The End of the Schism:
Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of Christian Life in Europe, 1880s–1970s
by udi greenberg
harvard university, 368 pages, $39.95
Once upon a time, there was a culture that was split into two bitterly opposed parties. They shared the same history and proclaimed the same fundamental beliefs, but distrust between them was deeply entrenched. Even when they lived alongside one another, their lives were strikingly separate. They inhabited their own partisan media worlds. Both sides saw every issue through the prism of their conflict, and they found ingenious ways to blame each other for anything that was amiss in the world. There was little reason to imagine that the situation might ever change.
And yet, within a single lifetime, it did—almost beyond recognition. As a new series of challenges arose, the two parties found themselves sharing common enemies. And though plenty of their leaders and spokespeople reflexively blamed the new evils on their old enemies, some bold souls on each side began to plunder the other’s ideas and even, cautiously, to form a common front. As new challenges proliferated, so, too, did the temptation to cross party lines in search of collaborators. Soon the two sides began to find principled justifications for these alliances of convenience. Quite suddenly, the kind of cooperation that once had been denounced on all sides as treachery came to seem almost banal: yesterday’s partisanship.
Udi Greenberg’s book is about how western Europe’s division between Catholic and Protestant, which seemed ineradicable, morphed in less than a century into a broad ecumenical consensus. Greenberg is much too careful a historian to draw the dubious parallel I’m suggesting with our own age. But you have to, don’t you?
The conventional, cynical version of the rise of ecumenism holds that nothing heals a quarrel better than a common enemy. In the modern age, Protestants and Catholics discovered that they hated and feared secularism, and in particular communism, more than they hated and feared each other. The losing side in a culture war can’t afford to be picky about its alliances.
Greenberg’s project is to deepen, broaden, and enrich that crude hypothesis. His method is to immerse himself in the best-selling writers who occupied both sides of the divide during the century he considers, with particular attention to those who had international readerships. People whom we now see as theological giants of the age, such as Barth and Bonhoeffer, are hardly mentioned in this book, while now-forgotten figures like Napoleon Roussel and Wilhelm von Ketteler take center stage. Greenberg’s hard-won familiarity with this material, in many languages, is the book’s greatest strength. It gives him the authority to show us this era, not as we choose to remember it, but as it appeared to itself.
The story he weaves has three strands, threaded through this entire period: three themes that consistently drew Protestants and Catholics together despite themselves. The first, as expected, is the fear and loathing of socialism, both in its blandly anticlerical and its fiercely anti-Christian variants. Greenberg tracks the emergence of “an inter-Christian alliance as a tool to maintain Christian hegemony over public life.”
The second strand is more original. Greenberg sees a similar Catholic-Protestant alliance emerging in the late nineteenth century to defend traditional Christian norms on gender roles, sexuality, and the family in the face of feminism and changing sexual mores. This is the book’s most compelling theme. As early as the 1890s, Catholic and Protestant politicians in Germany were cooperating to block proposals to liberalize marriage laws; in the 1950s, there was still a determined, cross-confessional rearguard action against the advance of women’s rights. Recognizing this common interest as a spur to ecumenism is a sharp insight.
Greenberg’s third strand of ecumenical cooperation, which emerges later and rather more tentatively, is global missions. He sees the mission field as being aggressively confessionalized even at the turn of the century, but he reckons that thereafter shared concerns about “civilization” and Islam drew Protestant and Catholic missionaries together. The retreat and collapse of empire only accelerated this convergence, as European Christians discovered common cause against the worldwide threat of socialist-inflected nationalism and discovered the common language of international development aid.
Once he has established these three arenas—socialism, gender, and missions—Greenberg then traces how Catholics and Protestants slowly, warily learned to cooperate in each one. Two episodes are pivotal. First is the rise of Nazism and fascism, which he provocatively claims was “more important” than communism in driving ecumenism. The argument is that a great many Christians came to believe that their stance on fascism—whether for or against—was more important than the old Catholic-versus-Protestant division. And so Christians on both sides scrambled for ecumenical allies; the one thing pro- and anti-fascists could agree on was the need to work across confessional lines.
Something similar happened in the 1960s, when a new split emerged. On one side stood the post–World War II Christian establishments, rooted in the Christian Democratic parties that now dominated the center-right: conservatives and old-fashioned liberals who had made peace with postwar democracy but were fighting a rearguard action against leftist secularism. On the other side were the new Christian radicals of the 1960s, the apostles of Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity,” fiercely opposed not just to imperialism and racism but to the complacent “churchianity” that they believed had betrayed Jesus’s own ethics. Again, the one thing the two parties agreed on was the irrelevance of old confessional scruples. By the 1970s, ecumenism went without saying.
It’s a pretty compelling case, and a story told with verve and formidable learning. But there are a few things to notice along the way.
One is the book’s restricted scope. The title promises “Europe,” but it is actually about Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, with walk-on parts for other countries. Fair enough: These were the nations in continental Europe that experienced real Catholic-Protestant divisions within their borders. (I’d love to know the Hungarian story, but that’s not a language anyone learns to read lightly.) Greenberg does briefly cite Spain and Ireland as contrasting cases, which show that different paths were possible. These were European countries that maintained assertively confessional identities throughout this period, and, in Ireland’s case, continued to be viciously divided. The point is that Franco-German ecumenism was not an inevitable feature of modernity, but a response to specific circumstances.
