by Jacob Saliba

Brandon Bloch is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He previously served as College Fellow in Modern European History at Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 2018. His writings have appeared in Modern Intellectual History, The Journal of Modern History, Boston Review, and elsewhere. Bloch’s first book, Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy, was published by Harvard University Press in August 2025. In it, he analyzes how Protestant theologians, intellectuals, and activists reconstructed West German national identity and secular democracy by relying upon an older language of religious concepts stemming from Protestant theology and political thought. Bloch uncovers not simply the religious and political contentions that played out between confessional and bureaucratic networks in the wake of World War II and Nazi collaboration but also how those very contentions underwrote in real-time the parliamentary and ideological fabric of the West German state from the 1940s onwards. Jacob Saliba interviewed Bloch about his book.

Jacob Saliba: The theme of religion in twentieth-century European intellectual history has seen a surge in recent years with excellent work by Ed Baring on the origins of continental philosophy, James Chappel on the rise of and reaction to the totalitarian state, Sarah Shortall on political theory and political theology, and Brenna Moore on social bonds and interpersonal networks. In contrast to this historiography, which largely relies on Catholicism as a unit of analysis, your book focuses on the ways in which Protestantism animated developments in twentieth-century German politics, from the early stages of the Weimar Republic to the establishment of West Germany during the Cold War. To begin, how and why does Protestantism, in particular, offer an entry point into thinking about and working through the history of democratic transformations in the last century?

Brandon Bloch: The historiography of twentieth-century European Catholicism has been framed around “transwar” continuities—whether from the Vatican’s interwar anti-Communist campaigns to its postwar support for conservative Christian Democratic parties, or from wartime Catholic resistance movements to the Second Vatican Council. The history of German Protestantism draws our attention instead to the rupture of 1945. We are confronted with the question of how a group that had little tradition of democratic thought or practice could come to play a significant role in postwar movements for the expansion of West Germans’ constitutional rights.

German Protestant life fragmented under the Nazi regime; competing factions divided in response to attempts by Nazi bureaucrats to establish a unified Protestant Reich Church. The Protestant Church in Germany (EKD) was founded as a federation of the Lutheran, Reformed, and United regional churches only in August 1945. Germany’s division into two countries proved more problematic for Protestants than Catholics, since Protestants made up the overwhelming majority of the Soviet zone and the German Democratic Republic. The two most influential theological currents of interwar German Protestantism—Karl Barth’s “dialectical theology,” which emphasized the gulf between divinity and humanity, as well as a Lutheran renaissance that defined the state as an “order of God”—offered little guidance for conceiving the role of the church in a democracy. Yet during the two decades after 1945, we find Protestant theologians, church leaders, and lay intellectuals at the front lines of major political debates facing the early Federal Republic of Germany—on issues ranging from gender equality to military service to emergency laws.

This shift cannot be explained simply in terms of a successful moral reckoning with the Nazi era. Here I am in agreement with the historiography of Catholicism, and of postwar Europe more generally, which has emphasized the circumscribed narratives of the Nazi past that dominated the early postwar years. But neither did German Protestants deploy a consistent political language across the divide of 1945. Instead, I show how a long tradition of German Protestant nationalism, which emphasized the role of the Protestant confession as the ultimate source of Germans’ shared political values, was reconceived under conditions of German occupation and division. In a divided West Germany governed by the majority-Catholic Christian Democratic Union, the assumption that a German state would necessarily align itself with Protestant values was broken. Protestants, when entering the political sphere, had to defend their visions of Germany’s future. This new ethos was buttressed by an overdrawn yet powerful narrative of Protestant anti-Nazi resistance, which framed the church as a bulwark against state overreach. It was only after their initiatives began to find success in government policy and the court system that Protestant intellectuals came to describe their confession as a source of West German democracy.

JS: Your theoretical model is as fascinating as the narrative itself. You contend that Protestant intellectuals, theologians, and activists built and participated in what you call a “parallel public sphere” (6). How does a parallel public sphere depart from or add to our more familiar understanding of the Habermasian public sphere as that space for the production of knowledge and social-political agency through reasoned debate?

