Abstract
In what is increasingly considered a post-secular age, the role of religion in immigrants' negotiations of transnational identities and search for national belonging is once again thought to be a significant one. The growing presence of Islamic diaspora communities in Europe and America has brought to the fore questions of how a "foreign" religious faith and heritage can be reconciled with the modern and secular - and yet latently Christian - cultures of their host countries. This dissertation attempts to contribute to this discourse by shedding light on a somewhat similar chapter in American and German migration and religious history. Returning to the so-called era of secularization in the late nineteenth century, I investigate the problem of how religion and nationalism were reconciled in a transnational context, namely in a German Catholic diaspora's emerging construction of German-American identity. The vehicle for this analysis is the rhetoric of a leading opinion-shaper in the German-American Catholic community, Joseph Jessing, as it was performed in his leading German language Catholic newspaper, the Ohio Waisenfreund. Focusing on the print medium that was so crucial for the spread of ideas in the nineteenth century, I research almost thirty years of Jessing's newspaper, as well as other German-American newspaper of the time, and place Jessing's contribution to the diaspora group's identity construction in the context of his day. I argue that before the era of a more complete German assimilation in the twentieth century, Jessing represented a more resilient diaspora element that resisted imposed Americanization and instead perpetuated competing narratives of national and religious identity. I show how the phenomenon of transnationalism manifested itself in the importing by Jessing of the conservative and ultramontane variety of European Catholicism into the American setting. Forged in the Prussian and Catholic province of Westphalia during the 1860s, Jessing's import of a culture war mentality into the German diaspora context in America was the foundation of national and religious narratives that countered the dominant American narrative of Anglo-American Protestantism, as well as the dominant German identity narrative of liberal secularism and Protestantism, which found its manifestation in the new Prussianized Germany. With a political ideal rooted in the past - German unity under Catholic leadership - and a view of the United States as a decentralized confederation of various nationalities, Jessing attempts to construct a German Catholic imagined community by inculcating a heightened sense of German nationalism and cultural maintenance. The emerging consciousness and construction of American national identity in the post-Civil War period, in which the Catholic Church also participated through Americanization and Americanism, created an identity crisis for Jessing and other conservative German-American Catholic leaders. But Jessing's mission to create a German-American Catholic community also incorporated - somewhat unknowingly by Jessing - the simultaneous goal of finding national belonging in America. The result of this complex clash of national and religious missions was Jessing's reluctant participation in an emerging American Catholic historical counter-narrative that claimed the rightful belonging of Catholics in the American national community.