German Neo-Pietism and the Formation of National Identity DORON A VRAHAM In the early nineteenth century, a neo-Pietist circle of awakened Protestants emerged in Prussia and other German lands. Disturbed by the consequences of the French Revolution, the ensuing reforms and the rising national movement, these neo-Pietists— among them noble estate owners, theologians, and other scholars—tried to introduce an alternative meaning for the alliance between state and religion. Drawing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pietist traditions, neo-Pietists fused their keen religious devotion with newly constructed conservative ideals, thus rehabilitating the legitimacy of political authority while investing the people’ s confession with additional meaning. At the same time, and through the same pietistic source of inspiration, conservative neo-Pietists forged their own understanding of national identity: its origins, values, and implications. In this regard, and against the prevailing view of the antagonist stance taken by Christian conservatives toward nationalism in the first half on the nineteenth century, this article argues for the consolidation of certain concepts of German national identity within Christian conservatism. I N 1934, shortly after the Nazi ascension to power in Germany, American historian Koppel S. Pinson published Pietism as a National Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism, in which he argued that Pietism provided eighteenth-century Germany with the emotional elements that would support its subsequent nationalism. 1 Pinson, it seems, detected an irrational element embedded within German nationalism from its very beginnings. A generation later, in Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland (1961), German historian Gerhard Kaiser examined the ways that the eighteenth-century heirs of German Pietism invested traditional political images with patriotic meanings, thus linking Pietism and early German nationalism. For him, the Pietist-patriotic merger forged a tradition by which, during the national age, loyalty to national institutions was bound to religious rules. 2 In 1982, Pinson and Kaiser, both of whom signaled the irrational nature of German nationalism, were taken severely to task by Hartmut Lehmann, a prominent historian of German Pietism. Lehman 1 Koppel S. Pinson, Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of German Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 25–26. 2 Gerhard Kaiser, Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Säkularisation (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1973), 225–226. 87 Church History 88:1 (March 2019), 87–119. © American Society of Church History, 2019 doi:10.1017/S0009640719000544 Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009640719000544 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Ichilov Sourasky Medical Centre.Medical Library, on 30 May 2019 at 15:37:35, subject to the