Preliminary Programme

The scientific study of religion, especially the Biblical scriptures, spread across the European universities during the late 19th century. Being part of the liberal theologian wave, and thus overlapping and being closely connected to modernist Christian intellectual movements such as Cultural Protestantism and Cultural Catholicism, the history of theology and history of ideas usually count these waves as dead after the First World War when other theologian trends began to dominate. However, the so-called “new theology” did not only influence academia, but also spread to other fields of society outside the universities and the churches. This is for instance the case with regard to so-called Biblical Criticism and the new and upcoming discipline which is today called Comparative Religion studies. Here the theologian scholars acting as public intellectuals aimed at spreading and socially utilizing the program of a new Cultural Christianity, cleansed by science, with the ability to function as social glue in the emerging modern nation states. This led to public debates about the status of the Bible and to productions of new Bible histories cleansed of “irrationalities” such as miracles, aiming a reaching the modern human being, and at relating Bible history to the history of the nation. In the case of the Lutheran-dominated Nordic states Sweden and Denmark this also resulted in educational reform work, in the case of Sweden during the 1910s and in the case of Denmark during the 1930s, when religious education underwent a scientific and historical turn, whereas in France scholars of the new theology participated in reform efforts leading up to the education acts of 1881 and 1882 under Minister of Education Jules Ferry, separating religion and the school (Cabanel 2016; Buchardt 2017).

Based on a source material consisting of reform commission work, popular handbooks and pamphlets, writings in newspapers and magazines, and public lectures and debate in newspapers and periodicals, this paper addresses how Biblical Critical scholars acted as public intellectuals and disseminated the new science-based theology in public enlightenment efforts and educational reforms which were central to the development of the European nation states from the 1880s to the 1930s. Which transformations of the relation between religion and state was it influencing and influenced by? Based on comparison of the three national cases Denmark, Sweden, and France it will further be discussed how we can understand the secularization and resacralization dimensions in the dissemination and reform efforts, and how the efforts can be said to have contributed to the dissemination of a transformed understanding of nation through education and thus to modern national and social imaginaries (e.g. Taylor 2007) in the states in question.

M. Buchardt (2017). Lutheranism and the Nordic States. In: U. Puschner & R. Faber (eds.). Luther. Zeitgenössisch, historisch, kontrovers. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Zivilisation und Geschichte 50, pp. 285–295.

P. Cabanel (2016). Ferdinand Buisson. Père de l’école Läique. Genève: Labor et Fides.

C. Taylor (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge (Massachusetts) & London (England): The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. (Show less)

Thinking with Ludwik Fleck about thought styles (1979) in education, indicating specific and distinguishable ways of making sense of the educational world and about their materialization in the respective unique epistemologies by understanding them as ‘languages’ (Tröhler 2011), one can detect dominant thought styles/epistemologies such as for example American Pragmatism, French Philosophy, or German Idealism. This German thought style is manifested in the thought collective (Fleck 1979) of the Geisteswissenschaftliche Pädagogik with its idiosyncratic moments based on the Protestant concept of Bildung as the aesthetic harmonization of the soul.

The decidedly national link between epistemology and nation leads to the question about a phenomenon I would call ‘epistemological nationalism’. Finding this German Protestant thought style in the Catholic neighbor country Austria is remarkable considering its independent status since 1918. In line with the defeat of the former Habsburg empire in the First World War, the religious diversity and the way of government changed. A different history in Germany or former Prussia though, hence, it seems as if Germany as a “belated nation” (Plessner 1935) itself took the chance of an even more belated nation and silently conquered and occupied Austria’s educational academia, bringing about an unnoticed change of the dominant language entailing this particular Protestant thought style. During the 19th century, the Austrian educational sciences were concerned with Erziehung, rather than – as in Germany – Bildung (Engelbrecht 1982), whereas today there is no difference anymore between the two neighbors regarding their dominant educational thought styles, which can be seen in the names of the educational departments or faculties (for ‘Bildungs’wissenschaft) as well as the academic classes’ titles and tables of contents – at universities in Vienna or Linz in Austria equally to Germany with examples in Berlin, Koblenz-Landau, or Heidelberg.

Based on archival sources of Austrian history of scientific education from the 19th century up until today, the paper explores the question of a Germanization of Austrian educational sciences in a way I would call ‘epistemological colonialization’. This is being understood as an example of ‘traveling ideas’ which are a common good in academia and complement the thesis of national epistemologies very interestingly from a historical-comparative perspective.

H. Engelbrecht (1982). Geschichte des österreichischen Bildungswesens. Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag.

L. Fleck (1979). Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Edited by Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton. Translated by Fred Bradley and Thaddeus J. Trenn. Foreword by Thomas S. Kuhn. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.

H. Plessner (1959). Die verspätete Nation. Über die politische Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer (first published in 1935 under the title: Das Schicksal deutschen Geistes im Ausgang seiner bürgerlichen Epoche). Zürich: Niehans.

