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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 education, 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 prevented 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 culminate 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 standardized 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, “Säkularisierung”. 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 Historisierung einer großen Erzählung der Moderne, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36 (2010), 347-376. «129 +
