This scholarly and lucid book began as a dissertation at the University of Chicago. Steinhoff launches his work with a discerning review of the literature, which during the past decades until recently has portrayed the city as a modern Sodom absent of religion. The earlier conclusion, therefore, emerged that religion was a casualty of modernization or that it was enclosed in its own milieu. Recent work has tended to revise this older paradigm, since the evidence actually suggests that religious communities did not really dissolve nor were they restricted in the face of urbanization. Rather, Christians operated in these transformed worlds to assist in the construction of modern urbanity.
Such earlier thinkers as Max Weber also proposed that urban communities in Europe could be characterized as rationalized and demystified, that is, as secularized. Contemporary research seems to suggest that the earlier predictions about the course of urbanization may have to be nuanced. “New urban history” as a discipline has uncovered a more complicated story of what occurred between 1860 and 1918. In essence, instead of decimating religion, modernity helped give faith communities a new lease on life. Clerical training became professionalized and ecclesial institutions became more rationalized. Churches, therefore, were enabled to establish a pervasive presence in the milieu of modernity. Steinhoff contends that it is time to dispense with the urban legend that the secular city stood in opposition to faith traditions. The city was not as inhospitable to religion as previous work has suggested.
Steinhoff's goal is to explore the dimensions of religious interaction within the urban environment of Strasbourg. Such an explication includes looking at the structures and practices of “traditional” religious communities as well as uncovering new directions taking place in churches and inspecting the types of piety, which were being nurtured in the modern urban environment. His premise is that modern societies were complex environments organized by a range of stimuli, including religion. Strasbourg is a perfect setting to provide a focus for this study. It was neither a huge metropolis like Berlin nor an industrial city like Essen. It was part of France until annexed by Germany as a result of the Franco–Prussian War, and it contained large numbers of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Hence, confessional rivalry was a primary feature of the city. Studying Protestants in Strasbourg also exposes the cutting issues of identity that were so much a part of the Second Reich.
The book itself is divided into three sections. The first section examines the structures of religious culture and community as these shifted to German rule. Included in this section is an analysis of the Protestant parish milieu as well as an intimate study of church-state relations and the political state's involvement in ecclesial affairs. The second section studies how confessional affiliation and piety were expressed by the varied parishes in this evolving urban setting. Religious education and pastoral care are two of the foci of this part. The third section, that is, the final chapter, is devoted to the issue of how Protestant church reform and the modernization of institutional structures made the churches more responsive to socio-political changes and to the needs of the urban population. Church governments gained a surprising independence from the state and exemplified the tendency toward participatory government so crucial in pre–World War I society. Even women were given the right to vote at the parish level, reflecting their active involvement in urban religious life. These Protestant churches took advantage of modernity to realize more effectively the principles underlying the original Protestant church ethos in modern times. Steinhoff's work basically succeeds in unveiling an interpretation of the so-called “secular big city,” which includes the role that religion has played in structuring modernity with Christianity present in the public arena.
Particularly interesting is the method used by the churches to gain an even greater voice in the choice of their spiritual leaders so that parishes could legitimately act as purveyors of religious culture. Also significant is the position taken by the Protestant communities in defending their local traditions and identities. They could be as particularistic as Catholic communities. To establish their ecclesial identities, teachers of religion sought to connect what their students learned in their faith traditions with what they imbibed in other classes. These teachers hoped to integrate religion into the whole school program. As part of the educational reforms so typical of modernity in Germany, attending school became compulsory as did the fact that all students had to take religion classes. Steinhoff carefully uses the various inspection reports to unveil what actually transpired in the classrooms and pulpits of the parishes in order to provide living glimpses into Protestant urban life.
Steinhoff concludes that Strasbourg's Protestant communities were social groups the demonstrated their own dynamics and vitality during this era. The modern big city was apparently a place where secular and sacred influences permeated one another. Steinhoff has offered a lengthy analysis that reveals in its richness the complexities inherent in modernity and illustrates that even in this period, religion was far from being a merely private affair since it actively promoted public discussion. This study should help illuminate the contemporary view of the relation of religion to the secular sphere in western societies that are still ambivalent when it comes to the role of religion in the political life of states. Today's citizens may be able to learn from the historical experiences of their predecessors.
