Description

This book explores the culture, politics, and ideas of the nineteenth-century German secularist movements of Free Religion, Freethought, Ethical Culture, and Monism. This book explores the culture, politics, and ideas of the nineteenth-century German secularist movements of Free Religion, Freethought, Ethical Culture, and Monism. In it, Todd H. Weir argues that although secularists challenged church establishment and conservative orthodoxy, they were subjected to the forces of religious competition. This book explores the culture, politics, and ideas of the nineteenth-century German secularist movements of Free Religion, Freethought, Ethical Culture, and Monism. In it, Todd H. Weir argues that although secularists challenged church establishment and conservative orthodoxy, they were subjected to the forces of religious competition. 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. 'Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany is a highly original, deeply researched, elegantly argued, and very significant contribution to modern German history. Crossing virtually all of the topics of recent interest in the field, including secularization, anti-Semitism, the Kulturkampf, monism, the history of Berlin, and esoteric religious pursuits, Todd Weir blends recent research with older debates concerning Bismarck's policies, the Strange Death of German Liberalism, and the problem of Jewish assimilation. Readers will surely be impressed by the depth of Weir's research and the subtlety of his argumentation, and even subjects they thought they knew well will look different on viewing them from the perspective of 'the fourth confession'.' Suzanne L. Marchand, Louisiana State University 'Todd H. Weir's book is a social and political history of organized secularism in nineteenth-century Berlin as it unfolded in the context of the German confessional system. Rather than simply providing a conventional intellectual history of secularist ideas, this study focuses on the organizations that promoted 'free religious' or secularist worldviews, the sociological compo