Want to take some time out from the election drama in the US? How about reading a brief historical primer on German religious conservatism?
OK, I hope that I'm not violating any written or unwritten rules by posting this. It is
not about any particular election - it's more a kind of historical background primer to provide context for some aspects of German politics. It's basically an addendum to the introduction to German politics that I posted on the old board about three years ago and that you can see, in a slightly updated version, here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dat ... sp=sharing
So here it goes...
CATHOLICS, PROTESTANTS, AND GERMAN CONSERVATISM
If I write a text like this, I should probably start by describing the limits of my own perspective, and perhaps my own biases, too. So, I've spent pretty much my entire life so far in parts of Germany that were historically mostly protestant and are now mostly secularized. I can describe how things look like in places like that from my own experience. But I've only been in historically Catholic parts of the country for fairly short visits so far, so when it comes to things like how much influence the Catholic Church still has in which places, I have to go by media reports, stuff I can see on the internet, and guesswork. I was raised with a religious outlook somewhere between Protestantism and secularism, and when I was growing up, for a while I thought of Catholics as some kind of "strange people in different parts of the country who have weird restrictions when it comes to sex", that is, more or less the way culturally liberal people from the more culturally liberal parts of the USA might see Christian fundamentalists. Later, of course, I learned that fundamentalist protestants routinely make the Vatican look like a bastion of cultural moderation, but some small parts of my brain might still have my original outlook.
That said, let's go back to the beginnings.
Germany was, of course, one of the countries (though not the only one) where the Reformation started. This happened in the 16th century, a few centuries before the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, that Empire effectively consisted of a lot of small-to-medium-sized states ruled by nobles of various ranks, including some ruled by Catholic bishops, as well a number of Imperial Free Cities and some other political entities. Once the Reformation had started, in some places, the local rulers became protestants, and in others, they didn't. After some attempts by the Catholic Emperor and his allies to either destroy or persuade the "heretics" had failed, political leaders eventually agreed on a compromise that was later summed up as
"Cuius regio, eius religio",
a Latin phrase that means something like "Whoever has the region shall have the religion". In other worlds, local rulers were authorized to decide which Christian denomination the Christians among their subjects were supposed to follow.
To give you some idea of what this meant in practice, here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is a map of the Holy Roman Empire in 1789, immediately before the start of the French Revolution:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HRR_1789.png
Here's the same map partially translated into English:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_ ... 789_en.png
In each of the small patches of color, the local authorities might have had a different choice of Christian denomination than in the
next small patch of color. And the Christians among their subjects usually obeyed them; if someone felt really strongly about wanting to follow a particular denomination, often, the nearest place that followed that denomination wasn't that far away. People who preferred smaller protestant denominations that didn't have any rulers among their followers sometimes went to Pennsylvania. Generally speaking, you were more likely to be in a protestant patch of color in the more northern parts of the country, and more likely to be in a Catholic patch of color in the more southern parts of the country, but that's just a general tendency that didn't necessarily apply everywhere all the time.
The Thirty Years War of 1618-1648 is usually described as a war between Catholics and protestants, and to some extent, it was - but only to some extent. It
started out that way, but as a result of various complicated political intrigues, all kinds of political and military leaders changed sides in the war without changing their religion, so it eventually ended up as a war with both Catholics and protestants on both sides. And it shouldn't be forgotten that France intervened in the war on what was theoretically the protestant side at a time when the French government was effectively led by Cardinal Richelieu. The best way to describe the two sides in the Thirty Years War is probably "The Holy Roman Emperor and whoever was, at each moment, allied with the Holy Roman Emperor vs. whoever was, at each moment, at war with the Holy Roman Emperor".
The Holy Roman Empire was finally dismantled in the Napoleonic Wars. After the end of those wars, in 1815, the surviving German states founded the German Confederation, whose constitution, among other things, guaranteed equal rights for Christians of different denominations. Another result of the Napoleonic Wars was that the protestant Kingdom of Prussia got a number of new, often historically Catholic territories along the Rhine.
In terms of religion, much of the 19th century in Germany was taken up by conflicts between the authorities of the Kingdom of Prussia and the Catholic hierarchy, as well as many of the observant Catholic laypeople, within Prussia. There had already been various struggles along those lines earlier in the century, but things really got to a boil after the founding of the German Empire in 1871. New Chancellor Otto von Bismarck waged the "
Kulturkampf", or "culture struggle", against the Catholic Church over issues like civil marriage, state subsidies of Catholic institutions, and religious instruction in schools. After a while, things started to calm down. Note that this was a conflict between two groups of staunch cultural conservatives: Prussian monarchists and Catholic clericalists. The latter group had founded the Zentrum, or Center Party, which, over the course of the late 19th and early 20th century, gradually grew into one of the largest parties in Germany. Since that time, civil marriage has been the only legally valid marriage in Germany. You can, of course, have whatever religious ceremonies you want to sanctify your marriage, but only the civil ceremony matters from a legal perspective.
In 1918, World War 1 ended, and Germany became a republic. The new Weimar Constitution officially disestablished all churches that had previously been established churches in any parts of the country, but it also allowed all kinds of cooperation between the governing authorities and major churches that liberals from the USA would see as blatant violations of the separation of church and state. The Center Party was now one of the most powerful parties; it was usually part of the governing coalition, and supplied a number of chancellors. This being the 1920s, social mores became less conservative. In some major cities in the traditionally protestant parts of the country, most people were at most nominally protestant by now.
