Michael B. McDuffee. Small-Town Protestantism in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Living Lost Faith. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. 151 pp. $48.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8204-6223-3.

Reviewed by Edward Mathieu (Department of History, Beloit College)
Published on H-German (June, 2004)

McDuffee's book is a valuable contribution to the burgeoning field of modern German religious history that takes Protestantism seriously as a category of analysis. It is a local history of a small, predominantly Protestant town--Butzbach, in the grand duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt--during the middle years of the nineteenth century (1830-1872). Its implications are significant in rethinking the place of Protestantism in nineteenth-century Germany. The book is a study of religious change, of an increasing ecclesiastical focus on the youth, and of the struggles of churchmen to maintain the loyalty of the masses to the church as institution. The book is divided into two parts: "a study of religious change in Butzbach as taken from the pastoral records"; and "a closer look at the material and methods used in religious instruction for catechism, confirmation, and school" (p. 3).

McDuffee focuses on efforts to maintain religion in the community. Most of his primary sources "are reports by pastors detailing religious life in Butzbach" (p. 3). The author understands that the clergy are aware that the world is changing around them; he seeks to explain how they respond to these changes. Thus the author's "primary subject" is "the religious change postured by the Protestant church itself in facing the new problem inherited from the eighteenth century of seeking 'conformity with this world'" (p. 3).[1] McDuffee explores the responses of the clergy to the changing times--rather than simply measuring decline based on statistics like communion frequency. He looks for and finds a church that is, to a certain extent, dynamically trying to meet the pressures and demands of a changing world.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is the author's elaboration of an idea of de-Christianization, a transformation of Protestantism from a focus on the sacrifice that Christ made to allow men to find salvation in the next life to a focus on religion's moral teachings useful in this world. Religion becomes not a medium to achieve salvation in another life, but a feeling, a set of values, an identity with which one can live this life. Thus, "the experience of being religious, of feeling religious, replaced the specifically Lutheran doctrinal base of Christianity" (p. 82). A more "practical" Christianity oriented on this world replaced an abstract other-worldly Christianity of the scriptures.

The book's subtitle, Living Lost Faith, gets at the heart of a key thesis of the work. The author presents the decline of a church-based Protestantism and of a Christ-focused religiosity, but also a continuing Protestant identity (alongside a developing multitude of other identities) and an at least episodic emotional commitment to a feeling of Protestant religiosity. A series of encounters with religion, including religious instruction in school, confirmation training, and periodic "attendance at special church services" like confirmations and funerals "contributed to the laying down of layers of memories in combination which together formed and nurtured a Christian identity as a part of the Protestant self" (p. 55). It has become clear that in the modern world identities are flexible and fluid. McDuffee urges us to recognize that religious identities remain among these--that rather than a simple decline of religious identity we should perceive fluctuating and perhaps part-time religious identities.

The author argues that the theology of the times undermined a Christ- and next-world-centered Protestantism. Thus a church-centered Lutheranism suffered in favor of a focus on life in this world. McDuffee only hints at some of the important implications of this kind of Christianity. He suggests that a de-Christianized religious sensibility urged virtue and moral excellence, but not church attendance. Two conflicting streams of thought on this subject emerge. On the one hand, there is an increasing theological and social emphasis on this world. But McDuffee goes far beyond this to imply that religion itself became unimportant. McDuffee concludes that "religious life ... had been secularized" and that "town residents neither feared nor desired God" (p. 1). He tells us that "indifference toward the faith" had become the most common choice of Butzbach Protestants (p. 2), that they had "freed themselves from the influence of the Protestant church" (p. 111). The author's evidence, however, does not directly reveal residents' religiosity.

One of McDuffee's pastors wrote that the people believed "one could be a good person and a practicing Christian without going to church" (p. 51). We are left wondering what this might have meant beyond the fact that people did not feel church attendance was necessary. This begs the question of what lay people were doing in this world and outside of the confines of the institutional church in the name of their new focus on Christian brotherly love. McDuffee mentions that "this was the unrivaled age of inner missions and Bible societies" (pp. 6-7), but goes no further with the idea. He touches on the concept of the "Practical Christian" (p. 18) as a description of the layperson not concerned much on a daily basis with religion. This misses the key idea of practical Christianity: practical work in this world--perhaps de-Christianized and detached from the church but nonetheless performed in a conscious context of Christian activism.

