Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany

The Rise of the Fourth Confession

Todd H. Weir

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781107041561
• eBook ISBN:
  9781139699129
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Negotiating the boundaries of the secular and of the religious is a core aspect of modern experience. In mid-nineteenth-century Germany, secularism emerged to oppose church establishment, conservative orthodoxy, and national division between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Yet, as historian Todd H. Weir argues in this provocative book, early secularism was not the opposite of religion. It developed in the rationalist dissent of Free Religion and, even as secularism took more atheistic forms in Freethought and Monism, it was subject to the forces of the confessional system it sought to dismantle. Similar to its religious competitors, it elaborated a clear worldview, sustained social milieus, and was integrated into the political system. Secularism was, in many ways, Germany's fourth confession. While challenging assumptions about the causes and course of the Kulturkampf and modern antisemitism, this study casts new light on the history of popular science, radical politics, and social reform.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Time Line of Organized Secularism in Germany and Berlin
• Introduction
• 1 Dissidence and Confession, 1845 to 1847
• 2 Free Religious Worldview: From Christian Rationalism to Naturalistic Monism
• 3 The Sociology of Dissent: Free Religion and Popular Science
• 4 Politics and Free Religion in the 1860s and 1870s
• 5 Secularism in the Berlin Kulturkampf, 1869–1880
• 6 From Worldview to Ethics: Secularism and the “Jewish Question,” 1878–1892
• 7 Secularism in Wilhelmine Germany
• Epilogue: German Secularism after 1914
• Appendix: Membership Statistics of the Principal Secularist Organizations
• Bibliography
• Index