Contested enchantments: Evangelical revival and the global dimensions of national religious conflict in the German empire, 1870--1914

Images of faith healings, evangelism crusades and other impulses of modern Evangelicalism will not call to mind Protestantism in modern Germany. Yet such divergence did not always seem inevitable, and this dissertation explores the evolving encounter of Protestants in the German Empire with evangelical revivals generated in the United States and British Isles between 1870 and 1914. Specifically, it examines the flourishing of several transnational pious associations, who owed their inspiration to Atlantic exchanges and created a vast network of activist societies and fellowships, whose members I call "the new pious." Balancing between a particularizing, Protestant nationalism and attraction of an increasingly integrated Atlantic religious world, they aimed to indigenize Evangelicalism and evangelicalize Germans. Gradually the integrated the entrepreneurial impulses of Anglo devotion into a mass, democratizing identity that calibrated Pietism to the speed and publicity of the new, urban world, which did not fit within the given divisions of continental religious life like "Church," "sect" and "confession." As such, their story elucidates the receptiveness of Wilhelmine Germany to Atlantic modernities that would hold far less appeal for later generations.Interwoven with this narrative of success, this dissertation also reconstructs the growing angst among Protestant nationalists, Church elites and the press over the rise of "Anglo-Saxon" influence in German religion, a panic that spread apace with the emergence of radical currents in Evangelicalism over the period. At each stage, conflicts over the shifting margins of Protestant identity intersected with anxieties about global competition and "Americanization," such that, by the end of the Wilhelmine era, evangelical practices became recognized symbols of American cultural hegemony and homogenization. Eventually, this anxiety spread through the Protestant world and into the imaginings of the new pious themselves, creating a crisis of German vulnerability and a backlash against foreign religious models. Hence the story of the encounter with Evangelicalism helps illumine the broader Wilhelmine experience of globalization, both its remarkable openness and its rapid closing on the eve of the First World War.