In this elegantly written and sweeping history of Protestant–Catholic relations in Dutch-, French-, and German-speaking Europe, Udi Greenberg highlights the centrality of religion across a century of European history. Drawing on a wide range of sources on Christian thought and organizations, Greenberg innovates intellectual history by placing race and sex at its center. By including missionaries tsituate Europe in a global context, this creative survey locates signal connections between domestic and international thought and organization. Throughout, the author illuminates the hypocrisy of interconfessional discourses of equality in light of ecumenical support for policies and values of exclusion. Greenberg's argument that, at base, ecumenism was “an intellectual project” (10) challenges standard narratives of deconfessionalization to pose key methodological questions about the history of religion and secularism in postwar Europe.
The transformation of Protestant–Catholic relations across the twentieth century was nothing short of seismic. Centuries of internecine hostility extended beyond doctrine and liturgy as Protestants associated Catholics with cultures of criminality, poverty, and anti-intellectualism, while Catholics linked Protestants to nihilism, sexual perversity, and revolution. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, however, Protestants and Catholics began to make common cause along axes of class, race, and sexuality in a self-proclaimed battle against materialism. Their endeavors took shape and form on both the left and right in the 1930s, when Greenberg discerns the “first large-scale and comprehensive efforts to reconcile the two confessions” (6). After ecumenism gained political force in the 1950s with the ascendance of Christian Democracy, leftist activists and missionaries in the 1970s would inscribe new forms of interfaith collaboration by challenging the inner-Christian compact to maintain hierarchies of class, race, sex, and—in shared hostility to Islam—religion.
Across his century of focus, Greenberg traces a dynamic of parallel Protestant and Catholic undertakings that culminated in joint initiatives. Between the 1880s and 1920s, shared opposition to materialist movements of female emancipation, sex reform, and working-class political and economic power inspired Christian cooperation across the confessional divide. Paradigmatic in their disproportionate appeal to the middle class, such paternalist initiatives as the founding of the Christian Trade Unions were meant to “tame workers’ hostility to both capitalism and the churches without giving in to their demands” (76). Convinced that the nuclear family's survival required state control over male and female sexuality, Catholics and Protestants promulgated legislation and founded interconfessional organizations to shore up public morality. Only in the colonies did a shared Christian embrace of the “civilizing mission” fail to inspire interconfessional collaboration, despite missionaries’ similar approaches to combating Islam, polygamy, and indigenous resistance to European economic exploitation.
Drawing on earlier initiatives, the 1930s and 1940s represented ecumenicism's true unveiling in forms both fascist and anti-fascist. In the early Third Reich, National Socialists, including Adolf Hitler, exhorted Protestants and Catholics to subsume their divisions in the unifying identity of the Volksgemeinschaft. Inspired by anti-communism and fascism, right-wing European theologians, thinkers, and academics of both confessions advocated for ecumenical unity, while Catholics and Protestants on the left developed early theories of the Social Market Economy by rejecting the materialism of unregulated capitalism, communism, and fascism. The 1930s also engendered new conceptions of sexuality that framed marriage within codes of sensuality, while, in the colonies, missionaries opposed to Nazi biological determinism evinced increased respect for indigenous cultures. According to Greenberg, if the Nazi years birthed true ecumenism, the two postwar decades marked its political apex in the form of Christian Democracy, especially but not only in Germany. Through “unequal welfare systems, sexist family laws, and paternalist training programs for Asians and Africans” (5), politicians and ecumenical organizations sought to realize democratically their long-standing goals of social order and hierarchy. Manifesting the influence of Nazi-era impulses, Protestants and Catholics advocated a “new vision of the family that sought to strengthen and legitimize it as the site of love and pleasure” (205). At the same time, Christian missionaries drew on 1930s calls to “indigenize” the churches (216) in postcolonial efforts to convert Muslims (219).
Such ecumenical projects soon found themselves under assault from “a large contingent of Catholics and Protestants” committed to reconciling Christianity with anti-authoritarianism. Embracing Christian collaboration in order to effect global social change, the Christian New Left broke with ecumenical priorities of order and hierarchy to adopt liberation theology and anti-Islamophobia in support of socialism, sexual reform, and new relations with the Global South. The fact that “revolutionary ecumenism was ultimately defeated” did not, in Greenberg's view, render it insignificant; instead, “[i]n many ways this movement was the last effort to substantially rethink the meaning of Christianity in Europe” (232). If Greenberg remains inspired by the radical Left's ecumenicism, he is forthright about the contemporary radical Right's instrumentalization of Christianity to oppose religious and racial diversity. Although beyond the scope of his survey, the German term “Abendland” (the Occident or the West) well illustrates Greenberg's argument: Originally Catholic but adopted by Protestants after World War II to depict a united Christian front against Communism, the Abendland came increasingly to connote hostility to Islam. The PEGIDA movement (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West [Abendland]) of the mid-2010s, for example, exemplified how right-wing extremists equated Christianity with whiteness and “Christian civilization” in attacks on those deemed other.
