ABSTRACT

Even as Kant argued the special status of his faculty, the American Revolution was under way. Religious enthusiasms crossed the Atlantic. Longstanding sectarian loyalties that had fuelled religious conflicts in England touched entire American populations like nothing else, even taxation. In America, too, religion proved a ‘crystallisation point around which other important social problems settled’, as Schilling (1988:277-8) observes concerning German circumstances where confessions ‘formed the core of competing political programs’. In turning to the American scene, however, it is worth noting his distinction of ‘confessions’ and ‘denominations’:

‘Confessionalisation’ is a far less familiar term…especially to British and American audiences, who are better acquainted with ‘denominations’ as private religious associations than with state churches. The formation and development of ‘confessional churches’ (Konfessionskirchen) are, by contrast, central topics in German history between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. They were exclusively established, or at least privileged, creeds and ecclesiastical organisations within a particular society…Each formed a highly organised system, which tended to monopolise the world view with respect to the individual, the state, and society, and which laid down strictly formulated norms in politics and morals.