As the grandson of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, Professor of History Udi Greenberg has always had a deeply personal interest in learning about the Christian experience.
“European Christians had considerable influence on my family’s life,” he says. “I’ve therefore always been interested in understanding the ideas, assumptions, and experiences of the Christian majority.”
Greenberg’s new book from Harvard University Press, The End of the Schism: Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of Christian Life in Europe, 1880s–1970s, examines the ways in which different denominations of European Christians put aside their centuries-long struggles to unite under the broad umbrella of “Christian faith” in the 19th and 20th centuries—and what it meant for religion and politics globally.
The book questions the traditional interpretations of why and how this ecumenical movement arose. Rather than simply responding to a growing need for tolerance and pluralism, Greenberg argues, many European Christian elites were motivated to unite by darker ambitions: namely, a desire to squelch pro-equality movements such as socialism, feminism, and Afro-Asian liberation.
In a Q&A, Greenberg discusses the complicated and dramatic history of Christianity in Europe, his groundbreaking research, and the future of ecumenism.
Prior to the rise of Christian collaboration in the early to mid-1900s, Catholics and Protestants had been warring with each other for centuries. What are the origins of this rivalry?
The origins of the animosities between the two denominations trace all the way back to the early modern period and they were over different understandings of what being Christian meant: What is justice, authority, and grace?
But what’s fascinating, and less remembered, is that anti-Catholicism and anti-Protestantism did not slowly die out by the modern era. As I show in the book, they acquired new meanings and, in fact, intensified in the late 19th and early 20th century. Many Europeans took it for granted that Catholicism and Protestantism helped explain the rise of urbanization, capitalism, imperialism, or feminism. And when they wanted to criticize those, they blamed them on the other denomination. Sectarian animosities, that is, were not some leftovers from the early modern era, but very modern and very powerful forces.
By the mid-20th century, however, Christians had more or less set aside this hostility and unified in ecumenism. Conventional explanations of this newfound unity suggest a modern focus on tolerance and multiculturalism. But you found this to be inaccurate. Why?
The reason this traditional interpretation is misleading is that it was invented only several decades after the fact. As I show in the book, the first and most enthusiastic advocates of reconciliation were not interested in universal tolerance, but rather believed that Christians should unite in a joint struggle against mutual enemies, especially socialists, feminists, and Jews. They sought to achieve new tolerance between Christians in order to solidify other hierarchies.
This is because most Christian elites in Europe in the 19th century were deeply anxious about new movements that called for equality. This was especially true for socialists, who in that period not only called for economic equality, but also were militant atheists. (Karl Marx famously called religion the “opiate of the masses,” which led many Christians to believe that equality was, by essence, anti-Christian.) For that reason, much of the political and intellectual energy of both Catholics and Protestant elites was focused on combating movements that called for equality—whether socialist, which called for economic equality; feminist, which called for gender equality; or Afro-Asian liberation, which called for global political and racial equality.
During the early 20th century, Catholics and Protestants largely mobilized separately from each other; beginning in the 1930s, and increasingly in the following decades, they concluded that their causes were best served together.
In fact, you suggest that the rise of the Nazis accelerated the budding ecumenical movement. How?
The Nazis are understandably remembered today for their racism and genocidal violence. But during their early years, much of their rhetoric focused on topics that were of interest to many Christians, especially resistance to socialism and feminism. But one innovation they introduced was the claim that both Catholics and Protestants are equal members of the racial community. Their founding document from 1919 declared that both Catholics and Protestants are equal in what they called “positive Christianity,” a non-confessional idea of religion. This was a revolutionary new message, which no other major political party in Germany advocated for before, and once the Nazis had a meteoric breakthrough in the 1930s, many Christian elites felt the need to emulate it.
What are some examples of the “astonishing successes” of the ecumenical movement that you highlight in the book?
The most obvious impact that the ecumenical movement had was the foundation of inter-confessional parties in postwar Europe. Until the 1930s, most parties that identified as Christian were either Catholic or Protestant, and some didn’t even allow membership from the other denomination. But in the 1940s, Christians organized in what they called “Christian democratic” parties, which welcomed both confessions. Those proved tremendously successful electorally: In France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Switzerland, they either ruled or were senior members in coalitions and largely shaped postwar reconstruction. That meant that they were able to implement their understanding of economics (for example, by designing welfare systems that were anti-socialist and emphasized the significance of inequality) or gender (by passing harsh anti-feminist laws).
You note that ecumenism “reached its conclusion when it was embraced by radical activists.” What do you see as the future of the movement—if there is one?
I trace how ecumenism became so normal that even leftist radicals, who in the 1960s and 1970s sought to reform Christianity and embraced socialism and feminism, ultimately took it for granted that the two denominations were allies. Today we see the legacy of this thinking in the rhetoric of the European far right; figures like Giorgia Meloni in Italy or Viktor Orban often talk about “Christian Europe” and about Christianity as the source of European culture, and both take it for granted that this includes both Catholics and Protestants. This would have astonished Europeans a century ago.
If there were one key message you’d like readers to take away, what would it be?
The main point of the book is that Christian thought was enormously creative and flexible. Most people who grew up outside of the churches’ orbits tend to think of Christian teachings as something stable and unchanging, especially when it comes to gender. But as I show, Christians in the modern era have shown remarkable ability to reinterpret old texts and draw new lessons from them, new ways to explain the world and to figure out how to live in it. This is a fascinating intellectual world which merits more attention.