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Use the code BLOOM50 to receive nearly 50% off of every single Princeton University Press print book, e-book, and audio book. The sale ends May 31st. So go to press.princeton.edu and use the code BLOOM50 as soon as possible. You won't regret it. Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Megan Cochran. Today, I welcome back Udi Greenberg, author of The End of the Schism, Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of Christian Life in Europe.
1880s to the 1970s. Udi Greenberg is an associate professor at Dartmouth College, where he studies and teaches modern European history with a focus on the history of ideas and politics. Professor Greenberg, it has been 10 years since you appeared on the New Books Network to discuss the Weimar century. So before we get into this book...
I'd like to talk about what's been going on with you during that time. And how did you come to write this particular book now? Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for interviewing me. So I've been at the same place. I've been at Dartmouth over the last decade. And my venture into this particular project came from two things. The first was... Over the last few years, there's been...
An explosion of writing about Christianity, specifically about Christianity in the middle of the 20th century. And a lot of brilliant scholars have been writing books about the influence that organized Christianity had on European governance and European post-war. overwhelmingly, this scholarship has been about Catholics and the Catholic Church in particular.
And what I've been interested is where are the Protestants in this question, in this story, in part because the Protestant churches, Protestant parties, organizations have been such a formidable force. in European politics, especially in Central and Northern Europe. And I was interested in the question of where are the Protestants in this question? And I set up to study it originally. I was interested in the question of Protestantism.
in Europe. The second question that I was interested in, as I started working about Protestant organizations like the World Council of Churches and other networks of missionary and welfare organization, is the dramatic transformation that... go through the missionary world, in particular with the onslaught of decolonization. I was interested, what was the response of all the Protestant organizations that were on the forefront of advocating for imperialism, for colonization?
informally as kind of agents of empire with very complex relationship with formal political empires. What happens to them once the colonial empire collapses? What happens when imperialism, formal imperialism, is over? So I started looking at those documents. And what was interesting to me at the Bose, and I was unprepared for it as I looked at all those documents, is the sudden appearance of Catholics in all those documents. If you look at...
Protestant organization, missionary organization, wealth organization, political networks. Suddenly in the 1950s and early 1960s, there was a clear influx of Catholics. Suddenly all those Protestant organizations invited Catholics. to their organization to talk about established cooperation with Catholics. And I asked myself, suddenly, what happens in this period that suddenly cooperation with Catholics seems important?
When I looked at all the materials of those organizations in the 20s and 30s, they were all intensely anti-Catholics originally. So I started asking this question and I found that there was no scholarship that really addressed this question. what happens to the relationship with Catholics and Protestants. And so after several years in archives and in readings, I've kind of realized that that was the question I'm actually interested in and started to focus this project on that question.
Yeah, so let's get into it a little bit. So I'd love if you don't mind that we can start with the schism itself and the situation that this comes out of. What was the relationship?
between Catholics and Protestants in the beginning of this. And so why was it such a big deal that it would change? Yes, that's a great question. So in historiography of the general history of Europe, The operating assumption is that the war of religions ended in the early modern period, and that Catholics and Protestants more or less settled into some sort of pluralism, and that with the creeping secularization in the 19th century... the schism kind of lost much of its intensity.
However, when one looks at the materials of the late 19th and early 20th century, a very different picture presents itself. If we look at Catholic and Protestant publications in the late 19th century, there seems to be, in fact, an intensification. Catholic and Protestant writers attribute every modern illness that they attribute to the modern world, they attribute to the other confession. So if Catholic... Writers believe that modern industrialization and capitalism are destroying communities.
and spiritual bonding between people, oftentimes social theorists in the early 20th century attribute the origins of capitalism to Protestants. Similarly, when Protestant writers try to to grapple with nationalism. and with the significance of nationalism for communities. Oftentimes they attribute the enemies of nationalism to Catholics, who are allegedly part of an international network that really holds its alliance to the Pope and the Vatican.
And this is not just French figures. This is very major figures in European thought and politics. The Prime Minister of Britain, William Gladstone, wrote in the 1870s intensely anti-Catholic tirades in which he claims that the Catholics are trying to undermine the nations of Europe and to take over Europe. to be servants of the Vatican. Similarly, very major social political theorists like Max Weber famously attributed the modern economy to the rise of Protestantism.
He drew very anti-Catholic writings that claim that the main problem, hindrance for the modern economy is Catholicism. So I was interested in why is it in the late 19th century there's a kind of... a new intensity of confessional animosity. And what one finds, and that I thought was important, is that many Catholics and many Protestants conceptualize
the challenges of the modern era, of modernity, through confessional lenses. They really understand that both the promises of modernity and the dangers of modernity. are really understood in confessional terms. I think a good example for this... is a thinker who's quite forgotten today, Emile de la Vallée, who is a Belgian Protestant writer, considered one of the founders of international law, figures of...
He wrote about law, about economics. Some of his writings sold millions of copies. One of the most popular writers of the 19th century. And in the 1870s and 1880s, you wrote at length about how to understand the modern economy. And you wrote that the prosperity that you associate with capitalism, industrialization, commerce...
innovation, entrepreneurship, he argued, all of this comes from Protestantism. Because Luther and his followers broke the yoke of ethnic allegiance to traditional authority. Because they encouraged people to read the Bible themselves, they made them into much more intellectually agile and independent people. And he said, because of that, the Protestant areas of Europe, Northern Europe, England...
