ABSTRACT
Ernst Haeckel and his Haeckelian Monist followers seldom lost an opportunity to criticize established religion. They viewed Christianity as the principal force in the modern world impeding the victory of science, and they accused established religion in Germany of spiritual decay and political reaction. The Monist attack on Christianity came at a time when traditional religious beliefs were being forcefully challenged not only in Germany but throughout the rest of Europe as well. The Haeckelian Monist attack on Christianity and traditional creeds was in one sense a typical nineteenth-century critique of religion as outworn mythology, and it is for this that they are usually remembered. The association of Haeckel and the Monists with nineteenth century naturalistic and materialistic atheism reveals, however, only one side of their relationship with Christianity and traditional religion. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Catholicism also emerged in Germany as a distinct and separate political force with interests of its own.
