In the middle of the 20th century, a prolonged animosity came to an end. For more than four centuries, the enmity between Catholics and Protestants, known to theologians as the two confessions, had been one of the organising principles of European life. But, then, it stopped.
To grasp just how revolutionary this inter-Christian peace was, it’s worth remembering what came before it. Because the mutual hatred between the confessions shaped not only the early modern era, when gruesome acts of violence like St Bartholomew’s Day (1572) and the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) tore Europe apart. Anti-Catholicism and anti-Protestantism remained powerful forces well into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and shaped social and political life. The most extreme case was Germany, where the Protestant majority in 1871 unleashed an aggressive campaign of persecution against the Catholic minority. For seven years, state authorities expelled Catholic orders, took over Catholic educational institutions, and censored Catholic publications.
In the Netherlands, Protestant crowds violently attacked Catholic processions; in Austria, a popular movement called ‘Away from Rome’ began a (failed) campaign in 1897 to eradicate Catholicism through mass conversion. Catholics, for their part, were just as hostile to Protestants. In France, Catholic magazines and sermons blamed Protestants for treason, some even called for stripping them of citizenship. Business associations, labour unions and even marching bands were often divided across confessional lines.
Even on an everyday level, it still was common into the 20th century for neighbourhoods, parties and magazines to be strictly Catholic or Protestant. Prominent politicians and lay writers routinely blamed the other confession for backwardness, subversion and sexual perversity. A prominent German historian even claimed, in the 1860s, that Catholics and Protestants were descendants of different races.
But then, by the 1950s, this mutual disdain ended.
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Why, then, did so many Europeans abandon these divisions within just a few decades? The answer lies in the 1930s, and especially the rise of Nazism.
The Nazis are generally remembered today for their extreme racism, imperialism and genocidal violence. But during their early years, their message often revolved around economic and gendered themes. And both echoed the concerns of many Christians. In the economic sphere, they promised a crusade against socialism and its more radical version, communism, and called on workers and employers to cooperate with each other in harmonious inequality. In the sphere of gender relations, the Nazis insisted on separation and inequality between the sexes, and used welfare policies to push women out of the workforce, so that they could focus on procreation. Early Nazi publications often explicitly claimed that these ideas overlapped with Christian teachings, and that they were Christianity’s allies.
But Nazi ideology also introduced an important innovation. While this is often forgotten, Nazism also promised to end the confessional divide. In its founding document from 1920, the party declared its support for ‘positive Christianity’, a new and racialised conception of religion that included both Catholics and Protestants. Adolf Hitler himself was quite preoccupied with the confessional division. In several passages of Mein Kampf (1925), as well as in several speeches, he blamed it for Germany’s internal divisions and weakness. The Nazis therefore claimed that a new order required a historic new, inter-Christian cooperation. Christian unity, the end of the centuries-long confessional war, was a necessary preparation for defeating ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, a goal that Hitler and his acolytes considered inevitable.
As long as Nazism was a fringe movement, Christian elites largely ignored this message. But its rise to power, first in Germany and then, through military conquest, its occupation of Europe, led many to emulate the Nazi call for confessional unity. In 1932, for example, the Catholic writer Robert Grosche launched the first Catholic journal to openly support Nazism. Grosche posited that both the Church and the Nazi movement recognised that God’s grace operated not through individuals but through racial communities. Catholics and Nazis, Grosche maintained, were allies in creating a ‘sacred space’ in which all of society mobilised together towards collective salvation. Grosche also became the most vocal proponent of engagement with Protestants. The two confessions, he mused, were brethren in the ‘community of blood’. The Austrian bishop Alois Hudal published some of the most prominent efforts to square Catholic teachings with Nazi dogma. Like Grosche, he envisioned a joint future: ‘He who … eliminates the religious division,’ he explained, ‘would render the greatest service’ to ‘the German race and Europe’s entire cultural leadership.’
This meant that they could cooperate in restricting procreation to those ‘racially healthy’
Ideas of Nazi-inspired confessional unity were not restricted to theology. They informed popular commentary on bread-and-butter issues, such as economics. The Protestant German economist Georg Wünsch, for instance, had spent the 1920s attacking socialism and Catholicism as detrimental to economic growth, but in the 1930s he changed his tune. When Wünsch in 1936 proclaimed his support for Nazi economic policies, especially public works, he declared that these programmes embodied the values of both confessions. Wünsch thought that Nazi public works would foster harmony between employers and workers while maintaining divinely ordained inequalities (since private property remained protected). In the 1930s, Catholic and Protestant theorists began to criticise earlier stereotypes and insist that both confessions could contribute to the modern economy. One leader of the Inner Mission, Germany’s largest Protestant charity, proclaimed that the ‘violent struggle’ over economic policies was no longer between the confessions but ‘between the Christian confessions and the irreligious’ worldview of socialists and communists.
Across Europe, many Catholics and Protestants also admired the Nazis’ assault on feminism and sexual minorities. And, in turn, this led them to insist on the existence of an interconfessional sexual ethics.
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The rise of Nazism in Europe, in short, dramatically reshaped Christian life. On the one hand, Christian elites across the continent were divided in their approach to the radical Right and its racism. On the other hand, that internal conflict led figures on both sides to seek new allies in the other confession. Both of these alliances, whether sympathetic or hostile to fascism, required enormous intellectual innovation. In both cases, these radical changes did not originate with bishops or popes; it was lay leaders and popular writers who led the way to a new Christian unity.
Since the new Christian peace was linked to Nazi ideology, one might expect it to die in the ruins of the Third Reich. But the exact opposite happened. The cooperation between Catholics and Protestants only deepened after the Second World War, becoming the mainstream of Christian life. Perhaps most importantly, talk of reconciliation moved from the sphere of ideas and small associations to the world of party politics and state power. Together, Christians were able to leave deep marks on European governance.
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