Protestant home towns. Religion and the middle class in Thuringia, 1871--1914.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the importance of Protestantism to small-town middle class construction in Thuringia, an economically and politically diverse region of small towns, prominent in the cultural nation, and homogeneously Lutheran. Thuringia serves as a case study into the possibilities of Protestant bourgeois religious commitment. In the nineteenth century bourgeois activists increasingly determined the direction and focus of religious practice. The heart of Protestantism shifted away from traditional institutional church practices, and towards practices within civil society. Drawing on Wichern's vision of <italic> Innere Mission</italic>, bourgeois Protestants from across the political spectrum acted on the belief that the response to the problems facing the German people must be comprised of three essential, indivisible elements: religious renewal, national unification, and social regeneration. Language used in bourgeois expressions of identity, worldview, and social and political project was framed in a context of Protestant religiosity. Through Protestant cultural performances like the 1883 Luther Festival bourgeois activists combined the Reformation, the nation, and bourgeois values, and presented them as a package for public consumption---and public participation. Middle-class Protestants acted out their faith in mission associations. Through this civic activism they claimed the moral and 'apolitical' high ground in their social contact with the masses. It was largely through the context of religion that women were able to emerge in civil society. Women's religious civic activism was also an important part of a bourgeois mission to uplift and to police the masses. Clergymen, whose social importance was far from declining, were prominent leaders in cultural and social endeavors of the bourgeoisie. Schools remained fundamentally confessional, while pedagogical activists seeking to institute modern educational concepts described the mission of educators and the school system as deeply Christian. Bourgeois political rhetoric, particularly in conceptions of bourgeois identity vis a vis the Social Democrats, was impressed by the importance of faith and the danger of godlessness. Protestantism was a context that helped forge class identity and that brought bourgeois programs for national unity and social reform into harmony.