ABSTRACT
As is the case with a number of his other Danish contemporaries, Kierkegaard’s arguments and claims often attack the person Ditlev Gothard Monrad rather than his arguments or positions. Kierkegaard’s distaste for the liberal movement and his disdain for privileging the political over the religious regularly overshadowed any attempt on his part to do justice to Monrad’s ideas. This sort of consideration may minimize some distance between the thought of Monrad and Kierkegaard, but ultimately, even when one attempts to reconstruct each of their respective views as fairly as possible, there are still fundamental disagreements between the two figures especially concerning the relationship between church and nation, religion and politics. In this article I argue that Kierkegaard’s reaction to Monrad and to the concept of the People’s Church of Denmark reveals an important component to his understanding of the relationship between Christianity and the political. The article is divided into three sections: (1) a brief overview of Monrad’s life with emphasis on his religious, political, and literary achievements; (2) a description of Kierkegaard’s direct references to Monrad in four journal entries; and (3) an account of Kierkegaard’s views on the People’s Church of Denmark as well as his conception of the political in light of the 1848-49 revolution in Denmark.
