Getting married even though your partner belongs to a different religion or denomination? In past centuries, such marriages were considered a disruptive factor. In this interview, historian Dagmar Freist talks about external pressure, escalating conflicts between parents over the faith of their children and cohabitation today.
QUESTION: Mrs Freist, you have investigated religiously mixed marriages in the period from the 16th to the early 19th century. To what extent were such mixed marriages a disruptive factor?
FREIST: With the Reformation, the unity of Christianity fell apart, even if this was not the intention of Martin Luther and other reformers. And churches and rulers did everything they could to create denominationally homogeneous subject organisations - in other words, they tried to make it clear to the people: You are Lutheran, Catholic or Calvinist, the sovereign represents this or that religion, and these are the beliefs. This so-called confessionalisation meant that the denominations more or less avoided each other. Mixed religious and denominational marriages, which nevertheless existed, were completely contrary to this, because in the smallest social unit - the family - the different denominations met in the smallest of spaces. The everyday challenges of a religiously and denominationally mixed family included decisions about the church law applicable to the marriage, baptism and the "correct" school attendance of the children, the "correct" church attendance or the observance of different public holidays. So these marriages in different corners did not fit in with the authorities' endeavours to create clear denominational identities.
QUESTION: If the title of your latest publication talks about discord as well as faith and love, what was the source of conflict? When people wanted to marry, was there pressure from outside, or did discord also develop within the relationship?
FREIST: In these mixed marriages, the complicated mixture of this religious-confessional coexistence became apparent. It began on a smaller scale with family members who did not agree with the marriage, but also with the local priest. One particularly important dispute that reached into the core of the family was the question of child rearing: which denomination will the children have?
QUESTION: How did people deal with this?
FREIST: Many married couples dealt with these conflicts very proactively and made written agreements about the religious instruction of the children and the preservation of their religious freedom of conscience. However, a marriage rarely lasted for decades - this was not due to divorce rates like today, but to the often early mortality rate. It was not uncommon for a surviving parent to have two children, for example, who belonged to different denominations or perhaps the religion of the deceased partner. What happened then? Churches and relatives tried to influence the future upbringing of the children from the outside. Discord arose during the lifetime of the partners if one spouse tried to circumvent the agreement once made, i.e. to restrict the religious freedom of the other or to bring up the children in a different religion contrary to the agreements. According to the records, the main point of conflict was in any case the upbringing of the children.
When a marital dispute escalated into child abduction
QUESTION: What sources did you use?
FREIST: I have long been interested in the question of how something like a religious self-image - by adopting or changing theological guidelines - develops and is perceived as such. I've been looking for material on this in court records because they are a good place to observe deviant behaviour and the reactions to it. In the General State Archive in Karlsruhe, I came across a pile of files labelled "mixed marriages". I found almost exclusively conflicts about child rearing and even child abduction for religious and denominational reasons - the term discord is almost trivialising. I then followed up on these initial traces and found an astonishing amount of material on this topic.
QUESTION: Were parents already fighting over custody back then?
FREIST: That was regulated, it usually lay with the father or the male relatives. Disputes usually centred on the issue of the religious upbringing of the children: was one spouse not keeping to the agreement? Was there perhaps only a verbal agreement? And the conflict erupted when someone in this situation - whether a spouse, relative or the priest - argued that this child was being subjected to religious coercion of conscience: Then charges were filed.
QUESTION: In other words, you had a court decide which denomination a child should be brought up in?
FREIST: Yes. But even more exciting: the key question in these court cases was: what is the child's religious conviction? At what point can a child express a religious identity? In the 17th and 18th centuries, there was a debate among clergymen about the age at which people were able to recognise and formulate a religious identity. Protestants said from the age of 14, perhaps only at 16 or 18, Catholics considered it to be possible to recognise God at a younger age; later Calvinists also joined in the discussion. In an abduction case, you can imagine how difficult it was to prove which religion the child in question actually had...
Religious subjectivisation versus "parrot talk"
QUESTION: How did the courts try to find out?