Germany, Holland are the forefront of capitalism. They argue that the main hindrance for modern capitalism is really Catholicism. worship of saints, its belief in miracles, its significance that he attributes to the clergy that hinders economic dynamism and the conceptual mind frame that one needs in order to operate in the new economy.
And he argued that, therefore, if we want to have prosperous Europe, we need to convert all of Europe to Protestantism. Those ideas seem very strange today for us to attribute capitalism to. confession seems absurd, but for millions of readers at the time, that seems to be a very convincing argument. It seemed to apply to the world in which they operated and lived through, and they read those texts in abundance. So what the first chapter of my book does is try to map.
how both Protestant and Catholics understood the modern world in confessional terms. And that's true for economics, for politics, for... for gender and sexuality and for the missionary endeavor. They understood that the expansion of empires is a response to the attributes that they attribute to Catholicism or Protestantism and argue that the colonial project is hindered by Catholicism or Protestantism.
So to understand what the schism was, we have to remember that in the late 19th and early 20th century, it is a foundational framework. for how millions of Europeans understand the modern world. They believe that the conflict between Protestant and Catholics has not declined, and that is indeed still very much... an important way for understanding modernity. Yeah, I really appreciate you explaining how that is. I think for an American audience today...
Would it be going too far if I said it's similar to the way that in America, we tend to see everything through the lens of our politics? We tend to put everything through this lens of, well, are they a Republican or are they a Democrat? At this time, that lens was religion. One of the most popular genre that people read was comparing
different parts of Europe, according to Catholicism and Protestantism, comparing what is Catholic and what is Protestant civilization. And that is, in fact, one of the main motors behind the development of new statistics. The science of statistics were often associated with the rise of the modern state and new economics, but much of the forefront of statistics was scholars who tried to compare.
large numbers of phenomena between Catholics and Protestants. So, for example, try to compare where are there more birth out of wedlock? which areas, Protestant Catholics of Europe, have more murders per capita or more trying per capita. from there to deduce what is the influence of confession on morality, on economics, on gender, and so on. And that is...
Again, for us today, that sounds very weird to think that Catholicism or Protestantism is the main category that define how people interact and operate in the world. But for late 19th and early 20th century, those texts were huge bestsellers. They seemed like a common sense. And they often also inspired political, um,
mobilization. Those who study Germany will be most familiar with what's called the Kulturkampf, the culture war, in which the Protestant majority in the 1870s and 1880s lodged campaigns of repression against Catholicism.
But similar sentiments and clashes between Catholic and Protestant organizations really were a common occurrence in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in Austria, in France. And the first chapter tries to trace... how those intellectual animosities and cultural animosities often also fed political animosity. So let's move a little bit forward and start to talk. I want to come back to these four areas that you just mentioned, but I do want to sort of set the table.
first. So let's go forward a little bit. And one of the themes that runs through the book is these contrasting responses. Actually, let me let me back up. Before we go into that, I was going to talk about a quote, but I want to come back a little bit and just say, we talked about what was happening, what the schism was. But now maybe you can sort of set the table on what was starting to change. Why did it start to be the case?
that Catholics and Protestants began to see some shared concerns and not see each other as mutual enemies. Like what started to happen? Yeah, that's a great question. So in my book, I try to map two stages of this, very broad development. The first and most kind of the scene setting part of the story is transformation that happened.
beginning the 1870s and especially 1880s onward. And those happen when Catholics and Protestants begin to have a sense of mutual concerns or mutual enemies in three different aspects. that seem to be the main center of Catholic and Protestant life. politics. The first is the social questions. Like many Like many Europeans, both Catholics and Protestants were deeply concerned by the rise of socialism and Marxism as an important political force that began to mobilize workers.
They were not unique in this anxiety, but there was a certain edge to the anxiety about it because socialism... was organized as a deeply atheistic organization. Socialist parties, socialist activists in the late 19th, early 20th century actively tried to secularize society called for the disestablishment of churches. for ending religious education, try to convince workers to leave the churches, to adopt anti-religious rituals like cremation or secular marriages.
For that, and in the case of the most notorious cases, the Paris Commune in 1870, 1871, were socialist radicals. organized violence against the Catholic Church and murdered several important clergy. This event, though, unusual cast a long shadow on Christian thought. And Christian, both Catholics and Protestants, felt an urge to try and figure out how do you tailor a response to socialism that will allow workers to again be integrated into Christian life.
So one set of anxieties is anti-socialism. And both Catholic and Protestant organizations at the time tried to mobilize to create Christian labor unions, Christian workers' parties in some cases. welfare organization that will cater to workers and will convince workers that inequality in itself is not bad, that some cooperation between workers and employers is natural and should be accepted.
While dropping the intense militant secularism of the Socialist Party. And we can see for the first time in the late 19th and early 20th century, some cooperation between Catholics and Protestants in, for example, organizing. interconfessional labor unions.
that will mobilize Christian workers against socialism. We can see some efforts to draft welfare policies in which Catholic and Protestant work together, even if they still hate each other and condemn each other for being a problem for the modern economy, they still recognize that socialism presents a third force in the relationship.
And indeed, many writers like Emile de la Valle, who I mentioned earlier, start writing against socialism at the same time that he's writing against Catholicism and argues that maybe some cooperation. around the social question is possible. The second axis around which a new hesitant cooperation begins to develop is against feminism. Both Catholics and Protestants, despite their deep suspicion to each other, share deep anxiety about the rise of organized feminism in the late 19th century.