The exclusion of two other countries—Britain and the United States—is more of a stretch. Greenberg says that American ecumenism had a quite different trajectory, which is true, but there were enough points of contact that the comparison would be worthwhile. And Britain: Well, I’m British and I don’t want to sound like I am griping at being ignored, but Britain is a European country with a deep history of Catholic-Protestant antipathy and a country in which all three of Greenberg’s arenas were sites of fierce contestation. In many ways, Britain’s journey toward ecumenism was strikingly similar to the Continent’s, but the differences could be illuminating. The war against Hitler did not shatter Britain but rather renewed its national myths. There was no Christian Democrat party on the center-right; instead, the center-left Labour Party famously owed “more to Methodism than to Marx.” And the Church of England scrambles many of Greenberg’s categories, being an ungainly ecumenical entity of its own: A historically Protestant church many of whose leading members forcefully insisted on their Catholic identity. What would the transformation of British gender roles, the sudden disintegration of the world’s biggest colonial empire, and the surge of 1960s radicalism in the British context look like when seen in light of the European ecumenical movement? I’d love to know what Greenberg would have to say.
Until I hear that fuller version, I’m not convinced that the changes Greenberg describes were as sharp as he claims. During the French Revolution, Jacobin “dechristianization” was already teaching Catholics and Protestants to make common cause. After Napoleon’s defeat, Catholic Austria, Protestant Prussia, and Orthodox Russia formed a “Holy Alliance” against liberalism and revolution. In the mission field, there was rivalry but also cooperation. The Anglo-French Opium Wars against China secured rights for both Catholic and Protestant missionaries, and there as elsewhere they learned to carve out distinct geographic zones. The Protestants’ World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910—conventionally the launchpad for modern ecumenism but barely mentioned in this book—deliberately chose not to address missions to South America, on the grounds that that Catholic continent was already Christian. Nor did ecumenism carry all before it. Confessional divisions (including divisions among Protestants, a subject that goes unmentioned) are stubbornly persistent. Two hours after I finished the book, a former student emailed me to say that the late Pope Francis was the Antichrist.
One feature of Greenberg’s argument is a troubling parallelism, whereby Protestants and Catholics, and indeed conservatives and radicals, always mirror one another. But these traditions really were starkly different. Their struggle was asymmetric warfare. Nineteenth-century Protestants were indeed intensely paranoid about Catholicism, but Catholics were not nearly so worked up about Protestants. Or again, the pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen did indeed cherish ecumenical hopes, of a sort—but they were Protestant. Pro-Nazi Catholics (a much smaller group) had no such enthusiasms, and neither Catholic nor Protestant anti-Nazis showed much evidence of ecumenism, either. And it may be tasteless to point this out, but the postwar ecumenical flowering was possible only because Rome gave so much ground, embracing principles of liberalism, pluralism, and democracy that it had once denounced as Protestant deceptions. Vatican II’s conservative opponents grumbled that the Council was not a ceasefire in the wars of religion but a surrender. It was easy for 1960s Protestants to be generous to Catholics. The Protestants seemed to have won.
I appreciate why Greenberg might not want to express such a crass view. As he points out, he is neither Christian nor European, and he does not have a dog in this fight. But as he knows all too well, in a world of zero-sum partisanship, nothing and no one is ever neutral.
Greenberg is austerely objective, but, inescapably, he writes from within the twenty-first-century American academy and its fastidious values. The great benefit of this perspective is that he can be merciless in his criticism of European Christianity, which is often richly deserved. You may not agree that ecumenism was at heart “a project to perpetuate disparities” or a “struggle to preserve inequality,” but he makes a serious case. And it is fair to describe ecumenical writers’ “obsessions” with certain issues, to call their gender policies “monstrous” and their propaganda “lurid,” even to note that their convictions are “repeated ad nauseam.” Greenberg has read an awful lot of this stuff and has earned the right to express an opinion. When he is discussing policies like the forced castration of gay men or the exclusion of illegitimate children from public schools, it is hard to disagree with him.
But I missed seeing the other side of the coin. Greenberg is ready to blame but not to praise. At times it feels as though he wanted to. There are figures, such as Yves Congar or Hendrik Kraemer, whose stances he does seem to admire. But although he describes their criticisms of “totalitarianism,” he carefully puts that term in scare quotes, distancing himself from their value-system—while feeling free to criticize ecumenists’ “heteronormativity.” He points out the 1950s Christian Democrats’ “relentless” determination to avoid both socialism and hyper-individualism without countenancing the possibility that this determination may have been wise. His discussion of global “development” is quick to recognize its neocolonial qualities without noticing its countervailing merits. Only the Christian radicals of the 1960s get friendly treatment.
I get it, of course. What self-respecting modern secular academic would be caught being warm about establishment European Christians? And why should he? Well, because he’s a historian. He doesn’t need to like his subjects, but he does need to be able to inhabit them, to see the world through their eyes. Doing so would help him understand, for example, why Christians had to work so hard to impose their social vision despite believing that it was “natural.” This was not, as he implies, some revealing contradiction, but a central tenet of Christian anthropology, in which human beings are not what we were made to be.
And yet, ultimately—and despite the final pages warning of the embrace of Christian nationalism by the modern European far right—I found this a hopeful book. It suggests that even the entrenched divisions out of which Greenberg is writing are not forever. All we need to reunite us is something we can hate and fear more than we hate and fear each other.
