This session explores the intersection of religion and nationalism. The first paper contextualizes the resurgence of nationalism in France during the 1890s, examining the interrelations between two movements: L'Action Française and Le Sillon. The second paper discusses Adolf von Harnack’s (1851-1930) swift transition from a public supporter of Kaiser Wilhelm II to a defender of the Weimar Republic. It argues that his distinct form of Lutheran Kulturprotestantismus provided the theological resources for this political transition, in ways unavailable to many of his contemporaries. The third paper highlights the dynamics of moral social criticism during the transnational, cross-cultural missionary encounters from approximately 1865 to 1900. It examines how missionaries navigated questions of national identity and culture in the complex geopolitical landscape between nation-states.
At the outset of the 20th century L'Action Francaise and Le Sillon, the former identified with the philosophy of Charles Maurras, the latter with Marc Sangnier, vied for the allegiance of Francophone Catholics more largely and the Catholic hierarchy more particularly. Maurras valued the Church as supporter of order and discipline and increasingly gained its support while over the same period Le Sillon ran afoul of the hierarchy, receiving condemnation in 1910. In the 1920s it was Action Francaise's turn to receive condemnation. The paper focuses on the interrelations of the two movements up to the condemnation of 1910.
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.
This paper elucidates the dynamics of moral social criticism in the transnational, cross-cultural missionary encounter, circa 1865-1900. It addresses the ways in which missionaries navigated questions of national identity and culture in the geopolitical interstices between nation-states. Turning to models of worldwide religious and cultural pluralism in American social life, such as the 1893 World Parliament of Religions, this paper investigates how ecumenical efforts to put religion on display, so to speak, galvanized the formal codification of cross-cultural missionary methods. Mining the discourse of seasoned missionaries (e.g., John L. Nevius), theologians (e.g., J. Gresham Machen), cultural relativists (e.g., Franz Boas), and grassroots efforts at missionary mobilization, I argue that cultural diversity on the world stage provided missionary-minded American Protestants a conceptual model for engaging religious diversity in their own nation. The outcome was the relativization of culture and intra-tradition criticism.