Well, this post is turning out a little longer than I expected! We should have one more update following this, covering developments in Judaism, but I may post the second part of the 1928 update before that, which will cover events in France, IntRevMar, and Germany and be in a more traditional narrative style. Also, let me know if there are any topics people are interested in hearing about. Right now, I’m planning on writing similar multi-part updates on sexuality, academic life, and film in the socialist bloc.
Craig Calhoun and Charles Tilly, “The New Dispensation? Religion, Resistance, and the Mediation of New Theological Currents in Socialist Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1984.
North European Protestantism: Charisma, Crisis, and the Fragmentation of Protestant Christianity
From 1925 to 1945, German Protestantism became one of the world’s primary sites of religious experimentation, theological innovation, and millenarian enthusiasm. This has long been a source of enduring puzzlement for church historians; some have been tempted to dismiss the facts on the ground as trivial epiphenomena. Doctrinaire socialists and their critics both agreed that Marxism aimed at the extirpation of existing religious life-forms, not the engendering of new ones. Even when we abstract from the political-cultural situation, the staid and conformist culture of German Lutheranism hardly seems fertile ground for doctrinal innovation.
How, then, did such a situation arise? To understand why German Protestantism took the course it did, we must first understand how the official church lost much of its legitimacy with its traditional supporters over the course of the Great War. For centuries, Lutheranism was not simply one religious institution but a pillar of the social order. In Prussia, it functioned as a quasi-state church, embedded in its cameralist bureaucratic apparatus and tied closely to regional elites. Clergy members were either civil-service members or positioned adjacently to them, and sociologically, the church possessed a symbiotic relationship with the state, acting as a crucial buffer for its authority.
Protetantism sanctified the traditional Prussian values of obedience, order, duty, discipline, and national mission. Unlike catholicism, it was a legitimating culture, not a counter-society. During the Great War, Protestant Churches did their godly duty, and were crucial in the moral mobilization of parishioners. The war was a trial of faith, a purifying ideal, or, in moments of existential dread, a divine “test” of the German People’s will. The church wagered its moral credibility on the cause of the state, and refused to triangulate as popular disaffection with the war erupted. When the revolution came, the Protestant Church found itself the object of polemical attacks, and was held in disrepute - if not outright abandoned - by large numbers of the traditional Protestant Mittelstand of clerks, teachers, artisans, technicians, and junior professionals. A similar, though not identical story can be told for the state churches in Denmark and Sweden.
A structurally complicit church naturally resisted the revolution, and found that it had lost much of its sympathy when it aligned itself with Ludendorff’s national salvation government. Much of the senior hierarchy fled to America, further exacerbating the crisis of authority. The revolutionary state disestablished official churches and cut off official streams of funding, while church attendance wiltered. The Mittelstand , ambivalent about the new socialist government, vainly held out hope that moderates in the Social-Democratic Party would protect their property. Although the cancellation of war debts would violate this wish, millions of the traditional supporters of the Lutheran Church remained in Germany, and in the desire not to alienate them further, State Atheism was officially restricted to the removal of previous privileges, rather than the wholesale abolition of churches.
In the wake of their disillusionment with the socialist government under the First Luxemburg ministry, it is unsurprising that Mittelstand and rural elements sought out more traditional religious languages of belonging. However, without any church possessing a unified hierarchy, sacramental monopoly, or institutional discipline, power naturally drifted to the parishioners. A situation of decentralized religious competition thus provided the ground for the rise of charismatic and millenarian movements. A latent sense of revolutionary expectation contributed to a mood in which history itself was seen and witnessed as spiritually charged. New mass leaders emerged, expounding heterodox theological visions that spoke directly to the changed historical situation. To illustrate this dramatic shift, and gain a sense of how this transformed the character of institutional religion, we will examine the two most famous cases: Arno Grunewald and Cornelius Huisman.
Arno Grunewald and the Return of the Ecstatic
Arno Grunewald was one of the most consequential figures of the twentieth century, though the significance later attributed to his life has often obscured its fundamentally ordinary beginnings. Admirers and critics alike have contributed to a dense accretion of legend around his person. In what follows, we will attempt—so far as the sources permit—to remain within the domain of the concrete and the legible.
