The recent upsurge of far-right political parties across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America demands new attention to the phenomenon of Christian nationalism. The case of Germany is instructive as a country where Christian churches have played a comparatively minor role in the rise of the far right. Whereas U.S. evangelical denominations have been outspoken in their support of Donald Trump, the Protestant and Catholic churches in Germany have declared Christianity to be incompatible with the xenophobic Alternative for Germany (AfD). Church leaders who publicly rebuke the AfD are well aware of the long historical backdrop for their actions. In 1933, some Christian factions, especially within the Protestant churches, celebrated the establishment of a National Socialist dictatorship. Even as the Nazi regime violently persecuted Jews and political opponents, only a small proportion of church officials and lay parishioners participated in resistance efforts. The German trajectory therefore raises an important question for scholarship on Christian nationalism: How do denominations that historically espoused Christian nationalism come to embrace a more pluralist, inclusive vision of their faith?
To address this problem, my presentation draws from a larger research project on the political evolution of the Protestant Church in Germany (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, EKD) in the post-1945 Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). Comprising regional churches of the Lutheran, Reformed, and United denominations, the EKD counted over twenty-six million members in 1950 and was an influential actor in national political debates. Although the EKD’s postwar leaders had been overwhelmingly socialized in traditions of right-wing Protestant nationalism, during the 1950s and 1960s the church became a locus for movements to restrain state power and pursue reconciliation with Germany’s wartime enemies. My presentation will argue that ecumenical dialogue, both among Protestants across the Iron Curtain and between Protestants and Jews in West Germany, became a key driver of this transformation. Rather than a simple story of deradicalization, however, I propose a more complex, entangled relationship between ecumenism and Christian nationalism. Even as postwar ecumenical initiatives challenged exclusionary doctrines of national salvation, they reinscribed a longstanding tenet of German Protestant nationalism: the conviction that the Protestant confession served as the source of Germans' shared political values transcending social divisions.
The presentation centers on the years around 1960, a pivotal moment in postwar German history. An international crisis over the status of Berlin, the growth of liberal media outlets, and the onset of domestic trials of Nazi perpetrators converged to catalyze a critical public discourse about the Nazi past for the first time since 1945. Protestants both participated in and shaped this process. The presentation’s first part examines cross-border links between East European Protestant pastors and West German veterans of the Nazi-era Confessing Church, an organization that had sought to preserve the independence of the churches from the Nazi state. I show how encounters around organizations such as the Prague-based Christian Peace Conference motivated West German participants to reassess the Oder-Neisse line, the postwar German-Polish border by which Germany lost one quarter of its pre-1937 territory. West Germany’s major political parties continued to call for border revisions. Circles of Confessing Church veterans, however, began speaking out for the recognition of the Oder-Neisse line—contravening a central tenet of German territorial nationalism.
As I argue in the presentation's second part, East-West encounters in turn shaped ecumenical initiatives between Protestants and members of West Germany’s tiny surviving Jewish community. Key figures of the East-West dialogue, such as the former Confessing Church pastors Helmut Gollwitzer and Kurt Scharf, founded the Working Group on Jews and Christians at the German Protestant Assembly (Kirchentag) in 1961. Among the first German organizations to confront Christian participation in the Holocaust, the Working Group played a key role in pressuring the EKD to reverse its position on the West German trials of Nazi perpetrators. During the early postwar years, Protestant leaders had campaigned for amnesty for convicted Nazi war criminals as a vehicle of postwar reconciliation. In a widely circulated 1963 memorandum, however, the EKD Council endorsed the trials and upheld the possibility of reconciliation only as an outcome of due punishment.
Such an orientation folded back onto the discussion of Germany’s postwar border. In October 1965, the EKD Council released its so-called Eastern Memorandum, the most widely discussed and controversial statement by the postwar German Protestant Church. With the Eastern Memorandum, the EKD became the first major German institution to call upon the West German government to recognize the Oder-Neisse line. Here again, the church upheld acknowledgement of and reparation for Germany’s wartime atrocities as a precondition of postwar reconciliation.
Yet ecumenical encounters also reinscribed ideologies that had long undergirded German Protestant nationalism. West German Protestant pastors routinely contrasted their openness to border revisions with the ongoing reticence of Germany’s Catholic hierarchy. The Eastern Memorandum made no reference to the Holocaust, nor did it challenge widespread narratives of Protestant anti-Nazi resistance. By centering the duty of reconciliation, Protestant ecumenists tended to impute an equivalence of wartime suffering between Germans, Jews, and other Nazi-occupied populations. Moreover, the positive media reception of the Eastern Memorandum encouraged its authors to identify their confession as a bedrock of the Federal Republic’s democratic values, without considering the limits of their reconciliation efforts.
The presentation will conclude by reflecting on the uneven legacies of postwar German Protestant ecumenism. In recent years, veterans of 1960s dialogue initiatives, and their heirs in the pastorate and EKD leadership, have contrasted their church’s openness to ecumenical dialogue with the alleged religious dogmatism of Germany’s Muslim communities. EKD statements on Christian-Muslim relations have identified Protestant values of pluralism, tolerance, and respect for individual human dignity as the very sources of Germany’s secular democracy, calling on Muslim immigrants and their descendants to undertake a process of self-critique. Such statements play into anti-immigrant stereotypes even as the EKD has resisted right-wing calls for restrictions on immigration and asylum. Postwar ecumenical initiatives therefore promoted religious transformation by working within, not against, older nationalist visions.
The history of the Protestant Church in Germany (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, EKD), a federation of regional Lutheran, Reformed, and United denominations, provides a counterpoint to the recent resurgence of Christian nationalism across the U.S. and Europe. Following widespread Protestant support for the Nazi dictatorship, the EKD became a locus for post-1945 movements to restrain state power and pursue reconciliation with Germany’s wartime enemies. My presentation argues that initiatives toward ecumenical dialogue during the years around 1960, both among Protestants across the Iron Curtain and between Protestants and Jews in West Germany, became key drivers of this transformation. Rather than a simple story of deradicalization, however, I propose that ecumenism and Christian nationalism remained entangled. Even as postwar ecumenical initiatives challenged exclusionary doctrines of national salvation, they reinscribed a longstanding tenet of German Protestant nationalism: the conviction that the Protestant confession served as the source of Germans' shared political values.