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THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE EDUCATED CLASSES IN PROTESTANT GERMANY...
families of clergymen. The fact that sons of the clergy were now moving into
non-theological professions in large numbers was another consequence of the
Enlightenment. The social group which thus came to the fore, and must be
called an elite, brought with it a particular intellectual and moral schooling
and language which it never fully lost. As this group spread through society, so
did specific special attitudes, shaped by an academic training, a classical educa¬
tion, the need to appear morally exemplary, and a strong professional ethos.
The same group had become the most important force for the transmission
of forms of religious thinking and expression to the secular world. This pre¬
vented Enlightenment thinking from losing its connection with religion. The
Protestant German Enlightenment was from its beginnings and its essence an
Enlightening of religion. Significantly, in the German Enlightenment criticism
of religion and its substantiation came into being in tandem and were, in terms
of their arguments, reciprocally interrelated. The Enlightenment understood
itself as Christian and as an attempt to provide the fundamental principles of
Christianity a reasonable basis, released from the narrow confines of both the
Church and orthodox theology. After all, Enlightened religion did not culmi¬
nate in a negative criticism of religion, but aimed at the formation of a religion
that tied together autonomous self-determination and reasonable individual
religious consciousness, discharging the traditional authoritarian and stand¬
ardized orthodox protestant religion.
“Secularization”, in the form which it took during the second half of the
eighteenth century, especially in the Protestant part of Germany, prevented a
turning away from religion. Conversely, it was a crucial factor in the creation
of the intellectual climate in which German culture could blossom around
1800. In shorthand terms, this culture could be described as secular, that is,
moral-aesthetic in form, and religious, if not Christian in the strict sense, in
motivation.?0®
208 This interpretation has been influenced by SHEEHAN, Jonathan, Enlightenment, Religion, and the
Enigma of Secularization, American Historical Review 108 (2003), 1061-1080.; BARTH, Ulrich
Sakularisierung und Moderne. Die soziokulturelle Transformation der Religion, in U. Barth (ed.),
Religion in der Moderne, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2003, 127-165.; HÜBINGER, Gundolf, “Säku¬
larisierung”. Ein umstrittenes Paradigma der Kulturgeschichte, in U. Schneider-L. Raphael (eds.),
Dimensionen der Moderne. Festschrift fiir Christof Dipper, Frankfurt/M.-Berlin-Bern, Peter Lang,
2008, 93-106.; and BORUTTA, Manuel, Genealogie der Säkularisierungstheorie. Zur Historisier¬
ung einer großen Erzählung der Moderne, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36 (2010), 347-376.
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