Grunewald was born in 1898 in the provincial Prussian city of Erfurt to Matthias and Emma Grunewald. His father worked as a harness-maker, a skilled artisanal trade that had long occupied an ambiguous position between petty production and industrial manufacture, while his mother assisted in the business. The household was respectable but increasingly precarious, and from an early age Grunewald was exposed to both the discipline of skilled labor and the quiet anxieties attendant upon its gradual displacement by larger firms.
As a child, Grunewald was reserved and observant rather than precocious. In his primary schooling he distinguished himself less through brilliance than through persistence and ambition. Several teachers noted his diligence and secured him a scholarship to attend the Erfurt Realschule , which he entered at the age of ten. There, his academic profile was uneven but distinctive. He ranked near the top of his class in the natural sciences and performed consistently well in history and religious education, while struggling in foreign languages, geography, and modern German literature.
It was during his years at the Realschule that Grunewald first became acquainted with the horticultural industry that would later shape his professional life. A cousin, Walter, was employed in one of Erfurt’s numerous seed firms, and Grunewald spent several summers assisting him as an apprentice. The work appealed to him not for its promise of advancement but for its internal coherence: the careful observation of growth, the patient correction of error, and the disciplined coordination of labor across seasons. By the age of fourteen he had resolved to pursue further education at a Realgymnasium in order to qualify as a seed-tester.
This plan was derailed by the outbreak of the Great War. Although many of his classmates were able to complete their education uninterrupted, Grunewald was compelled to return home in 1914 after his elder brother—who had been assisting in the family workshop—was drafted. Between 1914 and 1917, Grunewald worked alongside his father while continuing his horticultural training irregularly with his cousin. During this period he also developed an extracurricular interest in theology and history; surviving records indicate that he held memberships in several of Erfurt’s lending libraries and was a steady, if unsystematic, reader.
In 1917, Grunewald himself was drafted and assigned to an engineering corps on the Western Front. Owing to his mathematical competence, he was employed primarily in clerical and logistical duties rather than front-line combat. In 1918, during an Entente offensive near Ypres, his unit’s positions were overrun and Grunewald was struck in the leg by artillery fire. The injury ended his military service. He returned to Erfurt in November 1918 to find his father’s business in decline, increasingly unable to compete with larger industrial suppliers favored by the wartime economic apparatus.
Still recovering from his wound, Grunewald supported himself through a series of irregular employments. By this point, the horticultural sector was also under strain, suffering from shortages and the tightening effects of the British blockade. He expressed a cautious interest in the small socialist circles active in the city but never joined them formally. Contemporary accounts suggest that he remained a sympathetic observer rather than a militant participant.
The revolutionary upheavals of 1919 reached Erfurt later and more hesitantly than they did Berlin or the industrial centers of Saxony and the Rhineland. Grunewald benefited from the subsequent reorganization of educational institutions, completing his Realschule education in 1920. With the assistance of his cousin and a local credit union, he secured sufficient financing to enroll in a newly refounded Realgymnasium. In his application, he described his background as proletarian, a characterization that stretched conventional definitions but reflected both the political climate of the moment and the ambiguous status of artisanal labor within it.
At the Realgymnasium , Grunewald received a rigorous scientific education. He studied physics, chemistry, and biology, including contemporary work on Mendelian heredity, animal breeding, and plant cultivation. This training would later prove decisive, equipping him with a technical vocabulary and methodological discipline that allowed him to move with relative ease between skilled labor, scientific practice, and ethical reflection.
At the time, however, there was little to distinguish him from a generation of similarly situated young men seeking to orient themselves amid the dislocations of postwar Germany. The qualities for which he would later be remembered—his ability to synthesize disparate domains of experience, his resistance to doctrinal closure, and his distinctive mode of moral address—remained latent, embedded within a life that appeared, to contemporaries and to Grunewald himself, unremarkable.
In the mid-1920s, amidst a general dearth of skilled labor, Grunewald attained a position as a managing director of a horticultural farm just outside Erfurt. Workers at the time noted his exceedingly gentle and circumspect manner, as well as his - even for the time - unusual level of commitment to his work, though some had suspicions concerning his relative lack of socialist verbiage in his addresses to the farm’s workers. Over the next few years, Grunewald reportedly grew ever-more private and cautious in his assessments.