That missionaries only pursued interconfessionalism after decolonization delegitimized their hegemonic claims underlines the imbrication of anti-materialism and ecumenicism with non-European discourses and practices. While Greenberg focuses on European proselytizers in the Global South, North America offers suggestive but unexamined connections to European developments. Deconfessionalization in postwar America, for example, reveals strikingly similar dynamics to those in Western Europe; as James D. Strasburg has shown, postwar American and West German dialogue played a notable role in attenuating transatlantic anti-Catholicism. Ecumenical Christian nationalism also fits a transatlantic frame, as contemporary North American extremists forge common cause with European partners to leverage age-old Christian language and sensibilities in the service of racial and sexual exclusion. In focusing on internal European debates, Greenberg excavates (predominantly male) thinkers from Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and especially Germany typically excluded from broader surveys of religious history. In so doing, he includes the voices of “political theorists, economists, marriage experts, and missionaries” as well as “a gigantic apparatus of Christian research centers, presses, and popular magazines” that disseminated intellectuals’ views (1)—an imaginative methodological move, even if his disregard for papal encyclicals can elide critical influences such as Pius XI's 1937 contributions to anti-totalitarianism. In drawing on such a diverse source base, Greenberg confronts directly perceptions of intellectual history as detached from cultural, political, and social change by stipulating that, “Social conditions mattered a great deal to Christian thought, but ideas did not simply reflect them” (15).
While Greenberg's approach represents a significant departure in framing and practice, it remains a work of intellectual history—absent analysis of, among other dynamics, the dramatic remaking of Germany's confessional map at war's end as well as postwar Western Europe's sustained confessional strife and religious diversification by guest workers and Muslim citizens of former colonies. Historical context is particularly relevant regarding the book's leitmotif, the rooting of ecumenism in shared Catholic and Protestant fears of materialism and secularism. If most scholars posit ecumenism as the post-World War II culmination of decades-long efforts to forge political and religious Christian unity—the founders of the Christian Democratic Union, for example, sought to realize aborted Weimar-era initiatives transmitted by interconfessional resistance groups, including Christian Trade Unionists and Social Market Economy theorists—they link its dramatic expansion after the 1950s to dechristianization. As consumerism, feminism, the welfare state, grassroots democratization, and new media catalyzed Western Europe's precipitous dechurching, devout Catholics and Protestants with dwindling popular religious and political support turned increasingly to each other. That ecumenicists’ modeling of Christian comity ironically helped loosen Western Europeans’ tether to their churches by diluting confessional identities, only underscores the salience of secularism. Committed to the “intentional and bold” (281) act of dismantling confessional barriers, ecumenical leaders inadvertently diminished their own relevance.
That Greenberg devotes just half a paragraph to secularization before the book's conclusion will leave many readers wondering how the “churches remained vital sites of social interaction” (1) after the 1960s. Indeed, most historians would dispute his opening claim that, “Throughout the extreme tumult that transformed Europe in the twentieth century, Christianity was a rare source of continuity” (1). As Thomas Großbölting demonstrated in Losing Heaven: Religion in Germany since 1945, West Germans’ relationships to their churches underwent an unprecedented historical rupture following the Second World War, peaking in the 1970s when church departures quadrupled. How, then, did the terms Catholic and Protestant change meanings across a century of religious transformation? If statements about the fin-de-siècle like “Catholics and Protestants in the Reichstag amended the national criminal code” (98) raise definitional questions, how do the signifiers Protestant and Catholic function in post-1970s Western Europe?
But these are all queries posed to reflect the seriousness with which scholars should take this book. Greenberg has written a captivating account of the revolutionary remaking of twentieth-century Western Europe on the axis of religion, a vitally important topic that should attract the attention of all historians, not simply those of Christianity. By locating the ecumenical battle against materialism in Christian efforts to maintain hierarchies of power hostile to socialism, feminism, and racial equality, Greenberg connects hitherto disparate initiatives and movements to propose new understandings of religion's path across European history. If some historians will differ on how to chart that path, his contribution is indisputably substantial and his conclusion—that ecumenism represented a “crucial process in the history of twentieth-century Europe” (282)—compelling.
