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The Pathos of Exile: Old Lutheran Refugees in the United States and South Australia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
Extract
Beginning in 1613, when the Prussian royal family converted to Calvinism while the vast majority of its subjects remained part of the state-regulated Lutheran church, the Hohenzollern kings found themselves living with an anomalous religious situation. Royal discontent with this circumstance had always existed, but efforts to bring about a change failed until, in the years after the Napoleonic Wars, Frederick William III resolved to take decisive action. A pious man and conscientious theologian, the king was deeply troubled by the continuing existence among large numbers of his subjects of rationalism and religious indifferentism, legacies of the Enlightenment. Moreover, reflecting on the defeat of Prussia by the French in 1806, he was also committed to national regeneration, which seemed blocked not only by the lack of religiosity he perceived, but by the disunity inherent in the religious gulf which separated Reformed monarch and Lutheran subject. In 1817, with the three-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation in mind, he proclaimed the intention to merge the Reformed and Lutheran churches of Prussia, and proceeded actively to involve himself in framing a common agenda for the doctrine of the new church. Serving God and the state in one bold stroke, the king was doubtless proud of the decision, and the large majority of his Lutheran subjects and their pastors unquestioningly accepted it.
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- Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1984
References
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance, in facilitating research for this essay, of the Fulbright Fellowship Program, the Australian-American Educational Foundation, the Research Foundation of the State of New York, and the Flinders University of South Australia.
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