In 1928, Grunewald received an assignment to investigate a series of farms which had fallen into disrepair following the upheaval of the revolution. He was meant to assess whether the collective could engage in profitable work upon them. It was here, “in the shadow of the great trees, amid the accumulated ruin of the past” - among terraced farms haphazardly laid out, with their patterns of irregular cultivation - that he first experienced the great “loosening” of the world as the divine presence unveiled itself, first delicately, subtly, and then with a steadily blossoming strength. A week later, he invited the workers of the horticultural collective to a tour of the premises, where in a tone which one later described as “serene, unmoving, and yet completely absorbed”, he described to them the contents of his revelation.
What he said that day was remembered less as argument than as disturbance. He spoke, witnesses recalled, of ages without naming them, of a world that had grown old and rigid in its fear, and of a nearness and seriousness that had begun to press upon human life after being lost for too long. He did not deny Christ nor repeat the familiar and deadening language of salvation and redemption; instead, he spoke of a work still unfinished, of a spirit that could no longer be borne passively but demanded embodiment in common life. History, he insisted, was no longer something that happened to humanity, nor something that could be passively awaited. It had drawn close, dangerously close, and would either be carried forward through committed and purposeful labor and mutual tending—or lost again for good. Several workers later wrote that they felt, for the first time since the revolution, that the future was neither promised nor foreclosed, but placed precariously in their hands, as something that could still be ruined by neglect as easily as it could be brought to fruition. Nonetheless, attendants recall that there were more than a few attempts at a disputation from certain workers, but the mournful silence which these received from Grunewald reportedly convinced the more skeptical to give him a hearing.
From here, Grunewald and two dozen of his followers began attending a local church in one of the larger worker’s districts in Erfurt. Although the church bylaws did not specify a procedure for a “recall election” of a parishioner, he gathered enough support - not on his own, but upon his followers’ initiative - to be appointed the new pastor of the church, despite his lack of formal training in theology.
The movement of the latter-day Waldensians spiraled outward from these modest beginnings. The first major town outside of Erfurt in which the signs of Grunewald’s teachings presented themselves was the regional industrial hub of Magdeburg. Individuals began to speak of a “prophet from Erfurt” who had brought a “new teaching of the Gospel” into the world. Demographically, women, the middle-aged, and industrial workers less well-integrated into unions and cooperatives were overrepresented. A small book - really no more than an extended pamphlet - titled “Grunewald’s Aphorisms” circulated around Magdeburg in 1927. This was apparently assembled by a group of his followers in Erfurt, and sent abroad to several sympathetic pastors.
Grunewald’s teachings gained most traction in areas that stood midway between the socialist modernity of Berlin and the Ruhr and the rural backwardness of such regions as Prussia and Pomerania. Thuringia, Westphalia, and parts of the upper Rhine Valley were the first locations in which actual institutions dedicated to a “Grunewaldian” or a “latter-day Waldensian” understanding of the Christian Gospel were founded. Grunewald himself showed markedly less interest in the actual development of institutions, and the theological force of his message was inherited at least in part from a metaphorical ambiguity which prevented it from hardening into dogma.
Different groups could thus interpret Grunewald’s teachings in their own distinctive manner. Workers treated it as introducing an ethic of care within production and as a recovery of the utopianism of the Month of Roses. Youth groups read it as a call for a new immediacy and a refusal of bureaucratic mediation. Rural believers believed Grunewald was calling for a new, spiritual renewal outside of the politics of both the old reactionary lutheran church and the new socialist government. And sympathetic party officials extracted a vague “ethical socialism” that could serve as a useful prop for the regime amongst the religiously inclined.
Overwhelmingly, however, in the early days of the movement Grunewald’s followers believed in the urgency of the task ahead and the necessity for a transformation in both everyday life and the traditional teaching of christianity. As this message spread throughout Germany’s protestant heartlands, it earned both fervent followers and sympathetic listeners; while the former strove to create an independent “Grunewaldian” meeting-groups, the latter brought his teachings into their established churches. Although the movement was hardly dominated by social elites, it tended to travel through those who possessed some degree of social capital: trusted foremen, respected teachers, youth leaders, lay preachers, and war veterans. As this occurred, the teachings of Grunewald were modified and inflected by local needs and local interpretations, increasing the urgency of codifying a more explicit set of doctrines. Grunewald eventually went to visit a number of his followers in 1929 throughout Thuringia and the Rhine Valley, but he remained tentative to lay down rules. What still united his followers were refusals of clerical mediation, violent eschatology, and a longing for a renewal of Christian spiritual life within the world of the present, along with a belief in its goodness and redeemability.
