Awakening: Transnational Evangelicalism, Diplomacy, and Piety in the Anglo-German World, 1815–71

This paper focuses on the international religious and political networks of German Protestants in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, including the Prussian diplomat Christian Carl Josias von Bunsen (Prussian ambassador to the Vatican, and later to England), as they formed between Prussia, England, and North America. Bunsen had contemporaries and associates in England, the United States, and Switzerland who were bound together by a shared interest in both re-spiritualizing European societies and exporting their faith in colonial and missionary contexts, Specifically millenarian and "awakened" forms of Christian belief bound these networks together, associated with the German Erweckungsbewegung and the Second Great Awakening in the United States.

At the same time, German theologians were in contact with American counterparts (like Princeton theologian Charles Hodge) involved in the American second and third Great Awakening in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. This project will further expand upon research showing the intricate links, based on both German migration to North America as well as the sharing of ideas among intellectuals and theologians, that the projects of awakening in both Germany and America were advanced by individuals who adhered to specifically millenarian belief systems. Special attention will be given to forms of liturgical and hymnological productions of Bunsen and his allies, including popular publications as well as formal theological writings, with an emphasis on the spread and reception and adoption of Germanic sacred music and ideas via emigration and missionary activity into North America and England. The paper will also show how intertwined Protestant Christianity was with the forces of nationalism in the period before German unification in 1871, and also how German Protestantism affected global religious and societal change through both immigration and missionary activity.