the heathens,” must be accompanied by “the most inner mission in one's own heart, which asks: do you too have the proper living faith?”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Community through collective struggle was a common refrain from the Protestant League. At a meeting of the Thuringian Foreign Mission Conference in 1893, for instance, Jena theology professor Friedrich Nippold celebrated the unifying effect of mission work, which had brought together almost the entire theological spectrum in a common effort.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Similarly, one of the co-founders of Jena's Protestant League, Professor von der Goltz, explained that the League sought both to fight Rome and to strengthen the Protestant church—the latter being the more important, and more difficult, task. As von der Goltz said, “The main issue remains the strengthening of Protestant identity. This will come of its own accord through the common struggle.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Superintendent Niese, speaking before the 1910 Kaltennordheim diocese conference, explained that the League was part of the effort to create living congregations, “in which Protestant identity glows.” Niese encouraged all to become enthusiastic members.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

One of the founding purposes of the Gustav Adolf Association was the effort to bring together Protestants of all theological and political leanings.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Champions of the Gustav Adolf Association regularly attacked the evils of Catholicism or ultramontanism. Support of the association in the face of “Catholic cravings for domination and violation” was “a holy duty, a duty of self-preservation for the Protestant church as well as for every individual parish.” On the other hand, it was more important that the community participate in the work of the association “for the love of a work that, as hardly any other, through its acts declares itself truly Evangelical-Protestant, born of true Luther-spirit.” One Gustav-Adolf activist concluded that “the noblest aim” of the association was to awaken and to build such feelings.Footnote ¹¹¹ The struggle against Rome, as carried on by the Protestant League and the Gustav Adolf Association, was thus at least in part aimed at strengthening the German Protestant community at home. It should be noted that the kind of community building that was going on here has been recognized by historians as a key aspect of local politics.Footnote ¹¹²

Public Protestant discourse encouraged a bourgeois religiosity focusing on the moral authority, capacity, and calling (Beruf) to improve the world. Protestant mission was modern, bourgeois, even liberal. As Thomas Nipperdey notes, “duty and service . . . and more generally: sacrifice and dedication to the whole” was very Protestant and, “to our amazement—also thoroughly the liberal ethos of the time.”Footnote ¹¹³ Thuringians unselfconsciously entwined liberal ideology with Protestant theology. A member of the audience at a Lutherfestspiel wrote that:

Here we see an individual fighting in the service of national progress. This was action against superstition and foreign domination. The struggle to establish a relationship with God offered personal independence, intellectual-spiritual freedom. This passage thus demonstrates an association of liberal and religious values: national and Protestant community, liberation, independence, faith, and engagement in the world. It is also an example of the kind of moral authority Protestantism offered liberal civic activism.

Social reform and evangelization were intimately entwined in the pronouncements of mission activists. In 1897 Senior Pastor Nagel of Lobeda (a suburb of Jena) connected social ills and religious errors of New Guinea, suggesting that the Foreign Mission had to address social as well as moral and religious problems.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Similarly, the chairman of a Sonneberg association to combat youth delinquency, the Orphan and Education Association, explained in 1884 that the association had religious-ethical as well as practical motives in its approach to the “social question.” Speaking at the association's first annual conference in 1884, he explained that “the grand theories for the disentangling of the ‘Gordian knot’ of the social question could be left to the philosophers and national economists; the new association would not decide whether and to what degree the state had a responsibility to solve the social question, and they would certainly not ‘hack through’ the social question with the ‘sword of social revolution (Umwälzung)’.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ He had no patience for an extended debate about the causes and nature of the “social question,” and he stood staunchly opposed to socialism. He called instead for immediate, practical, Christian social engagement to improve the lives of the less fortunate.

V. Mission Values

A sense of common values served to unify the bourgeoisie, and those values were closely associated with the Reformation and Protestantism. As Nipperdey points out, “obedience and faithfulness to duty, intelligence, objectivity, and tolerance,” which were “the elements of bourgeois-political morality,” were also “the subject of religious, of Protestant education.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Thuringian activists from across the mission fields elaborated such Christian bourgeois values. According to the Gotha Society for the Commonweal, the highest Christian ideals were “Freedom, equality, brotherliness, and the resulting general happiness.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ The Thuringian Foreign Mission Conference in 1903, held in Roda (Saxe-Altenburg), made clear the complex relationship between Christianity and bourgeois culture in a declaration of its goals:

The values Christian evangelization was to bring—including respect for hard work, order and authority, and intellectual and moral independence and cultivation—were thoroughly bourgeois and liberal.

