The Protestant historiography of the German Church Struggle has been shaped largely by its attention to two fundamental issues. The first has been the intrachurch struggle dominated by two churchpolitical factions: the Faith Movement of the German Christians and the Confessing Church. German Christians whole-heartedly endorsed the government of Adolf Hitler, campaigned to align the organization, theology, and practice of the twenty-eight German Protestant Land Churches with the racial and authoritarian values of the National Socialist regime and worked to create a centralized Reich church under a powerful Reich bishop. The Confessing Church stood for theological orthodoxy and ecclesiastical independence, rejected the authority of the Land Church governments that had fallen under the control of German Christians, and asserted itself as the uniquely legitimate church government in Germany.

Why have secular outlooks made so little headway in the United States in the twentieth century? Why did the Congress of the United States impeach Bill Clinton in 1998? Why have so many medical doctors in the United States been intimidated into refusing to provide abortion services to women? Might the answers to these three questions be the same?

While the year 2000 did not prove to be the eschatological blockbuster that some of our bolder Bible prophecy popularizers anticipated, nor the year when all our computers melted down, as some Y2K alarmists predicted, it did provoke some historians to step back from their usual topics of inquiry to attempt to sum up in a broad overview fashion some of the major developments in the century just past. A spate of books like Harvard Sitkoff's edited collection of essays, Perspectives on Modern America, with its subtitle, “Making Sense of the Twentieth Century,” were the result. In that spirit, as 2000 approached, I undertook an even more presumptuous venture: a brief overview of not one but two centuries of Christianity in America, from 1800 to the present, as a kind of outline sketch for a hypothetical book on the subject. The result is this essay. Once I had embarked on such a potentially foolhardy project, the practical question remained: What meaningful generalizations about two centuries of American Christianity could one offer in a relatively short space such as that provided by Church History's “Perspectives” feature? Still, Cotton Mather once boasted that he had boiled down the entire plan of salvation onto a single piece of paper, so from that perspective, five thousand or so words seemed ample indeed.

After the war was over leading Catholic laity and the lower clergy pointed their finger at their bishops, faulting them for not having the backbone and willpower to stand up to Hitler. Was this fair? Bishops said they tempered their criticism of Nazism because Hitler punished their priests rather than them. Were the bishops being candid and forthright with this statement? If so, was this the right strategy? Jesuits urged the bishops to become active in the Kreisau Circle of resistance. They did not. Should they have? Pope Pius XII gave the German bishops freedom to do as they saw fit regarding speaking out about the Holocaust. They spoke only guardedly. Should they have said more? The Concordat, the agreement between the Vatican and the German government, surprised German Catholics who had been warned again and again about Nazism. Was the Concordat a mistake? Once signed, should the church have stuck to it once Nazi racial policy had become manifest? There was an active Catholic resistance circle in Berlin. Were there others? If not, why not? Questions about Catholic resistance run on and on. Are they worth probing, trying to answer? In the end no matter what is said about Catholic resistance, the six million will have perished. And, in the end, no German managed to put an end to Hitler, although the Swabian Catholic, Klaus von Stauffenberg, came close. Is a discussion about Catholic resistance an exercise in futility?