BB: With the concept of a parallel public sphere, I refer to a set of institutions that fostered reasoned debate and exchange, but that operated through discourses that were not necessarily accessible to all—falling short of Habermas’s ideal. At conferences of the postwar Protestant Academies, during biennial meetings of the Protestant Lay Assembly (Kirchentag), and in the pages of the Protestant press, pastors and theologians came together with academics, politicians, and lay professionals to deliberate on major political questions confronting West Germans. Yet this public sphere had important boundaries and exclusions. Protestant public life was organized by the official churches or their subsidiary organizations, shaping the profile of those authorized to participate—most often male, highly educated, and Protestant professing. Personal rifts stemming from the Nazi era as well as internecine theological debates could make the discussions impenetrable to outsiders. And the relatively homogenous milieu meant that dubious assumptions, such as the ubiquity of Protestant resistance against the Nazi state, were shielded from outside scrutiny.

At the same time, the concept of a parallel public sphere helps us grasp the interchange between Protestant institutions and West Germany’s political mainstream. Press outlets ranging from Der Spiegel and Die Zeit on the center-left to Rheinischer Merkur and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on the center-right frequently reported on happenings within the church—sometimes with irony, but often with genuine interest. For example, the EKD’s Eastern Memorandum of 1965, which called on the West German government to recognize the postwar German-Polish border, shaped political debate far beyond the milieu of the church, largely due to the memorandum’s coverage in the press. But the origins of the Eastern Memorandum can only be understood by following the internal Protestant conversation.

JS: Your book includes names that are now commonplace to religious histories of World War II, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. It also discusses and contextualizes the real-time constitutional debates and ideological questions around Carl Schmitt, the founder of political theology. To be sure, you also offer an empirically rich study of many figures who are perhaps less well-known in English-speaking scholarship today but nonetheless were at the forefront of Protestant activism. In fact, you observe how certain efforts of resistance to Nazi violence during the war were largely the product of lay organizers and intellectuals on the ground as opposed to upper-level Church authorities (pp. 70-79). Which figures or groups of figures effectively capture the complexities of Protestant political life; moreover, which figures would readers today be surprised to learn had little to do or much to do with how we think about the making of German politics from the 1920s to the 1960s?

BB: This question gets at a core aim of the book, which is to situate well-known figures in a broader intellectual and political milieu. From this vantage point we can better appreciate the stakes of their intellectual projects, as well as alternative pathways that have been overshadowed.

One group whose prominence may surprise readers is the network of Protestant lay intellectuals and politicians around Rudolf Smend (1882-1975). Smend taught at the University of Göttingen as a professor of public and church law from 1935 to 1969, and he led a seminar that trained some of West Germany’s leading politicians, judges, and political scientists.

Although little remembered today, Smend exercised a significant influence in postwar West Germany, not only on political thought but on the decisions of federal courts. Smend’s key move was to reframe a tradition of Protestant nationalist thought—which regarded the Protestant confession as a source of values for the polity as a whole—as a foundation of constitutional law. Judges, Smend argued, should base their decisions not simply on the written text of West Germany’s Basic Law but on its underlying values. This principle figured into a number of Federal Constitutional Court decisions during the 1950s, and became ensconced into constitutional law with an important free expression case of 1958. Smend also captures the ambivalence of Protestant political life during the mid-twentieth century. He did not join the Nazi Party, though he was a member of the League of National Socialist German Jurists; during the war he steered clear of the politicized discipline of public law as well as anti-Nazi resistance movements. After 1945, Smend’s legal model was used both to defend West Germans’ basic rights and to promote distortive accounts of Protestant resistance.

If Smend is a little-known but impactful figure, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an individual who is extremely well-known today, and in some circles viewed as exemplary of Protestant resistance under Nazism, but was less influential in the postwar years than readers may expect. There are some references to Bonhoeffer in the writings of Confessing Church veterans, such as Helmut Gollwitzer’s 1953 The Christian Community in the Political World. But here, Bonhoeffer appears as a paragon of the critical decision of conscience, rather than the theologian who agonized over his own resistance. The image of a singular resistance hero was more useful in the postwar period than theological nuance.

JS: This seems to echo another observation in your book that Protestant thinkers often held divergent, if not ambiguous, interpretations of the modern state. Smend is perhaps a case in point for his rhetoric of a non-pluralistic and culturally uniform state. While his ideas seemed to dovetail with the “total state,” his version of the state also rejected the populism of Nazism (pp. 44-46). How did debates about the “total state” impact these subtle, internal differences?