McDuffee draws attention to the distraction of the clergy from their ecclesiastical duties. McDuffee mentions the demands of poor relief and the clergy's own growing interest in secular pursuits. Involvement in poor relief, we are told, impinged significantly on the pastor's time to devote to ecclesiastical matters. Perhaps as significant was the problem presented by engagement in the visibly political activity of poor relief; it became more difficult for clergy to maintain an image of impartiality (pp. 33-34). McDuffee also uncovers the increasing secular interests of clergy. They were, it seems, focusing less on the scriptures and more on secular literature as a basis for personal and professional development. McDuffee interprets this as part of the process of secularization--the clergy themselves were becoming more secularized (p. 36). This is a compelling story. But it begs the question of the extra-church role of the clergy. The Protestant clergy seem to have been engaged in social life to a remarkable degree. Their secular intellectual interests may have drawn them further from theology, but might they not also have allowed them to engage intellectually with lay people? Might this have been not only a distraction from the Godly, but also a new injection of the ecclesiastical into civil society and the social sphere? It certainly seems to indicate that the clergy were engaged in life outside the church. One of McDuffee's pastors himself acknowledged that the community perceived him in a dual role "as an official spokesman of the church and ... as a private individual" (p. 46). What this clergyman as private individual was doing, and how his actions as a private individual affected the place of religion in civil society, are left unexplored.

An exploration of the church's engagement with the youth, to which McDuffee devotes about half the book, is the strongest aspect of the work. It is in religious instruction of the youth that one can see most clearly the transformation of the church's efforts to hold or regain the masses. McDuffee tells us that in the nineteenth century Lutheran Christianity transformed "into a juvenile-based religion" (p. 16). McDuffee explains how the growing emphasis on this world resulted in religious education evolving ever more toward socialization and moralization. At the same time, religious education remained at the core of youth socialization. "The cornerstone of this institutionalized instrument of socialization remained the Protestant faith" (p. 45).

McDuffee argues that the dissonance and variation in religious education led to indifference (p. 109). Over the course of the period of examination the nature of the catechism changed dramatically--from an enlightenment rationalist approach, to one based on the emotionalism of Schleiermacher, and finally to a reliance on a dogmatic and anachronistic approach based strictly on Luther's catechism. This reflected the church's wrestling with methods to hold or regain youth for Lutheranism. The author argues that the final decision, Luther's small catechism and an approach that made little effort to win over the children intellectually or emotionally, amounted to a concession of failure (p. 100). In addition to this was the fact that the religious instruction differed greatly depending on who was offering it. A particularly glaring difference was that between schoolteacher and pastor (pp. 105-106). The gender segregation of religious instruction was both symptom and cause of the continuing feminization of Protestantism in the nineteenth century. It was, McDuffee tells us, a concession that religious instruction for boys was of less importance. And post-confirmation Christian education, increasingly populated by girls alone, became something feminine and juvenile (p. 67).

McDuffee describes increasing religious indifference among Butzbach residents. But to what were they indifferent? McDuffee's evidence may support the argument that devotion to church attendance and rituals was declining, but he implies a more general withdrawal from religiosity, and for this his evidence is insufficient. The book would have been more successful if the author had not felt compelled to make it fit within a sociological model of secularization. A number of definitions of secularization are offered. It might be a disconnection between "religious meaning for life" and "institutions propagating that meaning" (p. 4). McDuffee, drawing on the work of Brian Wilson, "assumes that 'secularization occurs in association with the process in which social organization itself changes from what is communally-based to a societally-based system'" (p. 7).[2] This assumption that religion declines as social organization broadens is problematic. McDuffee explains further that secularization meant that religion no longer provided "a focus of social unity" (p. 6). But the author's evidence does not have much bearing on social unity, it offers only insight into the church's perspective on the decline of faith and church affiliation. All of this draws the author into overstepping the authority of his evidence in making broad statements about popular religiosity, and draws the reader's attention from the really significant contribution of the book in the area of the transformation of the Protestant church.

The heart of the study is an examination of clerical understandings of religious changes, and responses to these changes. This involves a fascinating study of the changing nature of religious education and socialization which is both interesting and significant. The author is less convincing when he tries to move to argue specifics of a change in popular religiosity and a general movement of secularization. The evidence he musters does not support this. The reports of the clergy are valuable; the author sees a changing message in them as evidence of a significant historical change (which I find compelling), but there is too easy an assumption that that change in the expressions of the clergy relates fairly unproblematically to popular religious feeling/commitment. McDuffee seems caught between theories of secularization and his clergy's recognition that although the church was not fairing too well, they "could not deny that religious sentiments persisted" (p. 111). The book focuses almost exclusively on opinions of churchmen in their official capacity as representatives of the church--as such the book can demonstrate the church's perception of religious change or decline, and the decline of loyalty to the church as institution; but it cannot give us much evidence of popular religiosity, popular religious consciousness, or popular religious activism.

Notes

[1]. Karl Dobbelaere, "Secularization: A Multi-Dimensional Concept," Current Sociology 29 (Summer 1981), pp. 12-13.

[2]. Brian Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p.153.

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Citation: Edward Mathieu. Review of McDuffee, Michael B., Small-Town Protestantism in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Living Lost Faith. H-German, H-Net Reviews. June, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9439

Copyright © 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.