FREIST: They tried to find out their religious identity by questioning children. These question protocols and the answers have been handed down. The questions were not only aimed at the cognitive level by asking about doctrines. Instead, they tried at least as hard to understand how the religion was lived: Which religious practices were relevant, which songs were sung? Which church did the family attend, and was going to church associated with a positive attitude towards this church? Because at this time, Protestants also went to a Catholic church, for example, or vice versa, if they paid the fees anyway and the journey to "their" nearest church was too far. So it wasn't just going to church that was significant, but the attitude towards it: Does someone leave the church interior for certain liturgical acts, for example? The question of religious practices is in fact at least as important as cognitive knowledge. The files also contain the accusation that when children simply repeat beliefs, this is "parrot talk". So, and this is an ultra-modern question, they tried to get to the religious conviction, the religious subjectivisation - initially linked to age and thus the development of the mind, but above all also linked to the religion practised.
QUESTION: Were these conflicts only about religious issues?
FREIST: Conflicts like these that have been brought to court have often developed a momentum of their own. For example, I came across the case of a Catholic woman who married a Lutheran in her second marriage, switched to the Lutheran faith herself and now also wanted to bring up her child from her first marriage in the Lutheran faith. She was denied this right by a court in the Electoral Palatinate. When the sovereign had the child sent to a Catholic orphanage for a Catholic upbringing, the parents took the case public. At the beginning of the 18th century, the conflict over the confessional affiliation of a little girl turned into a case of imperial politics involving the violation of freedom of conscience, which was guaranteed in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
QUESTION: So such cases also had a political dimension.
FREIST: Indeed, what happened in small-scale mixed marriages in the family was highly explosive politically and was also dealt with politically at the highest level, tried before the imperial courts and, for example, deliberately brought to public attention during the Imperial Diet in Regensburg. The rulers of the states found themselves in the dock when they were accused of supporting members of their own religion and thus violating the right to freedom of conscience and the Treaty of Westphalia. The topic is therefore not only exciting in terms of everyday history, but also in terms of imperial politics.
Mixed marriages as a trigger for fears of foreign infiltration
QUESTION: Which religious and confessional mixtures were conceivable - or possibly unthinkable? Were the cases analysed mainly between Catholics and Lutherans?
FREIST: There were also Lutheran-Reformed mixed marriages - that was particularly explosive because the denominations were so close to each other. I analysed three territories: the Prince-Bishopric of Osnabrück, Electoral Saxony and the Electoral Palatinate. Interestingly, it was in Electoral Saxony, the Lutheran territory per se, that fears of alienation were strongest in the 17th and 18th centuries, even though there were only an insignificant number of people of other faiths there. This was apparently due to the fact that the Saxon Elector converted to Catholicism when he became King of Poland at the end of the 17th century. Against this background, a nervous mixture of constant observation and balancing developed. Naturally, mixed marriages were seen as a source of danger. The originally Calvinist Electoral Palatinate was indeed largely re-Catholicised from the end of the 17th century. In the Prince-Bishopric of Osnabrück, the legal situation led to constant change: when a Protestant ruler died, a Catholic came to power, then a Protestant again. And the previously disadvantaged denomination always immediately took advantage of the situation.
QUESTION: Do you still see parallels today, or has this "disruptive factor" been overcome?
FREIST: Until the early 19th century, women and men had relative room for manoeuvre - despite all these conflicts and attempts to interfere. This was because there were various options: couples were allowed to decide for themselves in marriage contracts how they wanted to bring up their children. Alternatively, the rule "daughters like their mother, sons like their father" existed alongside the patriarchal idea of "all children like their father" - and in some cases there were laws laid down by the sovereign. Due to this multitude of possible regulations, it often remained unclear what a mixed-confessional couple had actually agreed. This confusing situation was followed by a radical step at the beginning of the 19th century: according to the law, the religious upbringing of all children was based solely on the father's denomination. Conflicts between the state and the churches were thus inevitable if the father belonged to a different denomination. Even today, couples for whom their different religions are important still have to decide how to organise their life together in this respect. Ecumenical training programmes are offered for this purpose, for example. In contrast to the early modern period, there are also many more marriages today between Christian, Jewish and Muslim members of the faith. The question of religious instruction for children and religious practices in everyday life can also become a challenge in these modern mixed marriages.
Interview: Deike Stolz