The bourgeoisie came to place a great deal of weight in the ideal of religiosity—of devout Christian faith—and its members expressed that faith often and publicly. The decline of religion in Germany was a matter of dire concern: “If we ever came to the point that human society in its majority was composed of such [godless] types then the world would be a hell, life on it would be a brutal struggle of one against all.”Footnote ¹²⁰ But many had faith that religion was in good shape. Thus Pastor Kohlschmidt of Denstedt, a speaker for the joint National Liberal and Conservative candidate for Weimar-Apolda in 1890, argued that “the church in the state cannot be spared; in the adversities of life it is, God be praised, still sought out.” The audience rewarded the speech with “roaring applause.”Footnote ¹²¹ Similarly, the anonymous author of a six-part editorial series on the Reichstag election of 1898 called on the “hearts of all patriots” to support the anti-socialist political alliance. He argued that the “radical and demagogical party” (the socialists) had no “idealistic goals.” He contrasted this with the idealistic and Christian outlook of socialism's enemies. The pundit celebrated “the idealistic world view, especially founded on church-religious life.”Footnote ¹²² A world of idealism was thus necessarily a Christian world.

Bourgeois Protestants repeatedly expressed their belief that Germany needed religion. Thus the Gotha Society for the Commonweal in 1877 offered a basic truth of Christianity: “we must become better people, if better times are to come.” The Society called for renewed faith: “The more the spirit of Christ fills human souls, the more, too, public conditions will improve, the ravages of socialism will disappear, and the rightful demands of the poor will be fulfilled.”Footnote ¹²³ The mayors of the Dornburg district (north of Jena) insisted, “we need a constant awakening and strengthening through all of life . . . and such is only to be expected from religion.”Footnote ¹²⁴ At the dawn of the 1880s Paul von Bojanowski perceived that Germany was at a crucial moment; the consolidation of the nation was at stake: “Now it is necessary to hold fast to these achievements in the struggle against many enemies, but we can only lead the struggle successfully if we hold fast to the fear of God, which is the solid foundation of moral order in the life of nations (Völker).”Footnote ¹²⁵ Bojanowski argued that the German nation could only succeed if it held fast to its Protestant faith. And in 1907, the Gotha Society for the Commonweal urged everyone, poor or rich, of high or low birth, to hold fast to a faith in “the crown of eternal life.”Footnote ¹²⁶ These statements placed responsibility for society's improvement in the hands of the Protestant bourgeoisie and called them to renew their faith.

Respect for education, combined with the bourgeois calling to uplift the less fortunate, brought bourgeois activists to seek to educate and edify the masses. Protestant activists pursued mission as a pedagogical effort. In 1889 Pastor Nagel, then chairman of the Neustadt a.O. District Association for Mission to the Heathens, described Africa as the “dark continent” not just because of “the races that inhabit it,” the expanses of unexplored territory, and the reigning moral and social conditions, but also because of “the extremely low level of education and faith.”Footnote ¹²⁷ The Gotha Society for the Commonweal expressed its support for all educational efforts but averred that “the religious-moral basis” of these efforts must be “maintained and protected.” The society emphasized the religious aspect of education, stating that “there is no healthy morality without religion.”Footnote ¹²⁸ The Luther Festival celebrated the place of Protestantism in education, and especially Luther's role in educational reform. The author of “Luther in History” touched on Luther's accomplishments in this respect. Luther, so the story went, had created the public school. His name lived on in every Protestant school, “if only in the catechism.” And even if critics had improved on his pedagogical methods, it remained a contribution of the Reformer that he saw winning the youth as a primary responsibility and that he showed religious instruction to be the heart of education (Erziehung).Footnote ¹²⁹

Christian mission advocated respect for labor. In a newspaper article that covered most of the front page of the Weimarische Zeitung, readers learned that Luther said: “Christians should not go idle. Worry is forbidden to us, but work is not, indeed it is commanded to us to work, until the sweat flows off the nose.” Luther believed, according to the newspaper, that idleness “brings the common man besides the spiritual damage two additional disadvantages: that he neglects his work, and so consumes more than otherwise.” The author believed that Luther's views on work had had, and continued to have, a great effect on the reform of poor relief. The author pointed to Luther's words on begging: “No one among the Christians should go begging. He who wants to be poor should not be rich; but if he wants to be rich, so he grabs hold of the plow and seeks it himself from out of the ground. It is not proper that one goes idle on the work of another, becomes rich and lives well on the bad life of another.” And he emphasized another passage of Luther: “No one may go begging, the work-fit poor should work or be expelled, the unfit for work should be cared for, the poorer children should be educated in school, in trade.”Footnote ¹³⁰

