Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession by Todd H. Weir (review)

Dating back at least to Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, social theorists have generally seen secularization—the decline of religious practice, the diminished influence of organized religion, and the lessened salience of religious interpretations—of human existence as an integral part of modernization. In view of the continued—in fact, often increasing—importance of religion in the contemporary world, this assertion has been the subject of some dispute. Weir, in his study of “free religion” in nineteenth-century Germany, approaches the problem from a different perspective. He suggests that the key concept is not secularization but secularism, the development of a body of ideas and of the organizations incorporating them that asserted a nonreligious, increasingly science-based view of the world. This approach succeeds in illuminating a number of developments in Central Europe’s nineteenth century, but secularism does not always seem conceptually adequate to resolve the issues raised by the concept of secularization.

Weir begins by investigating the intellectual and theological development of free religion in nineteenth-century Germany, from its origins in the 1830s and 1840s as a kind of Unitarianism, through a phase of Hegelian pantheism, to the mystical-scientific interpretation of human life in the universe that had emerged by the last quarter of the century. Weir describes this last development as monism. Haeckel, a biologist, coined the term for his own particular version of free thought, but Weir uses it in a more general sense to encompass all strands of free religion at the beginning of the twentieth century.¹ He effectively demonstrates the close connections between free religion and left-wing politics from the democrats of the 1848 revolution to their successors, the progressives and socialists of subsequent decades.

To investigate secularism, Weir employs Bourdieu’s theory of a religious field, which links religiosity to social structure, in this case perceiving secularism as tied to the social conditions of small producers on the margins between the middle and working class.² Although the membership of Berlin’s free-religious congregation, a focus of Weir’s investigation, was certainly dominated by this social group, Weir must admit that other forms of free religion, such as the Ethical Culture Society, flourished in a more bourgeois milieu. Rather than being tied to a particular social group, secularism existed among all (at least urban) social groups, albeit taking different forms in each.

Another central conceptual point is Weir’s assertion that adherents of free religion formed a “fourth confession” in Central Europe, after Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism. The problem is the extremely low number of organized adherents of secularism, before 1914 never reaching 50,000 nationwide. There is certainly a good deal of evidence that many Germans shared some elements of the views of organized secularists—as can be seen in declining church attendance, anticlerical hostility to organized religion, or growing interest in scientific theories as a guide to ethics and morality—but these developments occurred largely outside the small and increasingly sectarian world of the secularists. Since such attitudes and behaviors are all examples of secularization, it would seem that a concentration on secularism to explain the relationship between secularization and modernizing social change is not entirely sufficient.