And indeed, we could see initial cooperations between Catholic Protestants, for example, in organizing anti-Protestant publications, anti-feminist. organizations and especially anti-feminist legislation, most notoriously. in Germany and also in the Netherlands were Catholic and Protestant parties.
form coalitions that enshrine patriarchal relationships and inequality between men and women into state law. And one thing that I think is worth remembering, historians of Christianity will know that, but... Oftentimes the histories of modern Europe neglects to note that much of modern governance in the early 20th century legislation around the social question and welfare legislation around gender and sexual relations is
pushed forward by very self-identified Christian parties, especially in the Netherlands. It's Catholic and Protestant parties that begin... the very expansion of legislation over procreation against homosexuality and against... The final axis. Sorry, guys. That continues today, but yes.
Yes, exactly. And the final axis around which Catholic protests begin to cooperate in the late 19th century is around the question of the civilizing mission in the colonies, in particularly Africa, but also Asia, where...
Even though they see each other as threat and competition for the evangelization of the world, many Catholics and Protestants begin to adopt the language of civilizing mission and associating the civilizing mission with introducing... work ethic to the colonies and especially proper gender relations, especially against female labor, against polygamy.
Early in the 20th century, we can see for the first time that Catholic and Protestant missionaries, a missionary organization, were hugely important for intellectual and political life in Europe. for the first time start saying maybe There could be some hesitant cooperation between Catholics and Protestants around the uplifting, quote-unquote, and civilizing of colonial subjects, meaning training them to work in factories and in small workshops.
and training them to have proper Christian family life around monogamous patriarchal marriages. So already in the early 20th century, there is some growing hesitant initial sense that even though they consider each other very different Catholics and Protestants. Among Catholic and Protestant elite, there is a sense that maybe there is mutual spaces against mutual enemies. I do want to come back to some of these ideas in a minute. But I want to do, I want to just.
come back a little bit to some of these central themes of the book, go into some of the details around those. One of the themes, I started to talk about this before, but I want to bring it out here. So there's this idea of equality and inequality. And this idea of equality and inequality isn't limited to just the socialist piece, but there's a sort of, it seems to me throughout the book, there's a sort of fundamental.
misunderstanding or disconnect or even animosity towards either the idea of equality on one side or the idea of inequality on the other side. I want to maybe just talk a little bit about that and have you say how this runs through so there's this idea of equality and it plays a role and I think you might have to explain what ecumenism is
clear. So I want to just sort of say like, we should probably talk about what is ecumenism and what does it mean? And then if you could just talk about this idea of equality. Because there is this idea that from a religious perspective, that this idea of equality was a really major. element here. And at one point in the book, you say that from a religious perspective, it's a hubristic revolt against God's order. What does that mean? Why was it so important for Christian groups?
to continue to legitimize inequality and which ones we're starting to find ways to bring equality into. That's a great question. So the most fundamental issue on which Catholic and Protestants agreed in the late 19th century and early 20th century and throughout most of the 20th century is that inequality is in itself ordained by God, and that questioning inequality as such is in and of itself a secular project.
There are many reasons for that. One of it goes all the way to the French Revolution and the belief that the introduction of ideas of equality... of all, went hand in hand with gruesome anti-Christian and anti-clerical violence. So the notion that the idea of equality is in and of itself violently anti-Christian had its origin in the French Revolution. It is being reinforced.
with the coming of socialism that is not only demanding full equality for all, but also claims that in order to achieve this equality, you have to secularize society. and to disestablish Christianity as the center of the moral compass of European society. And as I said, in the case of the... of the Paris Commune, it comes with very intense and real violence against Christians. So the shadow of the French Revolution and then of the Paris Commune.
leads many Christians, understandably, to believe that ideologies that call for equality are by essence anti-Christian, and therefore they mobilize in force to try to develop new understanding and new justification for inequality.
And this will manifest itself in the three, what I identify as the three important focus of Christian thought and politics, the social question against socialism, the sexual and gender question, especially against feminism, but also against other sexual liberation movements. and later against anti-colonial movements. The notion is that there is something hubristic
about demands for inequality that are intimately tied for anti-Christianity. And the term that Christian writers use to describe all of those is the 10 materialism. It's a term that we hear in many texts throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, in which writers over and over claim that modern ideologies that call for full equality are driven by the concept of materialism that says that what matters in life is material satisfaction without concern for spirituality.
and they all posit that the purpose of Christianity is to organize European society. to allow people to live spiritual and virtuous life. And in order to have virtuous and spiritual life, you have to have inequality. You have to have the defense of the concept of inequality. Now, they argue inequality does not mean animosity. They argue what we need to find is a spiritual bond and respect, mutual response between workers and employers, between men and women, between Europeans and non-Europeans.
in which people understand that they have different functions in the world, that they are not equal, but they live in harmony with each other because they are all driven by the understanding that human existence is first and foremost spiritual respect for others. and the problem with feminism, socialism and others. is that they disregard this sense of spiritual bonding. And that will be a driving force for Christian politics from the late 19th deep into the late 20th century.
in part why the book spends a fair bit of time around this period, because this is a concern that will drive Catholic-Protestant relationships. And as I will talk about it in a minute, part of the point that I'm trying to make in the book is that the belief that Europeans should have new equality between Catholics and Protestants. because they believe that they share the commitment to preserving inequality on other spaces. Yeah, to me, this point that you make in the book is...
so big and so important. And as an American, I will say, it was very surprising. You don't hear these kinds of arguments very much. in American education, at least not in my American education. And so the idea of anyone defending inequality is just sort of, it just jangles in my ear immediately.
