Project Details
Projekt
To be a catholic during the 1970s and 1980s: With the Greens or against the Greens?
Applicant
Professor Dr. Florian Bock, since 12/2021
Subject Area
Roman Catholic Theology
Term
from 2020 to 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 410907407
The project starts from the observation that there is no historical research how the catholics took part in the the rise of the party “Die Grünen”. This is surprising, since 30 percent of their voters belonged to this denomination, and in addition there were programmatic overlaps, however, also fields of conflict. The President of the Bishops Conference even once declared it was not allowed to vote for this party. So we can assume that guiding principles of catholics and Greens in semantics, practices and emotions during those decennia were somehow intertwined and stayed at the same time in conflict. In any case aligning with the Greens meant for catholics leaving “milieu” patterns of interpretations and acting, which makes understandable why the hierarchy fought back so heavily. This is the case why this project is suited to describe the new formation of the relation between the Catholic Church, political Catholicism and society in the FRG during the 1970s and 1980s. Underlying theses are: First, the founding of the Greens in 1980 was a pivotal point, second, the erosion and new formation of religious-political patterns of interpretation can be made visible by voter migration, and third, crises like the “Nachrüstungsbeschluss” and Tschernobyl were at the core of this process.The project is focusing two dimensions: First, the founding of the Green Party is going to be reconstructed under historical, religious, organizational und social terms. Secondly, however, in the center of this project the dimension of catholic biographies will be situated. The project analyzes individual processes of exchange and transformation in the tense field of religion, civil society and politics, using examples of the always intertwined semantics, practices and emotions, which accompanied those biographies. According to this research focus three specific groups of biographies can be identified: (1) Actors who were situated in the context of the Greens and distanced themselves from the catholic mainstream. (2) Actors of the catholic hierarchy, the Central Committee of German Catholics and – partly identical with the last – members of the CDU/CSU who had positions far apart from the Greens. (3) Finally actors of catholic youth organisations who were left- or right-wing oriented and so acted close or far to the Greens.
DFG Programme
Research Units
Ehemaliger Antragsteller
Professor Dr. Wilhelm Damberg, until 12/2021
