From Royalist to Republican: Adolf von Harnack and the Plasticity of Lutheran Religious Nationalism

This paper examines Adolf von Harnack’s rapid transition from public supporter of Kaiser Wilhelm II to defender of the Weimar Republic, arguing that his particular brand of Lutheran Kulturprotestantismus provided the theological resources to make this political transition in ways unavailable to many of his contemporaries. Situating his case within contemporary theories of religious nationalism (Brubaker, Gorski, Rieffer, Soper and Fetzer, Türkmen), this paper contends that prevailing typologies do not adequately account for how religious-national identities are renegotiated across changes in regime type. Harnack’s career reveals how the Lutheran two-kingdoms inheritance, combined with Kulturprotestantismus’s identification of Christianity with cultural achievement rather than with a specific political form, enabled a flexible religious nationalism adaptable to both monarchical and republican governance. This case complicates the binary between royalist and democratic forms of religious nationalism and has implications for understanding religion’s role in contemporary contexts of democratization, democratic backsliding, and regime change.