From “Defending Democracy from its Christian Enemies” by David P. Gushee
The Germanic ideologues sought to create national spiritual unity in Germany through a new Germanic quasi-Christian religion. This theme is so central that we must linger over it here.
Germany, birthplace of the Reformation and center of the disastrous wars of religion, had no memory of Christian unity. Germany was late to arrive as a nation, and each region had its own unique history with the Protestant-Catholic split as well as with further Protestant sectarian differences. Prussia;s foolish Kulturkampf of the 1870s – a war on Catholicism, led by the state under Bismarck – only exacerbated confessional divisions and weakened Christianity overall. There was no agreed German version of Christianity at the time these men lived. This helped to contribute to their desire for “a new faith, a new community of believers, a world of fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together.”