BB: For Carl Schmitt, Smend’s friend and intellectual rival, the “total state” stood above the legal order to organize all domains of social and economic life, even if to preserve their independence from political interference. Smend’s constitutional model rejects the supremacy of the state over society, instead regarding state and society as linked through the integrating values of the constitution. However, as you point out, Smend’s insistence upon “spiritual homogeneity” as the basis of political community is also strikingly anti-pluralist. What tipped the balance in favor of Smend’s vision after the war is that the Nazi regime did not behave as the “total state” that authoritarian thinkers like Schmitt had envisioned during the early 1930s. Instead, the Nazi state politicized every domain of life, strengthening postwar calls for a constitution that guaranteed the basic rights of individuals as well as the autonomy of churches. Smend’s model satisfied this demand without challenging the hierarchies that many conservative politicians and legal thinkers continued to uphold.

JS: Part of your argument rests on the claim that Protestant resistance to Nazism was frequently a myth that was written and re-written into the postwar era to offset German guilt. Your point, however, is not that this was taking place—an insight that historians have recognized for many years—but that this process of Protestants writing themselves into myths of resistance fit neatly into their categories of theology which always stood above and beyond the sins of the world. You suggest a specific political-legal debate during the Cold War that became a convenient vehicle to carry forward this myth: rearmament (pp. 160-171). Where did Protestants stand within the debate over German rearmament, and what were their theological arguments to support their claims?

BB: As historians have long recognized, rearmament was the critical issue for West German foreign policy, and even West German politics as a whole, during the first half of the 1950s. So much turned on this question: the prospect of German reunification, West Germany’s viability as a partner of the Western alliance, as well as the Federal Republic’s relationship to its Nazi predecessor. Rearmament was highly divisive within the EKD leadership, exacerbating a fault line that had formed in the mid-1930s—when Pastor Martin Niemöller’s Berlin-based “Dahlemite” wing of the Confessing Church split off from more conservative Confessing Church leaders over the latter’s cooperation with the state-controlled Protestant Reich Church.

What I point out, however, are the shared dynamics that existed on both sides of the Protestant debate about rearmament, including common appeals to a narrative of anti-Nazi resistance. Those Protestant conservatives who supported the Christian Democratic Union’s policy of West German rearmament relied on a longstanding distinction between temporal authority and the kingdom of God. Conservatives could point to Luther’s 1526 tract “Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved,” which contended that military service formed an obligation that Christians owed to the state in light of the state’s God-given authority over human affairs. For Protestant conservatives, the refusal of military service meant total opposition to the worldly order, which could be justified only against what Luther had called an “apocalyptic tyrant.” While such a situation had arguably existed under the Nazi regime, the Cold War demanded the return of military obedience.

Protestants who rejected rearmament relied on an alternative set of theological claims, inspired by the wartime and early postwar texts of Karl Barth—who at this point had moved away from the existential opposition of divinity and humanity foregrounded in his interwar writings. What Barth and his followers in the EKD’s so-called Brethren Council now emphasized was the Christian’s responsibility for bearing witness to the purpose and limits of the state. This alternative political theology put the Christian in a more active position to speak back against perceived overextensions of state power. Here another resistance narrative was at play: one that read Barth’s postwar theology back onto the Barmen Declaration of 1934, the founding document of the Confessing Church. In fact, the Barmen Declaration had rejected the deification of the state by the pro-Nazi German Christian movement, but the Confessing Church had not contested Nazi rearmament and some Confessing Church pastors served as Wehrmacht military chaplains.

Although these two interpretations of the Christian’s political obligations led to opposing conclusions on the question of military service, they shared much in common. Protestant conservatives and Brethren Council members alike referred back to a legacy of principled and sustained anti-Nazi resistance. Both groups conceived of the state as an absolute worldly authority, which the Christian was forced either to obey or to resist. There was little room in this worldview for democracy or human rights. After West Germany’s accession to NATO in 1955, however, the focus of the debate shifted from rearmament to the right of conscientious objection guaranteed in the Basic Law. In the campaign for a more expansive interpretation of conscientious objector rights, members of both camps came to emphasize the balance between state authority and individual conscience in a democracy.

JS: As you show, Protestants frequently supported “liberal” projects of human rights, de-nuclearization, and family welfare for their own, often esoteric, reasons. Protestants supported democracy, but a specific type of democracy. There was certainly a spectrum of Left and Right within Protestantism (pp. 234-255). Yet, many Protestants seemed to lean towards an exclusionary vision of Christian politics, however “liberal” it appeared on the surface. Indeed, for many years, Church authorities did not even recognize Christian woman as legitimate agents of political life, refusing to acknowledge the work of feminist resistance and women-led reform movements during and after the war. Moreover, as you discuss later on, this aggressively Christianized version of democracy can also be read into more recent issues of xenophobia, racism, and state-sponsored suppression of Muslim immigrants coming from the Middle East and Africa. Within what debates and circles did the limits and shortcomings of Protestant “democracy” originate from, and was there any continuity or connection between these origins and the rise of fascism?