Such a movement could not continue long without gaining the notice of both the authorities and the existing protestant hierarchies. When more conservative churches in rural Prussia placed a ban on Grunewaldian teachings, conflicts arose between his followers and religious leaders. Peter Heidel, a tenant farmer, launched a campaign of “abstention” from the churches, charging them with corruption and a “falling away” from true Christian faith. Churches were picketed in a manner reminiscent of the industrial strike. The socialist authorities were finally compelled to intervene and, seeing in the Grunewaldians an effective tool to crush the conservative churches, mandated reforms which would permit the direct election of pastors.
Elsewhere, followers of Grunewald insisted on a “complete freedom” of religious teachings and the “opening up” of the churches. What these phrases meant in practice was the driving out of the old church leaders, the return to a more “fraternal” ecclesiastical organization, and a renewed emphasis on lay participation. In the early days, these reforms were seen as necessary measures to bring about a new millennium. As the new decade approached and initial expectations were disappointed, Grunewald’s teachings adopted a more confrontational and millenarian tone. He started to speak vaguely of “the coming age”, which was already in motion but which was at risk of being “halted and strangled by the wicked and small-minded”. Only the fullest and widest community of believers working together, “free of all presumption, free of all burden, but toiling happily toward the future” would “give due honor to god and fellow man and bring about the new age”. These teachings were a spur toward reforming efforts of a million varieties. A number of important German feminists, pacifists and environmentalists were initially Grunewaldian enthusiasts, though some would later renounce Christianity altogether. A thousand flowers bloomed, and they took strange, frequently contradictory shapes.
Confrontations with the socialist government did occur, but they were uneven and typically negotiable. Grunewald’s followers objected to the increasing bureaucratization and mechanization of everyday life, but they did not figure any temporal government as their adversary. And no singular political doctrine was ever reached amongst the Grunewaldians, which prevented them from ever presenting a unified front against government policy.
Initial codification and theological reflection would come from theological students in the seminary of Tubingen. The key figure in the interpretation of Grunewald became the 12th-century Christian mystic Joachi of Fiore, who introduced into theology a tripartite division between the ages of the father (corresponding to the old testament), the son (corresponding to the age following Christ), and the Holy Spirit (corresponding to a future age in which the mediating power of the son would be replaced by direct human community with God and all other believers). The old chrstian ideal of communitas became key here, but rather than just a communitas of man with man, the age of the spirit would usher in a communitas in which men, god, and nature would directly correspond, ceasing to be separated. But this would require work - human work, performed on behalf of the godhead - to bring about. Man’s historical vocation was thus made one with his religious one. A strain of pelegianism, stressing the active work of man, was the dominant undercurrent of Grunewald’s movement.
From this identification between religious and historical flowed both the movement’s cohesion and its instability. If history itself had become the field of divine labor, then every domain of life—workshop, field, schoolroom, council chamber—became charged with theological significance. The Grunewaldians did not withdraw from the world; they intensified their participation in it. They formed “circles of tending” in which members pledged to examine not only their spiritual lives but their habits of speech, their conduct in production, their treatment of spouses and children, even the arrangement of their dwellings. It was widely remarked, sometimes with admiration and sometimes with irritation, that Grunewald’s followers seemed unable to speak of irrigation systems, wage contracts, or municipal sanitation without eventually invoking the Spirit.
Yet this sacralization of the everyday did not produce a uniform ethic. In Thuringia, groups close to agricultural cooperatives interpreted the age of the Spirit as a call to rationalize cultivation in harmony with nature, blending Mendelian heredity with a rhetoric of reconciliation between man and soil. In the Rhine Valley, where industrial discipline was more exacting, adherents emphasized reconciliation within the factory, speaking of the “healing of estrangement” between foreman and worker. In Westphalian towns marked by recent class conflict, the movement acquired a more penitential tone: communal confessions were held for participation in violence during the revolutionary years, and several meetings concluded with formal acts of reconciliation between former members of opposing militias.
This elasticity was a strength. It permitted the movement to travel without immediately hardening into sectarianism. But it also ensured that no two Grunewaldian assemblies were entirely alike. By 1930, observers could plausibly speak of “Grunewaldianisms” in the plural. Some circles maintained a close relationship with established Lutheran congregations, pressing for liturgical simplification and expanded lay preaching. Others rejected inherited forms almost entirely, meeting in schoolhouses or converted barns, singing new hymns composed in deliberately plain language, stripped of metaphysical ornament.
