A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

It was with this triumphalist Protestant ideology in the background that the architect of the Second Reich, the Imperial Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, launched in 1871 what one of his severest Protestant critics, Rudolf Virchow, Berlin’s independent-minded Professor of Pathology, usefully christened the Kulturkampf – the clash of cultures. What cultures were these? Liberalism and Protestant Germany in alliance against international and conservative Roman Catholicism. Bismarck was hoping to yoke the new power of the Protestant imperial state to the horror of liberals at Pope Pius IX’s various dogmatic statements leading up to the declaration of infallibility – he could also draw on German nationalist contempt for and fear of Polish Catholics, whose dismembered nation lay partly within the Reich.