The pedagogical parallels between Foreign Mission and Home Mission here are palpable. Both sought to uplift their clients by teaching them a respect for labor. Pastor Nagel, in a continuation of a speech introduced above, argued that worldly efforts alone could not “bring light into this darkness” of Africa's “extremely low level of education and faith.” It might only be achieved by “‘the gospel and the plow’—that is, education brought through the gospel, which points the blacks toward work and brings them to Christian faith.”Footnote ¹³¹ This is exactly what the Home Mission communicated about its mission to the heathens at home, based on Johann Hinrich Wichern's call to “pray and work.”Footnote ¹³² The system of hostels and workers' colonies was a Christian and moralizing institution designed to instill a bourgeois work ethic in its clients. The hostels would, it was hoped, protect young workers from the dangers of pub life, and “through Christian house rules . . . further their physical and moral well being.”Footnote ¹³³ Government councilor Stier, in an editorial in the Weimarische Zeitung, explained that the hostels were places “of purity and of peace” for “orderly” wandering laborers.Footnote ¹³⁴ Supporters of the colony at Geilsdorf felt that the best assistance they could give, in addition to “the necessary physical conditioning,” would be a “strengthened moral sense.”Footnote ¹³⁵ This was Christian mission with an aim to build good workers.

An important aspect of the significance of mission work to bourgeois identity was the often-asserted belief that mission clients were not Christian. This “heathen” status may be obvious in the mission fields in Africa and Asia, but it was equally important to the bourgeois conception of the work of the Home Mission, whose target was the German lower class. Christian belief was for the Thuringian bourgeoisie an important marker of distinction from the immoral, faithless masses. Thus evangelical moralization was a central element of Protestant bourgeois identity; members of the bourgeoisie perceived their working-class “other” as godless and immoral, and they embraced a common bourgeois mission to save these “heathens.” This godlessness and immorality was also a source of fear for the bourgeoisie.Footnote ¹³⁶ An association of a perceived working-class dearth of religiosity and social danger was most virulently excoriated in connection with the bourgeois prosecution of socialism. It was also apparent in bourgeois discussions of the social question. Christianization was thus an important plank in bourgeois efforts to integrate the lower class into bourgeois society.

Idealistic, spiritual values were essential to the improvement of the world and to the construction of community. According to J. A. Petzold, chairman of the Weimar pastors' association and speaking at the Thuringian Conference of the Home Mission in 1881, the solution to society's problems—a solution based in active faith—was the education of the people; the German people, they urged, must thereby be “reconstituted as one organism.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Protestant religion served as a central plank of the bourgeois and liberal ideal of social harmony.

Religion was the best and perhaps only defense against socialism. The Gotha Society for the Commonweal in 1877 expressed its belief that “socialism will yield only to truthful, living Christianity.” They argued that without a Christian motivation, there could be no supportable ideological basis of opposition to socialism. Without a Christian basis, the society claimed, anti-socialism could be only an expression of self-interest.Footnote ¹³⁸ Religion provided an ideological connection between efforts to uplift and to police, resulting in a kind of “tough love.” The anonymous author of a lead article on the occasion of Ascension Day expressed pity for those who had lost their faith, implicitly pointing toward the socialist working class. “Their desires find satisfaction in stewpots and beer mugs, and they are proud of this progress.” These poor souls “don't even know how poor they are; they have voluntarily degraded themselves to the level of the animals.” Through their lack of faith, however, they did more than injure themselves, “They are also a danger to the community.” The commentator concluded that “Without the awareness of responsibility before God, [and] higher duties to their fellow men . . . what does it matter to him if he treads his neighbor to the ground?”Footnote ¹³⁹ This offers an important dual perception of the importance of faith: workers suffered from a lack of faith in God's salvation and all that might entail, while at the same time those who lacked faith became a menace to the nation and bourgeois society. Protestant faith and heritage was central to the German nation, and the reliance of the German national idea on the Reformation required that the nation embrace Christianity.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Without faith the masses could never rise to become bourgeois and truly German, and without faith they must become essentially sociopaths lacking the ethical norms and values necessary to participate in bourgeois society.