Grunewald himself resisted attempts to fix the teaching in a systematic treatise. When pressed to clarify whether the age of the Spirit would abolish sacrament, church office, or even the distinction between clergy and laity, he responded obliquely. “Nothing is abolished,” he is reported to have said in a gathering near Kassel, “but everything is fulfilled—or else it withers.” Such answers frustrated both critics and disciples. To some, they signaled depth; to others, evasion.
The first real crisis of interpretation emerged after a severe economic downturn in 1931 disrupted several cooperatives in which Grunewaldians were prominent. A faction in Magdeburg argued that the failure of these enterprises demonstrated the necessity of more direct political coordination with the socialist authorities. If man’s historical vocation was one with his religious one, then, they insisted, participation in planning commissions and party organs was not a concession but a duty. Another faction, particularly strong in rural Thuringia, recoiled from what they called the “bureaucratization of the Spirit.” For them, the very language of planning risked reintroducing mediation where immediacy had been promised.
Grunewald did not resolve the dispute. His few public interventions during this period were strikingly somber. He spoke less of blossoming and more of trial. The age of the Spirit, he suggested, would not advance in a straight line; it would expose hidden attachments to power, pride, and domination within the community itself. “The Spirit,” he warned in one widely circulated address, “does not serve our designs. It consumes them.” These words were taken by some as a rebuke to overzealous reformers; by others as an indictment of timidity.
Meanwhile, the institutional footprint of the movement continued to expand. By the early 1930s, there were dozens of semi-formal Grunewaldian associations across central Germany, each maintaining correspondence with the Erfurt circle. A modest publishing house in Leipzig began issuing collections of sermons, commentaries on Joachim of Fiore, and practical guides to “spiritual labor in common life.” Attendance at annual gatherings swelled into the thousands. Contemporary police estimates, almost certainly exaggerated, placed the number of sympathizers in the hundreds of thousands.
The social composition of the movement shifted subtly over time. While industrial workers and artisans remained visible, there was a noticeable influx of teachers, lower-level civil servants, and nurses—figures positioned between state and society. Their presence lent the movement a new texture. Study groups multiplied; pamphlets grew more sophisticated; references to contemporary philosophy and sociology appeared alongside biblical exegesis. The Tubingen seminarians who had first systematized the Joachimite framework now found themselves in correspondence with young academics in Berlin and Heidelberg, who sought to reconcile Grunewald’s immanent spirituality with phenomenology and an emerging Marxist humanism.
With growth came the temptation toward consolidation. Proposals were floated for a national congress, a standardized confession of faith, even a modest training institute for lay preachers. Each proposal generated enthusiasm and unease in equal measure. To codify was to secure continuity; it was also to risk extinguishing the very fluidity that had drawn so many.
Grunewald’s own posture during these debates was increasingly enigmatic. Those closest to him in Erfurt observed that he had grown more withdrawn. He continued to preside over meetings, but spoke for shorter intervals, allowing extended silence to punctuate discussions. Visitors sometimes left frustrated, having received no clear directive. Others reported that these silences were themselves formative, compelling participants to assume responsibility for interpretation rather than deferring to authority.
In retrospect, it is clear that this refusal to become an unambiguous legislator both preserved and imperiled the movement. It preserved it by preventing premature dogmatization; it imperiled it by ensuring that succession would be contested. Already by the mid-1930s, younger leaders were articulating more sharply defined programs: some leaning toward a disciplined ethical socialism explicitly aligned with state planning; others toward a decentralized communitarianism wary of any alliance with political power.
What united these diverging strands remained less a fixed doctrine than a shared sensibility: a conviction that history had drawn near, that human beings were neither spectators nor mere instruments of impersonal forces, and that the divine, once imagined as distant, now pressed urgently within the structures of ordinary life. In a Europe still trembling from revolution and war, this conviction proved both consoling and destabilizing. It offered meaning without retreat, hope without passivity. It also ensured that the boundary between spiritual renewal and political transformation would remain porous—an ambiguity that would shape the fate of the latter-day Waldensians in the years to come.
Cornelis Huisman and the Return of the Transcendent
_“The true Church is not a denizen of this world.
The man who tells you otherwise would have the Church kneel before man. He would have the Body of Christ administered as one more instrument of human will. He would have you believe that history itself has become holy.
This is the oldest temptation.
“You shall be like God.”