Yet, I remembered, and this is just, I want to come back to your book, but when I visited Europe for the first time, I did a junior year in Europe, and I had a good friend who was English. I went to her hometown. And people were constantly talking about knowing their place. Like in a normal conversation, it came up every single day that I was in Britain. People talked about knowing their place.
And, oh, that's not my place. Or I would never presume that's not my place. People talked about it all the time. And I just kept thinking, well, what do you mean? What's your place? How can you possibly know? And I realized, wow, there are many, many people who see themselves, that there is an order, a natural order. Now that I say theology, I see it a lot. Some people, you know, and I'm only saying this out loud because I think I suspect a lot of other Americans are like, wait, what?
What does that mean? But this idea that there was an order, that there is an order ordained by God, that we all have our place and we must find it and stay in it. so deep. And I would argue deeper in Europe than it is in America, but equally, you know, here too. Yeah, I will leave it to America just to know better than me to assess how different American society is on that axis of
on this question. But it is true that it's something that we need to take seriously that for Christian writers at the time, writing against equality, it's something that repeats everywhere. And it is something that we, I think, need to understand where it comes from, because it is... for a Christian writer looking at the Paris Commune.
in the 1880s, writing a few years later, it is perfectly plausible to say that demand for equality will lead for the destruction of spirituality. I mean, that is... it rings right based on their historical experiences. And that is, for that reason, it's something that resonates and they repeat it over and over again.
Yeah, the inequality is the point. Yeah, yeah. So can you, I want to get to this idea of ecumenism and particularly that it was born from the crucible of Nazism. So maybe you can tell us what that is. Why does it come out of that? Right. So the term ecumenism existed before it's a term that comes from Greek, from the Church of the World. And in the late 19th century, it signified an effort.
to bring together Protestant organizations together, the ecumenical movement, that sought to coordinate work, especially around missionary organizations, so they can work together in part against Catholicism. However, in the 1930s, it suddenly acquires a new term by Christian and it becomes a major occupation. The term ecumenism or ecumenical begins to signify. The belief that there is a bond, deep spiritual conceptual bond between Catholicism and Protestantism.
That is a new idea that is far more radical and more revolutionary than the initial hesitant practical cooperation of the earlier decades of the 20th century against socialism and feminism. It's something that says that these are not just mutual. allies, again, a mutual enemy, but that they share something profound. And that is a new notion that begins in the 1930s. In the book, I argue that the reason, the kind of initial instigator behind it is the rise of the Nazi movement.
The Nazi movement, when it began, sought to introduce a new form of racialized religion that argued that Catholics and Protestants are the same, equal members of the Aryan body. and that they're both equal in the fight against what they call Judeo-Bolshevism. In the founding manifesto of the party, the 24 points.
The Nazis famously declared that they do not recognize the difference between Protestant and Catholics as important. They argue we support what we call positive Christianity, a conception of Christianity that is racialized, that bond both those. both of those confessions.
When the Nazi party is a small fringe movement, this doesn't seem to matter to Christian. Both Catholic and Protestant ignore it. But once the Nazis gain hegemony in German politics, when they have their breakthrough in the 1930s... then coming to power, and finally taking hegemony over euro. suddenly you can see a burst of Catholic and Protestant writing. that begin to argue that, yes, there is a Catholic and Protestant profound similarity between them. The first one to write in this term...
And to argue that Catholic and Protestant are really spiritual brothers in one body are those who sympathize with the Nazis. both theology and social theorists, theorists of gender and theorists of race. who argue that Catholicism, Protestantism and Nazism are all part of a special unity that believes in the spiritual unity of the races, that believe that... Divine grace operates through races and not through individuals.
and that each race has its own mission. And part of the reason for this interest is that the Nazis early in their... in their time in power, oftentimes echo language that is very familiar to Christians. They argue that they are going to overcome the socialist and communist problem by finding a harmony between workers and employers. That's what their welfare policy is. They say explicitly we are against materialism and we share the social vision of the churches.
Many of them argue early on that they speak in the language of patriarchal inequality between men and women. We have different visions and different functions in society. Now, as the regime, this is something that many historians have shown. As the regime radicalizes and prepares to war, it loses interest in Christianity and begins to adopt many policies that Christians feel uncomfortable with.
such as encouraging premarital sexual relationships for procreation. It discards marriages and family as important. Many are feeling very uncomfortable with forced sterilization, especially Catholics. And as time passes, the regime becomes also explicitly anti-clerical. But up to that point, there's a clear fascination with the Nazis. And even those who feel very uncomfortable and resist some of those policies.
still very much believe that Catholics and Protestants should follow the model of Nazi ecumenism by trying to forge. conceptual and organizational cooperation between Catholics and Protestants. And that is true for many social writers and important activists, Christian activists, theologians and writers. In response to that, there's another strand of anti-fascists and anti-Nazi writers who also begin to...
try and appropriate the language of ecumenism against fascism. So theologian writers, first in Germany, but also in France, most importantly, the French theologian, Catholic. Theologie and Yves Congar will become one of the most important figures later in Vatican II. wrote some of the first theological arguments that seek to explain why Catholic and Protestants
are similar brothers in the body of Christ. And he says the body of Christ cannot be equated with race and cannot be equated with nation. He says the body of Christ, after all, was crucified on the... on the cross and therefore it is imperfect and therefore you cannot associate it with race. But he argues explicitly if we want to develop an anti-racist, anti-fascist theology, it has to be Catholic and Protestant united.
in this effort. And many anti-racist, though they are a minority at the time, develop also ecumenical theory. Similarly, you can see many anti-fascist Christian... theoreticians of the economy that tried to develop an anti-fascist economic vision. They argue that the fascist vision of a state running the economy is ultimately like communism and it's secular and that the only way to have a true Healthy inequality is through three competition of the market.
