A spiritual state: civic education, Christianity, and the governance of Islam in Germany

In this dissertation, I investigate normative agendas of citizenship in contemporary Germany, as well as the role Christianity plays in fleshing out this civic ideal. Across Western Europe, (perceived) social and political challenges are met with calls for pedagogical solutions. Much of this educational elan flows from the public problematisation of Muslim minorities as deficient citizens in need of pedagogical guidance through integration classes, citizenship tests, and other dedicated programmes. I critically examine this pedagogisation of democratic citizenship through an ethnography of Germany’s far-flung sector of state-funded civic education. I argue that civic education renders the process of becoming a German citizen as a spiritual project. Rather than teaching a fixed curriculum, educators seek to guide their students on a path of personal self-transformation. Investigating a series of sites—including civic educational trainings for social workers, intercultural dialogue projects, local youth work, and public museums and exhibitions—I analyse how educators’ efforts to craft ‘good’ citizens mobilise testimonial, charismatic, and martyrological practices better-known from religious movements. Protestant organisations play a leading role in civic education. I trace this to the post-WWII rebuilding of the (West) German state, which granted substantial prerogatives to political Christianity. Protestantism is held up as a model for Muslims to emulate—both at the institutional level, where interreligious dialogue seeks to produce a Protestant-style Reformation in Islam; and at the individual level, where Protestant social workers act as spiritual masters to Muslim disciples. Thereby, becoming a good citizen assumes the shape of a religious awakening—sometimes a figurative conversion to Germanness, sometimes literally a conversion to Christianity. These findings generate distinct methodological, political, and theoretical upshots. Methodologically, by relying on 24 months of in-depth fieldwork to explore a series of concepts in political theory, I demonstrate the fruitfulness of ethnography for political-theoretical reflection. Politically, by highlighting how Muslim-oriented pedagogies re-entrench rather than upend patterns of domination, I question widespread assumptions about the capacity of civic education to empower its students. Theoretically, I bridge the divide between the sociology of citizenship and the anthropology of religion to expand existing literatures on European secularism. My dissertation demonstrates the extent to which Protestant Christianity as a lived religious tradition continues to animate ostensibly secular orders, thereby serving as the normative groups upon which the governance of Islam takes place.