We need not enumerate the calamities that follow when man enthrones himself. The thought itself is corruption enough. When the Church consents to be useful to the age, it ceases to be the Church. When it becomes the body of man, it ceases to be the Body of Christ.
I bring you no new doctrine. Beware those who claim one. The Word of God has not grown old. It does not require correction by parliaments or purification by committees.
When our Lord said, “Repent,” He did not mean once. He meant always. He meant that the entire life of the believer is repentance. And when He commanded that there be no God before Him, He did not leave room for amendment: no nation, no state, no idol, no future, no dream shall be placed in His stead.
Some of you tremble. You ask whether such words will bring ruin upon you.
You already live among ruins.
This life is not a guarantee; it is a trial. Be grateful that the trial is severe. The weight of the testing measures the weight of the reward. The deeper the corruption of the age, the more radiant the sovereignty of God.
Do not mistake me. You are not called to spectacle. You are not called to provoke. Discipline is not defiance for its own sake. It is obedience.
It is not yours to judge the world. God will sit in judgment over history. He will determine what shall stand and what shall be burned away.
But because He judges, you must judge yourselves.
Repentance is not a sentiment. It is separation.
If the age would make itself god, then you must refuse the age.
If the Church would make peace with the world, then you must remember whose name you bear.
The Kingdom does not arrive through policy. It descends in judgment and in mercy.
And until that day, you will live as strangers.”_
Thus spoke Cornelius Huisman in the city of Groningen. He attacked the socialist government obliquely, and the protestant churches which had accommodated themselves to it directly. He spoke with austere fervor and cold fire. He was not ordained as a pastor, but had taken it upon himself to mount the dais as a “private lecturer”. A subscription from several local notables maintained him in his position.
Huisman was born in 1894, the third son of a middling farmer. He worked as a clerk in Groningen until the British blockade led to the shuttering of his employer’s business. He briefly served in the army but saw no sustained combat against the Germans. When revolution broke out, he did not fight directly in the white army, but he had loyalist sympathies. Posthumously published letters reveal that he attempted to flee to the Dutch East Indies but lacked sufficient funds or sponsors.
Huisman did not speak of an experience of revelation or conversion, and thus we know little about what led him to a life of preaching. He insisted that he was not the teacher of a new dispensation but merely the transmitter of the true and eternal christian gospel. But his sermons inevitably targeted the “idols of the age”. These were manifold: humanity, socialism, the “worship of the state”, the fixation with military power, even the “race-idolatry” of Fascist France. The antidote, however, was singular: turn to God, who was not of this world nor in it, but looming beyond it as judge and arbiter.
This message was uniquely well-suited to the conservative remnant that remained in the Netherlands. By 1919, the socialist worker’s movement was genuinely hegemonic amongst the working-class of the Netherlands, but it still faced nearly united hostility from a disproportionately large commercial middle-class. The worker’s revolution in the Netherlands would likely have been quashed in the first years of the First Revolutionary Era without the intervention of German arms. The consolidation of the worker’s state necessitated a broad-ranging repression of the liberal and calvinist “pillars” of pre-revolutionary dutch society, leading to a general alienation of the old middle-classes from the new regime and the largest white emigration of any of the socialist states (as a proportion of total population). This placed the churches in a uniquely precarious position; with little hope of resisting the government, most of them resigned themselves to an uneasy accommodation. This was not, however, to the liking of their remaining parishioners.
In 1927, as a movement of abstention from public schools picked up amongst the conservative parishioners of Groningen churches, the Socialist government placed increased pressure on the protestant churches to formalize their cooperation. The Groningen consistory cautiously complied, issuing a circular affirming a policy of “constructive and measured cooperation” with the lawful authorities and denouncing “private theological agitation”. Huisman quickly assumed a position of leadership over the backlash against the church. He declared that any church which required the state’s permission to preach had already surrendered the keys entrusted to it. Stung by this attack, the church elders revoked his right to the pulpit; he responded by gathering his hearers on the wind-beaten market square, reading from the Heidelberg Catechism in the middle of winter. No schism ensued, but slowly, the position of the established churches withered. Families ceased attending official services and offerings declined. Young men began to abstain from minor party appointments on grounds of conscience. Established pastors, ever-worried about provoking repression yet equally unwilling to concede doctrinal ground, found themselves speaking to congregations who returned only silence and resentment. Huisman had forced the churches to make a choice: would they be guardians of the eternal word, or functionaries of a temporal order?