Some writers begin to write that in the 1930s and the 1940s, most famously the German writer Wilhelm Röpke, who lived in exile in Switzerland, later together with... with other will found the neoliberal movement. especially with the Montalaran Association, is one of the founders of it. He seeks to develop an anti-fascist economic theory that supports inequality but opposes fascism.
And he, interestingly, also, for the first time in the 1930s, the 1940s, started to argue that Catholic and Protestants actually share a belief in this understanding of the economy, something that he and others... flat-out rejected only a decade earlier. They argued that Catholicism and Protestantism in Economic theory are like water and oil. And suddenly in the 1940s, they argued the reverse in response to Nazism. So we can see an effort by Catholic and Protestants on both sides of the divide.
sympathizers to fascism and anti-fascists beginning to use the language and concept. of ecumenism in an effort to devise new ways of understanding what it is to be Christian in the world. Yes, Christian combined. I, I have, there's two ways we could go here and I'm. So I want to push a little bit more on the religious side of this. So let's do that really quickly.
Fundamental to any religious discussion is somewhat of a need to understand the theology that underpins it. And so in this case, we have... two different Christian groups, the Catholics and the Protestants. And yes, there's many variations within them, but two major groups. And they have very different interpretations of the Bible, their place in the world, how they relate to each other. So how did they have to adjust?
their, I'm going to call it their theological norms, but if they've been spending centuries trying to explain how they're so different, what did they have to do to get over that and start to work together? That's a fantastic question. So if you look at the hardcore theology, the deep theology of this question, there are the first time theological conferences in 1933 and 1934 where theologians meet and try to develop, okay, let's talk about what is it that we share.
with each other. Let's not focus on what we disagree. We agree, for example, that the relationship to the Vatican is different and we believe that... The place of Virgin Mary is very different for us in the world. What is it that we do agree on? And there's deep theological discussions about how does grace work? How does salvation work? And most importantly, the concept that seems to be at the focus of this theological discussion is a concept called the mystical body of Christ.
This is a term that began to circulate earlier on, especially among writers who tried to argue that The leadership of the church should be the believers and the communities and not clerical authorities. It was especially popular among Catholics, but not only.
Disturb suddenly begins to circulate much more aggressively and widely among theologians, and they argue one thing that we both share is the belief that there is such a thing called the mystical body of Christ that infers spirituality on a community. is for the fascists, it is racial and it correlates to the racial body. And this is clearly an overlap between Nazi language and Christian language. It's an effort to merge Christian language with Nazi language.
For the anti-fascists, what they try to argue, as I mentioned briefly when I talk about Kongar, is that a body is not... physical manifestation in the world, but that a body is a spiritual community that includes Catholic and Protestant together. But it means also that the visible borders of the church, let's say the Catholic church,
is not the same as the spiritual community of the believers. And one of the things that Congao is trying to argue in his book is that the Catholic Church has clear borders, who is converted, who is... and who goes to masses and so on. And he says, but the mystical body of Christ allows us to see that alongside this visible organization, Protestants are also part of this body. So there is a spiritual community, and what brings those communities together is a spiritual belief in salvation.
And that is for us, again, for if you, like me, grew up outside the orbit of the churches. The notion that there is structural similarity between Catholic and Protestant is not that strange. For contemporaries in the 1930s believers, that was a very radical argument. And that's why in the book I try to map how... writers try to make the work of reconceptualizing what is the border of a Christian community? What is the border of the body of Christ? What is the border of the church?
And there's a lot of ingenuity and innovation that goes into this effort of trying to imagine Christianity as something that is not Catholic or Protestant, but is something that entails both those communities. if we can just do a tiny little side note here, that it does not include other Abrahamic religions. It's very... It explicitly and openly does not include them. And in the case of the... fascist sympathizers, it is quite explicitly said.
Those texts, you know, if you look at the first ecumenical journals, the first ecumenical magazines, conferences and so on, speakers explicitly say, we are here in Ionite. united body that works to eject. the seculars, the communists, and the Jews in particular. So the Jews are agents of decomposition and outer spirituality. They are the manifestation of materialism. That is the antithesis of Catholicism and Protestantism.
We don't find any of this in the writing of antifascists. The antifascists are not antisemitic. There is some overlap among those. Figures were anti-fascist ecumenicals who later will develop some anti-antisemitic text, but at the time, not a single major publication that I've reviewed.
that calls for Catholicism, Protestantism, unity against fascism, mentions Judaism. The efforts to forge an anti-antisemitic Christianity is a project that goes on separate tracks and is usually a different set of individuals. to the Catholic Protestant Alliance. Yeah, fascinating.
Okay, I'm going to keep us going. I could sit in this for a while, but let's keep going. We've talked a little bit about economics and economic social theories and how important they were, particularly in the opposition to socialism. But can you talk a little bit more about the importance of the economists? You mentioned them as a source of material.
and the writings of this time that weigh in. You just give us a flavor of what you mean by that. What are some of the key... elements of that economic and social theory that was Yeah, and I think that that's important to emphasize because the majority of believing Christians don't read hardcore theology.
