History professor Udi Greenberg presented his new book “The End of the Schism” yesterday at the Rockefeller Center. The Dartmouth sat down with Professor Greenberg to discuss his book, which was released by the Harvard Press in April. In the book, he explores the reconciliation of Catholic and Protestant Christians in the 20th century over anxieties about feminism and socialism and its implications on modern European politics.
What drew you to the topic of Catholic-Protestant relations in modern Europe?
UG: In part, my family history. Although I’m not European, and I’m not Christian, my family comes from Europe and their lives have been deeply shaped by Christian politics and Christian life, specifically the treatment of minorities. So I was interested in understanding the lives, ideas and experiences of European Christians and how they experience modernity and understand the modern world.
As I was working in archives and in documents, I noticed a very surprising trend. I was looking at Protestant organizations and how suddenly, in the 1950s, all those organizations began to invite Catholics to participate in their events. And I was interested in what happened in this period that allowed these two formerly hostile Christian communities to finally cooperate with each other.
What did you discover about why this change occured? ?
UG: What I wanted to make clear in the book is that the force behind this transformation was not theology. It was not philosophy. It was not that the pope said to cooperate with Protestants and then everybody followed. What I found is that the cooperation between those two confessions was something that happened as a response to political, social and cultural transformations in Europe and in the world.
The first transformation took place in the late 19th century, when both Catholics and Protestant communities developed a set of overlapping anxieties about the rise of socialism, feminism and Afro-Asian anticolonialism.
The second stage that led to cooperation was the response to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. You can track very clearly that in the 1930s, Catholics and Protestant writers for the first time began to write that there is a deep structural similarity between Catholics and Protestants.
The final step towards reconciliation was decolonization and the deep sense between Catholics and Protestants that the new independent states in Africa and Asia might pose a real threat to organized Christianity.
Why do you think it’s important to understand this topic in the context of modern European politics?
UG: I think that for a long time, historians of modern Europe did not pay a whole lot of attention to organized Christianity. They just assumed that it was either a block of conservative politics, or that it was not particularly important. In the last few decades, it has become very clear that this is not the case — organized Christianity, even if it’s not what it used to be, is still very much an important force in world politics.
During the period after World War II and the collapse of fascism in continental Europe, the most dominant political force was Christian parties, who called themselves Christian Democrats. The parties that inherited fascism were not liberal and not socialist. They were explicitly Catholic-Protestant Christians. They all were premised on the idea that Catholics and Protestants would cooperate together in interconfessional parties. They presided over the reconstruction of Europe. They drafted its economic policy, its policies on gender and so on.
How would you summarize the most significant political and economic developments that resulted from the rapprochement?
UG: First of all, much of the most conservative policies with regard to the management of gender and sexuality were the product of Catholic-Protestant cooperation. From the late 19th century up to the 1960s, the expansion of censorship on erotic materials, the fight against prostitution, the family laws discriminating against women — particularly unmarried women — and children born outside of marriage, all of this was brought by coalitions of Catholics and Protestants.
Another important policy that stemmed from Catholic-Protestant cooperation is the opposition to socialism. We think oftentimes that the opposition to socialism was capitalism. That is not exactly the case. The welfare state in Europe, for example, was designed by Catholic-Protestant coalitions, to mitigate some of the hard edges of capitalism, but relied on the idea that inequality between people is important and natural, and that even a welfare state should make sure that inequality persists.
Do you see any remaining traces of the Christian rapprochement and its consequences in European politics today?
UG: Organized Christianity today is much, much weaker in Europe than it used to be, but you can see many of the legacies of this reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants in how the radical right in Europe understands itself. The leaders of the radical right — Giorgio Meloni in Italy, Viktor Orban in Hungary — they constantly talk about how they represent Christian Europe and want to preserve the legacies of Christianity, and they take it for granted that Catholics and Protestants are both heirs to this tradition.
