Mediating the Religious and the Secular: A Conceptual History of Worldview

Accounting for the interactions between secular ideologies and religions presents intellectual and cultural historians with a distinct methodological challenge. Some scholars have argued that secularization entailed a translation of religious ideas into modern politics. Advocates of the theory of political religion have used analogies between political movements (particularly totalitarian ones) and religions to make claims about the former. Both approaches are unsatisfactory because they presuppose a theological secret behind secular ideologies, a thesis that Walter Benjamin summed up in his image of the chess-playing automaton named historical materialism that was secretly controlled by a dwarf named theology hidden beneath the table. Conceptual history offers a alternative method that does not privilege either the religious or the secular realm. Instead, it examines exchanges between the secular and the religious by following the accretion of meaning and function that emerged out of the struggle for definitional control of key terms that were claimed by both religious and secular actors.

After setting up this methodological framework, my paper will offer, as a case study, a brief analysis of the term Weltanschauung/worldview from 1790 to the present. It will be largely focused on Germany but also examine the translation and mobilization of the term in the USA both by Cold War liberals and Protestant evangelicals. My aim is to show how the concept of worldview was not only one of the chief vehicles through which foe-friend distinctions were made, but also a site at which a changing horizon of expectations was fashioned for moderns. Across the fronts dividing religious, scientific, philosophical and political enemies, the term worldview was passed back and forth, and in the process, it inadvertently fused the religious with the secular.