When they think about what it means to be Christian, they read lay publications about economics, about gender, and about other issues that are on the top of their mind. And the economist and social theorist who write... Again, there's the fascist sympathizer and anti-fascist who try to explain what is the relationship between Christianity and the fascist project, in particular, the fascist project of solving the social question through the state.
and reorganizing class relations to the state. Those who sympathize with the fascists argue that yes, even though we were hesitant about this before and believe that... relationship between workers and And employers should be managed through Christian lay organizations and voluntary associations. Now you're okay, the Great Depression has ended this issue. there can be no response to the Great Depression and to communism without state intervention. And they argue that the fascists...
Through expanded welfare and through the crushing of organized labor, are realizing the Christian vision that was born in the 19th century of harmonious inequality, in which workers and employers work together, accept inequality, but work together towards a joint goal of racial salvation. The anti-fascist, like Rokke, who I mentioned, argued that that is exactly the opposite of what Christian vision requires.
Salvation and true inequality can be only manifest if it is voluntary. That is, only if workers and employers work together in voluntary without a coercive capacity of the state. Can we talk about... And they argue, therefore, that the job of a state... in order to create the conditions for virtuous life, is to foster competition and anti-monopoly that will allow people to voluntarily decide how they interact with the economy and to willfully choose.
cooperation between workers and employers. And according to them, if you try to coerce through the state, you just create communism, which is materialism. And that is the two different visions of Christian economics that unfolds and developed during the 1930s and 1940s. I want to get, so I, I, I want to talk about gender and sex and, um, and it's, uh.
And it's just so surprising to me that this plays such a huge role. Intellectually, I was like, really, why is this so big? And then as soon as I was reading the book, I was like, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, definitely. So can you talk a little bit? You've mentioned it a few times here and there. I'd really like to center on why this is such a major, major part of the...
discussion and the concerns that these groups were trying to... Right. That's a great question. So since the 19th century, and perhaps even before, one thing the Catholics and Protestants agree on is that the basic unit of society is the family. The family, according to them, is where one learns to be selfless, to care for others, to be virtuous. And from their point of view, this is the main training ground and model for what community should be like.
Now, there's no equality between children and parents. There's no equality between men and women in family, according to Christians. That is where you learn that inequality is healthy because it means that people take care of each other, have a sense of obligation and selflessness. According to them, the problem with feminism, with sexual reform movements in the early 20th century is that they tried to bring the family down and therefore would lead to the disintegration of society.
in fascism early on for some christian is exactly the belief that fascism works to preserve the family. It will be the movement that will crush feminism, that will re-establish the patriarchy, will try and push women out of the workforce so they can focus on their divine role as mothers. And in part, this is what generates a lot of enthusiasm for the Nazis among some Christians.
And for the rest of the 1930s, they tried to map what is the similarities between fascist family ethics and Christian family ethics, especially the focus on procreation and the belief that procreation is the center. Many of them, as I mentioned earlier, begin to have doubts about the fascist project when it moves to undermine the family with encouraging premarital sex. But most of them stick to it.
Nevertheless, because they believe that it is at least it solves the problem of feminism and sexual reform of them. In parallel, however, the anti-fascist writers, and there's a wave of family expert people who write very popular marriage manuals, sex manuals that many Christians consume. Begin to argue that fascism, because of its focus on procreation and breeding, is the only thing that matters.
is actually undermining the family. They argue that if you believe that the family's function is just to procreate in order to produce as many healthy racial subjects... then you take the whole concept of spirituality and selflessness out of it. And according to them, fascism should be rejected by Christian exactly because it undermines the family. And again, they argue that it is a form of biological materialism that takes spirituality out of human relations.
And they try to develop a new form of conjugality that is based first and foremost on sexual relationship and marriage as something that has spiritual function in and of itself, irregardless of procreation. and many of them for the first time argue that Christian marriage really is not about procreation, and it is sacred even if it does not lead to procreation. It is about...
relationship between the couple. Now, these are not feminist. They don't believe in equality of men and women, but they still believe that the purpose of marriage is spiritual fulfillment between the two members of the family, of the marriage bond. And interestingly, that project of articulating an anti-fascist Christian theory of conjugality first leads to the legitimization of sexual pleasure as such, something that is new.
In Christian thought, it argued that orgasm and sexual pleasure are good because they, irregardless of whether they lead to procreation, they are fine because they enable a spiritual bond. between members of the family and second for the first time you can see it's on the edges of all those publications, that they argue that Catholics and Protestants share a Christian understanding of what is the family and what is love and what is divine grace through sexuality.
conceptual breakthrough you cannot find a single tag of major writer in the early 20th century that would say Catholics and Protestants share a family ethics. It is considered obvious that Protestants agree to divorce. Catholics do not. There's a whole literature that says that Catholicism among Protestant literature says that Catholics, because of their
ideas of celibacy and so on actually have perverse sexuality. In the 1930s and 40s, for the first time, we see a sustained effort to argue that no, Catholics and Protestants share a real deep family ethic and sexual ethic. And that is something that comes from this crucible of the 1930s and 40s. I think that's such an important...
piece of the book. And it was very new information for me. I've never heard anything like that. So I found that section riveting and very surprising. So thank you for going through it. So I want to make sure we have time. I want to make sure that we spend a little bit of time at least. You've referred to it in a few places, but I do want to come back to this idea of colonialism and missionary work.
and the very large role that this plays. I think there is some obvious elements of the sort of manifestation of legitimized inequality. But maybe you can add a little bit of flavor to that. What were the groups trying to do, particularly the radical and progressive groups from the 60s and 70s? What were they trying to do and what did they actually end up doing?
