Crossing the Boundaries of Belief: Geographies of Religious Conversion in Southern Germany, 1648-1800

3. Losing Faith Doubt and Dissent

82 If one aim of the Peace of Westphalia was to minimize the threat posed by religious pluralism within the Holy Roman Empire by imposing stable confessional boundaries, then the converts who transgressed those boundaries revealed Germany’s confessional map for what it was: a religiously fragmented terrain fully coherent only on paper and in the imagination of clergymenandmagistrates .Conversionbetween the sanctioned Christian confessions was an inescapable by-product of the increasingly sharp lines drawn by Protestants and Catholics to distinguish themselves, while it simultaneously revealed those lines to be unstable and permeable. Converts challenged the bonds of religious solidarity that attached them to their original confessional community, and every convert became a constant reminder that loyalty to one’s coreligionists was not natural, necessary, or permanent. Consequently, conversion inevitably expressed some form of critique. It gave voice and shape to the amorphous dissatisfaction people might feel toward the confessional norms dictated by church, state, family, and community. Despite our romanticized images of an organically whole, premodern geLosing Faith Doubt and Dissent Losing Faith • 83 meinschaft, the community was rife with dissent, and disparate communal actors came regularly into conflict with one another. The imagined unity of the community masked deep fissures that could divide the interests of individuals sharing the same social spaces.1 Many conflicts could be dampened through informal negotiations, subtle pressures, communal customs, or the outright coercive force of neighbors or local authorities. Sometimes a momentarily disruptive outburst of anger and frustration, like charivari or Katzenmusik, could restore equilibrium and ultimately reproduce the illusion of communal unity.2 In contrast, conversion often decisively questioned basic, unifying religious norms that constituted early modern collective solidarity. Converts became embroiled in conflicts too difficult to contain or settle through routine communal negotiations or policing. The irresolvable strife produced by conversion dissolved attachments that situated converts in a web of personal and institutional relations. Conversion took place at the limits of a community’s ability to order social relationships among its members and thereby reproduce itself using its own internal mechanisms. We have seen how adopting a new religion forced converts to leave their hometowns, and in the next chapter I explore how the local crises engendered by conversion often required interterritorial state negotiations to help restore the breach within the local community. In other words, conversion produced tensions that exceeded and overflowed the political and social boundaries of the local community. Perceived from above, conversion was a troubling, but manageable, problem resolved by legal recourse to the guidelines of the Peace of Westphalia. Perceived at the level of the local community, however, conversion might seem fundamentally treacherous and threatening to the everyday order of things. This chapter examines how conversion endangered specifically religious norms, practices, and identities that constituted the local confessional community . Chapters 4 and 5 follow by analyzing the disruptive impact conversion had on political and familial solidarities founded upon confessional unity. Taken together, these three chapters account for the anxieties that clergymen, magistrates, and family members felt toward converts in their midst and how converts themselves in turn challenged their religious, political, and familial affiliations and loyalties. As the theological, social, and geopolitical boundaries separating Lutherans and Catholics became more rigid and exclusionary in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the boundary zones where conversion took place—the spaces that needed to be crossed to formally change one’s religion—became clearer and hence more easily navigable, while simultane- 84 • Crossing the Boundaries of Belief ously more easily policed.3 This paradox, the result of the confessional differentiation between Catholicism and Protestantism formalized in 1648, suggests that the process of confessionalization produced its own internal social logics of transgression and critique. The multiple, often improvisational choices made by would-be converts when crossing the boundaries of religious difference both constituted and undermined those boundaries through practice. Converts had to clarify and articulate (and thus give form to) the differences they saw between the rival confessional creeds and doctrines. At the same time, the act of conversion demonstrated that the line differentiating Lutheranism and Catholicism was by no means impervious and impermeable. Conversion in the post-Westphalian era was a choice premised upon the existence of irreconcilable , mutually exclusive religious communities, while it was simultaneously a bridge that allowed a personto cross from one community to the other. What were the typical religious contexts in which a person’s choice to convert unfolded? When...