BB: You are right to place “liberal” in scare quotes. As you point out, while many Protestants would come to embrace policies that could be characterized as liberal, they did not arrive at these positions on the basis of universal principles that presumed neutrality across religion, gender, or nationality.

What the book’s protagonists came around to supporting I would term a values-based democracy, or as I call it in the final chapter, the “Protestant Rechtsstaat.” They positioned the Protestant confession as a source of shared political values—such as freedom of conscience, religious tolerance, limited state power, and preservation of individual autonomy within institutions—that had been recovered in the Confessing Church’s resistance against Nazism. The idea that democracy requires some minimum values consensus is not inherently exclusionary. The problem comes when a particular group claims exclusive priority over defining and shaping those values; then, there is a tension with the liberal democratic principle of equality.

Again, I see the Smend circle as critical. Smend’s postwar jurisprudence emphasized the unifying values that underlaid the Basic Law. In principle such values were religiously neutral, but in practice Smend and his interlocutors emerged from a tradition of cultural Protestantism that identified the Protestant confession with the general interest of the nation as a whole. Smend’s own postwar texts emphasized the origins of the Basic Law in a Protestant resistance legacy defined by the Barmen Declaration. His position appealed within the Protestant public sphere because it both papered over the complexities of the churches’ relationship to the Nazi state and assigned Protestants a leading role in the rebuilding of postwar politics.

As you point out, the exclusionary dimensions of the postwar Protestant vision of democracy can be traced through recent debates about Islam in Germany. For instance, court decisions since the early 2000s on the display of religious symbols in public schools have built upon the precedent of the Federal Constitutional Court’s 1956 ruling on the Nazi-Vatican Concordat, which determined that the German states have broad latitude to determine the value structure of public schools. In doing so, recent decisions have upheld the Christian interdenominational school model, which inculcated Christian virtues of altruism, toleration, and stewardship, as a foundation for German democracy. In turn, statements by German courts and state governments have cast suspicion on whether Islamic religious symbols are really compatible with these democratic values.

I wouldn’t go so far as to argue that the Protestant Rechtsstaat had its origins in fascism. Already during the late Weimar Republic, Smend and other conservative Protestants defended a restrictive vision of democracy, anchored in shared Protestant values, as a bulwark against the populist energies of Nazism. The Protestant iteration of democracy was conceived as an alternative to fascism, but this isn’t to say that there weren’t overlaps. A hostility toward religious and cultural pluralism paved the way for thousands of Protestant pastors and lay intellectuals to embrace the Nazi Party. Even after their disillusionment—whether this came in the mid-1930s or not until late in the war—many would continue to view the achievement of homogeneity rather than respect for diversity as a political ideal.

JS: In part, we might even remark how these tensions represent a certain political theology around the Christian examination of conscience. This principle, as you show, often loomed in the background of politically active theologians and pastors who, while defending the realization of freedom as a theological virtue for believers, failed to promote it as an open ideal of democracy for all. And, yet, there were certain moments when Protestants seemed to embrace the universalistic politics of this religious ideal, for example, during national calls for making conscientious objection a basic constitutional right after the war. Despite certain confessional limits, this “democratization of conscience,” as you call it, seems to hold positive opportunity, too.

BB: Yes, absolutely, and I’m glad you’ve chosen to end on this note. A key tension within the thinkers I examine is that even as they insisted upon the Protestant origins of democratic values, they advocated for the embrace of these values beyond their milieu. The right of conscientious objection was intended not only for Protestants but for all West Germans; Protestant conscience formed a model for the conscience of a democratic citizen. For all the limits of their vision, therefore, Protestant intellectuals made important contributions to democratic thought in the early postwar decades, at a time when the Cold War West German state sought to place tight limits on dissent.

Jacob Saliba is an advanced Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College, where he is completing his dissertation on the relationship between Catholicism and major philosophical and political movements in France between World War I and World War II. His co-authored volume on the Hegelian philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, and the Jesuit theologian, Gaston Fessard, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Press (2026).

Featured Image: Albrecht Dürer, St. Jerome in the Wilderness (reverse side), via Wikimedia Commons.