Okay, so that's a great question. So what I tried to map is... missionary world in trying to structure a relationship between Catholics and Protestants. The sense of colonial competition very much infuses Catholic and Protestants' argument that says the Catholic and Protestants are enemies in the missionary world, and they need to work exactly because the other one is trying to convert the rest of the world against them.
In the 1930s, for the first time, we see a backtracking from this. There's no talk about deep spiritual. similarity between Catholics and Protestants, but you can see overlapping conceptions that argue that actually the role of Christian missions is not to compete with each other here, but to operate in a new world of anti-colonial forces.
to reestablish European dominance. The onslaught of decolonization is an important story that comes later in the book, in the next chapter, in which I talk about how the sense that the colonial empire, the fact that they collapsed. And they have been the political force that's undergirded the existence and expansion of missionaries in Asia and especially in Africa.
sparked deep anxiety among Catholic and Protestants. For good reasons. As I mentioned, this is not just a figment of their imagination. China, one of the major anti-colonial forces, When the communist revolution is completed in 1950 and 51, one of the first actions that it takes is to expel all Western missionaries, Catholic and Protestants, from China, the largest missionary space in the world.
It is followed by other colonial organizations in Africa that either expel missionaries or force them to hand over the educational system to their new state. So there's a deep and growing anxiety that the process of decolonization would lead potentially to the destruction of the missionary project.
This sense of mutual anxiety, for the first time in the 50s and 1960s, leads many Catholic and Protestant missionaries in some delay, several decades after those ideas have already been circulating in Europe. to argue that Catholics and Protestants actually are brethren in the mission to convert the world. There's an understanding that both of them are going to be permanent minorities in the missionary world. There's no longer any talk about converting the entire world for Christianity.
And for the first time, this is when we see cooperation between Catholic and Protestant missionary organizations, charities around missionary work. publishing translations of the bibles together sharing information it is for the first time happens in the 1960s
with the unfolding of decolonization. So part of the book alongside the setting of The social question and the gender question, how it plays into the relationship between Catholic and Protestants, also explore the place of the missionary world and the changes of Europe's relationship. to the colonial world, how that plays and helps feed the relationship, the transformation of relationship between Catholics and Protestants.
Would it be accurate to summarize that before that, Catholics and Protestants were each separately going out and trying to convince or to convert. the world and get more of the world onto their team, if you will. But now they start to see that this is something that they do together to preserve what they share and continue the colonization. as opposed to just the... separate, are they going to be Catholic or are they going to be?
Protestant, now it's like, well, are they going to be Christian? And if they're not Christian, will they fit into our colonial view of the world and their place? Correct. And I mean, some of them, some colonial, not colonial, excuse me, some missionary writers, prominent ones.
say quite explicitly, now with the collapse of the empire, if we are to preserve European influence in this space, We have to understand that the division between Catholics and Protestants are obsolete, that we have to work together in a united front to preserve European cultural hegemony, not that the political hegemony is over. And the only way to do so is through deep ecumenical relationship between Catholics and Protestants.
That is said in some places quite explicitly. I was surprised to find some of those texts that's logic being articulated so explicitly in writings around 1960-61 as decolonization kind of climaxes. in Africa. It's like the quiet part is out loud. Yes. Okay. So I do want to talk a little bit about some of the radical groups. Can we go there a little bit? Yeah, sure.
Radical and progressive groups. Can you tell a little bit about what that looked like, these radical ecumenisms? Yeah. So what the book maps is how the division between anti-fascists and fascist sympathizers kind of evaporates with the collapse of fascism. and how they come to cooperate with each other after World War II, and help to establish some of the most dominant political forces imposed for Europe Christian democracy.
And what we see in Christian democracy is a truce between those different wings of Catholicism and Protestantism that allows for Christians to enshrine some of their important priorities into European governance. to enshrine the inequalities between workers and employers by resisting socialism, by enshrining inequality between men and women through patriarchal legislation and so on.
In the late 1960s and early 70s, however, There's a growing group of radical Christians, Catholics and Protestants, who seek to question the commitment that has informed Christian thought and politics to inequality since the 19th century. radical groups, theology and student activists, lay writers, who begin to argue that first... Christianity is by its essence a revolutionary idea that calls for the universal solidarity with the oppressed.
and argue that embracing radical socialism, not the Stalinist one or the Soviet one in general, but a revolutionary anti-authoritarian in the spirit of the new left, is the mission of Christianity that argues that the solidarity and revolutionary mission of Christianity is to append.
gender inequality and calls for the legalization of abortion, the legalization of contraception, for the decriminalization of same-sex relationships, and finally for corrective anti-colonialism and anti-racism that aligns with the projects of the NIEO. of the new international economic order that calls for Europe to pay massive reparations for African countries. and Asians, and to mobilize Christianity against the lingering effects of imperialism, especially the Vietnam War.
Also in South America and in Africa, Christian organizations begin to donate money and weapons to anti-colonialists in Angola, for example, that fights the vestiges of Portuguese empire. So what I found interesting, first of all, this chapter of European Christianity is something that occasionally will appear in scholarship, but there isn't any systematic study of those group and organizations. And part of what I tried to do in the last chapter of the book is to reconstruct.
this universe of radical Christianity. And the second thing that I found really striking is that even though this radical Christianity set itself, all its thinkers, writers and activists set themselves... to overthrow all the concepts that have been so fundamental to Christian thought since the 19th century. The one thing that they keep from their predecessors is the concept of ecumenism.