Then, in 1933, the Nazis took over. The relationship between the Nazis and the major German churches during the years of Nazi rule has been the subject of an enormous number of books, documentaries, exhibits, monographs, papers, dissertations, essays, articles, and stage plays. As a general rule, you probably shouldn't believe anything you read or hear on that matter without getting yourself a second opinion, because people who bother to write or talk a lot about it usually have an axe to grind. At first, many religious conservatives welcomed the Nazis, and the Center Party, like other conservative parties, notoriously voted for Hitler's Enabling Act. Nevertheless, the long-term plan of the Nazis was to destroy Christianity as a factor in German society and culture. But since, at the time, almost everyone in Germany who wasn't Jewish was at least theoretically Christian, they couldn't simply round up all the Christians and murder them. Instead, they started campaigns of anti-Christian propaganda, harassed, persecuted, and murdered many individual clerics, and promoted various non-Christian world-views. If they had won World War 2, those campaigns would, to no doubt, have been intensified, but, well, they lost.
After the war, from 1945 onwards, what was left of Germany was divided into East and West, each side, at first, controlled by the respective occupying power. One of the many effects of this was that the new West Germany consisted mostly of places that had historically been. and mostly still were, Catholic. West German conservatives now decided that it would be smarter not to restore the multitude of conservative parties that had existed before 1933, but to mostly limit themselves to two main parties: the Christian Social Union, or CSU, in Bavaria, and the Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, everywhere else. Ok, some people tried to revive the old pre-1933 conservative parties, but those attempts generally went nowhere.
The new CDU, unlike the old Center Party, was officially non-denominational; it was mostly dominated by Catholics, but protestants had a kind of "protected minority" status. After a long time in which they had often been at odds with the state, Catholic conservatives now
controlled the state, at least in the West, at least at the federal level. The 1950s were generally seen as a very culturally conservative time. From the 1960s onwards, social and cultural developments had the effect that gradually - very, very gradually - the country became culturally less conservative, at least in matters involving sex among straight people. The increasing secularization of major cities in what had, historically, been the protestant parts of the country, combined with a kind of mellowing of the main organized protestant church, the EKD, had the effect that the Catholic Church came to be seen more and more as the main stronghold of cultural conservatism in the country, while Protestantism came to be perceived as at least relatively less conservative. (For the record, while there
are, these days, some US-style evangelicals in Germany, there aren't many of them, and they usually don't get noticed much.)
Over in the East, the churches had all kinds of ways of handling their situation under a political system that opposed religion in general but was usually cautious about handling it. There was accommodation, there was active opposition, and there was everything in between. The ruling powers liked the appearance of having several parties, and therefore allowed so-called "block parties" to exist, whose officeholders basically always voted the same way as the ruling party. The largest of these block parties was the Eastern CDU. However, the East generally became more and more secular during the years of partition.
When Germany was reunited, it was a largely secular country in the cities - less so in the countryside - in which cultural conservatives were mostly centered on the Catholic Church, but in which
political conservatives kept winning elections for a while. Then, in 1998, Helmut Kohl, who had been Chancellor of West Germany since 1982 and of the reunited Germany since 1990, lost his bid for re-election, and the CDU went into opposition. Wolfgang Schäuble, who had been Kohl's heir apparent for a while, became party leader. Former cabinet member Angela Merkel, who, as a relatively young (at the time and by the standards of politics) woman from the East benefited from three different quotas, became secretary-general of the party, which means that she was in charge of internal party administrative affairs of which the old men leading the party probably thought that they could be safely left to her.
Then, the great CDU party donations scandal of the late 1990s hit. A system of illegal donations to the party and slush funds was uncovered, which dated back decades. Almost everyone of any importance in the CDU leadership turned out to be involved, and a lot of careers were ended or at least temporarily suspended. Schäuble ended up in the wilderness for a while. Of the people with main positions in the party leadership, the only who survived relatively unharmed was Merkel, probably because she hadn't been seen as important enough to be told about what was going on. So she became party leader by default.
That didn't mean that the party she led now really liked, respected, or accepted her. She was from the East; she was a protestant pastor's daughter who, herself, didn't appear to be particularly religious; she was fairly bland as a person; and she was a woman. None of those things were what national-level CDU leaders had traditionally been expected to be. So while she was party chairperson, the party was not quite ready to nominate her for Chancellor yet. Instead, for the 2002 election, they turned to the leader of the C
SU, Bavarian Premier Edmund Stoiber. He almost won. Almost. His loss meant that the CDU had run out of potential Chancellors other than Merkel, so they finally nominated her for the 2005 election, and she won that one.
Since then, the CDU had to put up with her. She's not as culturally liberal as some might think - when Germany legalized same-sex marriage in 2017, she voted against the bill - but the more culturally conservative parts of her party were probably never that happy with her. When the hard-right AfD rose to prominence in the 2010s, it attracted some fervent religious conservatives. Merkel announced that she plans to retire after the 2021 election, and the struggle to succeed her is still going on. It's not at all clear how much of a religious conservative the next CDU leader, or the next Chancellor, will be.