D. Tröhler (2011). Languages of Education. Protestant Legacies, National Identities, and Global Aspirations. New York: Routledge. (Show less)

A part of the European colonial projects and as such of Empire was missionary efforts and cultural exploration including collections of artefacts representing the cultures of the colonized territories and its populations. These two practices also sometimes took place in connection with each other. While the history of mission as well as the histories of colonial expansions through artefact collection in the colonies are relatively well covered in research, it is less explored how such collection efforts were used in the metropolitan spheres in the European states, more specifically their role in public national enlightenment efforts.

Based on two cases; the collection efforts of the Danish Missionary Eduard Løventhal in Tamil Nadu, present-day India, for the Danish National Museum, and the collections led by industrialist Émile Guimet (1836-1918), the paper deals with how cultural collections were used in metropolitan Denmark and metropolitan France from the late 19th century and up until the beginning of the 20th century.
Eduard Løventhal, strongly inspired by the Danish pastor N. F. S. Grundtvig’s concept of a National Christian Spirit as the foundation of a civilized society, collected Indian objects for the Danish National Museum, efforts that included book and pamphlet publishing (Fredfeldt 2012). This became part of a broader national enlightenment wave in late 19th- and early 20th-century Denmark on the road from Absolutism and into Parliamentary democracy, making the school and the museum sites for national awakening.
Emile Guimet, a collector and amateur Orientalist, was in 1876 commissioned by the Ministry of Public Instruction to travel, write, and collect artefacts from Asian religions for public dissemination, something that laid the ground for Musee Guimet (e.g. Chang 2013). This happened in the context of the Third Republic 1870-1940, following the fall of the Second Empire, a period characterized by e.g. the passing of the Laïcité acts that separated religion and school.

Inspired by newer colonial history, pointing to the role of the colonial sphere as resource and laboratory for metropolitan reform work (e.g. Stoler 2002), and focusing on the part of a bigger source material that concentrates on respectively Løventhal’s and Guimet’s public enlightenment activities ‘at home’, the paper explores how creation of “colonial knowledge” was transformed into national enlightenment efforts in France and Denmark en route from Absolutism to respectively Republican and Constitutional monarchial democracies. In particular, the paper approaches the question of the friction and transformation of the socially practiced concepts of culture and religion in relation to creating a national consciousness in these public enlightenment efforts.

T. Chang (2013). Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Ashgate Publishing Limited.

S. Fredfeldt (2012). Fra Indisk Folkeånd til Dansk Kulturarv. Eduard Løventhal som missionær og indsamler i Indien fra 1872-1924 [From Indian Volk/folk spirit to Danish cultural heritage. Eduard Løventhal as missionary and public educator in India 1872-1924]. Dissertation, University of Copenhagen.

A. L. Stoler (2002). Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power. Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. (Show less)

The nation states emerging in the long 19th century are profoundly educational projects for they had to transform inhabitants of a territory into loyal citizens who share the feeling of a national “we”. Educational strategies were manifold, like national holidays, parades, the singing of the anthem, national days of remembrance, the flagging of official buildings, but also the invention of national broadcasting institutions, national post services, national railroads, national currencies, or national delegations of athletes to Olympic games, not to mention national armies and their socializing effects on young citizens.

Some of these aspects depend on a “national literacy”, the assimilated capability of citizens to recognize national flagging as part of their identity (Billig 1995). The one major institution designed to develop this literacy is the modern mass school as it aims not at teaching children to read, write, calculate, or to know something about history or geography but also to create a kind of person that identifies itself with the nation (Boser 2016; Tröhler 2016): The educationalized nation states obtained stability via creating a national “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) by means of education and schooling.

This allocation of political and social aspirations to education was not an invention of the nation states. The idea to solve crime, poverty, or corruption via educational strategies had been developed since the late 17th century, and education was accordingly always less a matter of teaching people an academic curriculum than a matter of transforming their souls to make them strong, steadfast, or humble. It is of special interest that the educationalization of people deemed to be at risk took place in Protestant contexts, but it is not surprising as it is a central element of Protestant theology that the individual’s soul is the lieu of salvation, and not the Holy Mother Church as in Catholicism (Tröhler 2008).

Hence, educational strategies were always more directed at fabricating the desired person, the prudent, the social, the moral – and in the long 19th century the national citizen sanctifying his own nation for which he was willing to die in times of crises, as the outbreak of the First World War testifies. In this overall frame the paper will address the question of how after 1900 aggressive nationalism and enthusiasm for war are to be traced back to banal nationalism in everyday life relying on national literacies developed in modern schooling aimed at loyal citizens.

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities. London & New York: Verso.

M. Billig (1995). Banal nationalism. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

L. Boser (2016). Nation, Nationalism, Curriculum, and the Making of Citizens. In: M. A. Peters (ed.). Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Singapore: Springer.

D. Tröhler (2008). The educationalization of the modern world: Progress, passion, and the Protestant promise of education. In: P. Smeyers & M. Depaepe (eds.). Educational research: The educationalisation of social problems. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 31–46.
D. Tröhler (2016). Curriculum history or the educational construction of Europe in the long nineteenth century. European Educational Research Journal 15(3), pp. 279–297. (Show less)