So many of those organizations and writers speak and think and act systematically about the cooperation between Catholics and Protestants. about ecumenism as the foundation for this radical Christianity. I found it really fascinating, and to me it showed how normalized ecumenism has become. It has become so normalized.
and so widespread that even those who set up to completely revolutionary Christianity take it for granted that Catholic and Protestants have something in common, which is a deep intellectual, spiritual, political similarity. And that undergirds their activism and thoughts throughout the 60s and 70s. And so that is the concluding chapter of the book that shows how mainstream ecumenism has become, that even its opponents... already see it as natural. It is like that is a Christian-ness.
This is shared in some ways. Wonderful. So I know we're getting to the end of our time. So I would love for you to summarize what you want our listeners to take away from your book. I think the most important thing that I took from the book, and I hope that readers take from the book too, is the immense creativity and ingenuity and intellectual creativeness that...
head from the 19th century and deep into the 20th century. I think, again, if you grow up outside of the orbit of organized Christianity, because it is mostly appears organized Christianity is mobilizing around conservative causes. like abortions and so on. It's easy to believe that, to have the misconception that Christian thought and beliefs are centered around certain... stable beliefs that are consistent through time.
especially fascinating and one of the reasons I found so interesting to work on this project, which would have been an obvious for anyone who grew up in the orbit of Christianity, is the tremendous creativity. and intellectual innovation that goes into constantly updating Christian thought to devise. solutions, plausible solutions to real problems, economic, sexual, political, international. and to constantly find new meanings in familiar ideas and familiar languages and in familiar texts.
to come with new ideas of what being Christian means, to reread the ancient text and to find new meanings in them and to reinterpret them and to... to find a new understanding of what it means to be Christian. And the book, in many ways, more than what it is... even more than a history of the relationship between Catholics and Protestants, even more than the politics and influence of Catholic and Protestant thought about European governance.
More than anything, it's about the creativity and liveliness and the plurality of Christian thought in the modern era. And that is what I hope this book is a contribution to. It is. An incredible amount of innovation in that. And thank you for bringing that all together. What is next for you? Thank you. So there are several books that I'm working on in parallel. One is a co-authored project that I'm working with my colleague, Juliana Chemidis from UW Medicine.
which is titled currently Decolonization and the Remaking of Europe, in which we try to trace how the collapse of empires from the 40s to the 70s and the mass migration that follows from the global south. transforms key functions of the European state. It's something that the last chapter of my book led me to think about systematically. And Giuliani has been working on her part of it when she writes about labor and the global left.
So the different chapters kind of thematically trace how key functions of European governance are transformed policing, welfare, the management of family and gender. environmental policies and so on. The second book that I'm working on is what I call the decline of the Natalie state. We have a massive amount of rich and wonderful scholarship that traces the dramatic intervention of the state.
in European understanding of sexuality and public health under the influence of Foucault from the late 19th to the mid 20th century. How the states begin to regulate public health, public housing, the rise of eugenics, the... tightening of regulation on sexuality, all of this begins to fade and to disintegrate with quick, wide remarkable speed in the 60s and 70s.
The disappearance of eugenics is an important force when states begin to say, okay, we don't care if you have same-sex relationships or if you have abortions. That is a remarkable transformation and we don't have a... scholarship that explain how all those different threads came together. And I hope to have a book that begins to think about those questions. And to me, it seems like it also can help us explain the retreat of state. from economic management and regulation in the 1980s and later.
Maybe if we understand why states no longer believe that human bodies and procreations matter as much as they did before, can help us explain why they believe that economic management and welfare don't matter as much as they did before? so that is the second book and finally the book that
I think is the most personal and the one I'm most excited to work on that I started writing is the history of parenting in the late 19th and 20th century. Very interesting how the transformation and reshaping of the European state. so deeply intervenes in the intimate relationship between people and their children.
and how the rise of welfare, military service, and so on, reshapes those relationships, especially... the counterintuitive development in which the vast expansion of the welfare state after World War II coincides with the rise of what we call today attachment parenting. And when the state begins to emphasize how important it is for mothers in particular to spend as much time with children.
How those two strands constantly intersect with each other throughout the 20th century is a question that I think is ripe for historical study. And that's something I hope to work on. Fascinating. I hope that means we'll have you back for three interviews. Some point in the future. And so the last thing I will ask you before I let you go is if you have a recommendation for a book or two, if you like, for our listeners. Yeah, I think that's a book that I've read.
most recently that I found really moving is Dagmar Herzog's book, The Question of Unworthy Life, Eugenics in Germany's 20th Century. It's a book that came out a few months ago. and traces the rise and fall of eugenics as a conceptual project. And it is a wonderfully moving book. that explores how caretakers in particular, and particular Christian caretakers, constantly negotiated the conflicting feelings that they have of taking care of those who they considered deficient.
in some ways, and how that informs state management, emotional management, politics, welfare. And it traces from the late 19th century all the way to the 1970s and the movement to destigmatize. disabilities, mental and physical. And it is an absolutely riveting read and one that raises so many questions for us historians that I would warmly recommend anyone to read. Well, I can't wait to read it with that recommendation. It certainly is going to make it onto my list.
Uli Greenberg, thank you so much. It has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today about the end of the schism, Catholics, Protestants, and the remaking of Christian life in Europe, 1880s to 1970s. Thank you for joining us on the New Books Network. Thank you so much for having me.