Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany
The Rise of the Fourth Confession

This book explores the culture, politics, and ideas of the nineteenth-century German secularist movements of Free Religion, Freethought, Ethical Culture, and Monism.

Todd H. Weir (Author)

9781107614222, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 23 June 2016

322 pages, 9 b/w illus. 2 maps 9 tables
23 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.5 kg

'This is a book that seeks continually to undercut the binaries that structure the way in which historians have considered these issues. Secularism, in this reading, appears both inside and outside confession. Anti-clericalism was a force not just against but also within the religious sphere. Kulturkampf legislation proved as destabilising for protestant churches as for German catholics. … There is intellectual history here, and social history too. But the core of Weir's book is the political meaning of secularism in the Prussian nineteenth century. For this is a study of how the constraints imposed by confessionalism and the Prussian state shaped secularism as a spiritual current and a political community. While secularism itself was never a mainstream movement, Weir argues persuasively that it punched above its weight politically and was symbiotically linked first to radical democratic associational life and politics, and then to the sub-culture that was Prussian socialism.' Abigail Green, English Historical Review

Negotiating the boundaries of the secular and of the religious is a core aspect of modern experience. In mid-nineteenth-century Germany, secularism emerged to oppose church establishment, conservative orthodoxy, and national division between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Yet, as historian Todd H. Weir argues in this provocative book, early secularism was not the opposite of religion. It developed in the rationalist dissent of Free Religion and, even as secularism took more atheistic forms in Freethought and Monism, it was subject to the forces of the confessional system it sought to dismantle. Similar to its religious competitors, it elaborated a clear worldview, sustained social milieus, and was integrated into the political system. Secularism was, in many ways, Germany's fourth confession. While challenging assumptions about the causes and course of the Kulturkampf and modern antisemitism, this study casts new light on the history of popular science, radical politics, and social reform.

Introduction
1. Dissidence and confession 1845 to 1847
2. Free religious worldview: from Christian rationalism to naturalistic monism
3. The sociology of dissent: free religion and popular science
4. Politics and free religion in the 1860s and 1870s
5. Secularism in the Berlin Kulturkampf 1869–80
6. From worldview to ethics: secularism and the 'Jewish Question' 1878–92
7. Secularism in Wilhelmine Germany
Epilogue: German secularism after 1914.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], European history [HBJD], History [HB]