The churches equivocated. They could not submit to the state without losing their legitimacy, but neither could they embrace Huisman without undercutting their authority and risking another round of repression. The consistory eventually issued an ambivalent statement, rescinding the ban on Huisman serving as private lecturer while urging compliance with the “lawful civic authorities”. This trial of fire had catapulted the position of Huisman, whose “private preachings” became the most popular in the city.
At this point, the authorities intervened, mandating a police presence at all of Huisman’s lectures. Several of his most prominent sponsors were investigated and arrested for unrelated crimes. A large cache of propaganda imported from the United States was found amongst his wealthier patrons. An attempt by Huisman to return to preachings in the public square next winter were banned, but this did not deter Huisman himself. At this point, the socialist government, paranoid about the presence of links between American evangelical group and Huisman’s movement and hoping to quarantine the movement in Groningen, made what can only be described as a grave mistake. When Huisman went to speak publicly without a license, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace and transported to a government prison in Amsterdam. A statement was smuggled out of the city, which eventually made its way to the American press. Stories were told of a vast government conspiracy to crack down on “free pastors” and “free churches”. Huisman gained sympathy not just in America, but in the more conservative sections of the Scandinavian world, whose political organs had already been repressed by social-democratic governments and who feared socialist religious persecution. International aid committees were formed, and the mystique around Huisman only grew when he pointedly refused to identify himself forthrightly with some of his reactionary sponsors, instead declaring that: “The membership in the Kingdom of God will be determined by God alone. All are equally unworthy of entry into its august halls. Those who believe they act on behalf of God must take care that they do not believe they act for God; for man has no true power but through God.”
The Dutch authorities, for their part, discovered that repression in a world of telegraphs and steamships could not be cleanly localized. Huisman’s refusal to align himself openly with monarchists or colonial nostalgists—his insistence that all stood equally under judgment—only deepened his appeal. He appeared, to sympathizers abroad and to many at home, not as the instrument of a fallen order but as a solitary witness against every earthly sovereignty. What had begun as a struggle over pulpit access in Groningen now threatened to become a referendum on the moral legitimacy of the Dutch socialist state itself.
Like the churches, the Dutch government equivocated. Expatriation was briefly considered, then dismissed; a heavy fine was imposed instead, along with renewed scrutiny of his patrons. Yet by then the affair had escaped the confines of Groningen. Sermons transcribed in cramped handwriting circulated in Hamburg and Copenhagen; extracts were serialized in small conservative weeklies in Stockholm. Huisman himself disclaimed disciples, but his arrest crystallized a diffuse unease across the North European Protestant world. In parishes already wary of accommodation, pastors began reintroducing stricter catechetical instruction and reviving older confessional formulas. Abstention from state ceremonies quietly increased.
In Germany, the resonance was sharper. Grunewald’s adherents spoke of divine nearness; those influenced by Huisman insisted upon divine distance. The exchange did not take the form of a formal disputation but of insinuation and reply. Grunewald warned against “small-minded Christians who believe in a God that despises His own creation.” Huisman countered that there was “no new age but only the old sin, which inclines man to believe that Christ’s work was insufficient.” Beneath these phrases lay incompatible visions of history itself: whether it could be sanctified through collective labor, or whether it remained under judgment until the end.
Afterlives
By the mid-1930s, North European Protestantism no longer resembled the orderly confessional landscape that had greeted the outbreak of the Great War. It had not been destroyed, nor had it been absorbed whole into the socialist project. Instead, it had fractured along lines that were at once theological and political, experiential and institutional. In Grunewald’s wake, millions sought a Christianity that dissolved the distance between heaven and earth, transfiguring labor, community, and history itself into sites of divine presence; in Huisman’s stern counterpoint, others rediscovered a God who stood in judgment over every temporal order, socialist no less than liberal, and demanded obedience rather than innovation. Between these poles lay a weakened but still persistent establishment, attempting to reconcile pastoral care with accommodation to a politicized civil society and a watchful state. What emerged was not the withering of faith, as Marxist orthodoxy had predicted, nor its simple privatization, as liberal observers had hoped, but a religious field newly volatile and intensely self-conscious. Protestant Christianity became, in these decades, a laboratory in which the universal claims of the age—of history, of humanity, of the people—were either baptized into immanence or rejected in the name of transcendence. In that struggle over mediation, authority, and the meaning of community, the Protestant churches both mirrored and magnified the deeper contradictions of the socialist world.
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