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50|dedup_wf_001::b4422b149974d83e545bd9738c646794

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DOI: <

10.3406/ahess.2002.280075

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Politics in the intimate sphere. Protestantism and culture in Germany in the 19th century

Abstract

Politicised inwardness. Protestantism and culture in Germany in the 19th century. This contribution examines the relationship between Protestantism and modern, middle-class culture which was already under discussion within German academic Protestant theology in the early 19th century. These debates focused, first and foremost, on the religious legitimacy of the Enlightment and its political consequences. The resultant confrontations led to a politicisation of the religio-theological conflicts already existent between Lutherans and Calvinists. In the early 19th century, Protestantism thus split onto two hostiles milieus: that of the liberal representatives of a modernistic "Christianity of Culture" and the conservative camp, supportive of the old ecclesiastical faith. This article shows that these controversies within Protestantism played an important socio-political part in the reinforcement of the ideological and party-political opposition between Liberals and Conservatives after 1848. In addition, reference is made to the economically relevant rationalisation potential of Protestant religiousness, which has received much attention particularly since the works of Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, as well as to the effects of Protestant values in the areas of culture and scholarship. The author derives the cultural significance of Protestantism from its specific. "semantic of inwardness". However, the internalisation of religious experience in Protestantism, he argues, has not led to a naive unworldliness but, rather, to a high regard for the outside world ("Weltfrömmigkeit"). It engendered a revaluation of the world, rendering it the decisive place for Christian probation, and thus made a crucial contribution to the rationalisation of Protestant lifestyles and to the religious recharging of culture and scholarship ("Bildungsreligion").

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