Culture ‘warring’ has become a sprawling and imprecise feature of American life. It includes everything from battles over school curricula and public morality to fights over religious liberty and marriage—even to what can and cannot be said from a pulpit. Beneath the noise, the operative goal is often the same: to restrict an opponent’s speech, reach, and cultural legitimacy.

This impulse is not new. It has a predecessor with sharper edges and a paper trail: the Kulturkampf. In the newly unified German Empire (1871), Otto von Bismarck, a feared diplomat, treated the Church’s institutional power not merely as a set of doctrines but as a competing public authority—as an organized network suspected of divided allegiance. What followed, roughly from 1871 to 1878, was not just a national contest of values but a ruthless suppression. Kulturkampf was a coordinated legal and administrative campaign to translate cultural conflict into state supremacy over schools, libraries, marriage, and the clergy. 

All seminarians, Catholic and Protestant alike, were required to study at state-controlled high schools and universities, where they had to pass an examination in German culture covering history, philosophy, and literature. After ordination, every priest and member of the clergy needed state approval before being appointed to any post. If the Church installed a priest or bishop without that approval, the cleric in question was removed and prosecuted for a civil offense. These new initiatives impacting civil marriage, educational subversion, and state control of religious appointments were enforced with statutes, courts, police power, fines, even imprisonment. 

Scientist, social reformer, and enemy of the Church, Rudolph Virchow gave Bismarck’s “reforms” the name Kulturkampf, meaning the struggle for culture, or the culture war. He praised it as “a great struggle in the interest of humanity” which would eliminate medieval traditionalism, deliberate ignorance, and authoritarianism. The fervor of the times can be understood by these words from a Prussian politician in 1875. To “enthusiastic cheers”, he said: “Gentlemen, anyone who believes in our day and age that he must carry his religion around with him; anyone who feels obliged to wear a particular dress, who swears grotesque vows, who bands together in herds, and who, when all is said and done, swears unconditional loyalty to Rome, the bitterest enemy of our young German and Prussian glory – such people can have no place in our state. That is why I say: away with them as soon as possible!” (Crisis Magazine, 2012)

Kulturkampf shows what a culture war becomes once it is converted into governance. To understand what made the Kulturkampf distinctive, it helps to recall how quickly it hardened into law.

In 1871, the German Empire was barely born, and Bismarck already viewed the newly organized Catholic Center Party (Zentrum) as a structural obstacle to national consolidation. The party defended Catholic interests in parliament, while the Church itself represented a transnational authority—Rome being an alternate locus of loyalty at the very moment the new state was trying to centralize sovereignty and standardize institutions. That is why the Kulturkampf still matters. It clarifies a recurring dynamic in modern politics: when an independent moral authority can mobilize citizens across state boundaries or partisan lines, governments often recast it as a threat to public order or national cohesion and respond by regulating, marginalizing, or absorbing it. In that sense, the Kulturkampf is less an episode of anticlericalism than a template for how states manage competing sources of legitimacy.

By late 1871, the state moved against Church infrastructure. A key early step was the “Pulpit Paragraph” (Kanzelparagraph, 1871), which criminalized certain forms of teaching from the pulpit. Then came the Jesuit Law (1872), which expelled the Jesuits from German territory—signaling that the state was willing not only to regulate church life but to remove religious leaders outright. Throughout the 1870s, pressures escalated. The secular levers were laws governing seminaries, bishops, and marriage. Today, the levers look more procedural but can be just as crippling: licensing boards and accreditation, conditions on public funding, employment and anti-discrimination laws, mandatory trainings, reputational blacklists, and the quiet shift from administrative policy to “moral” re-education.

What followed were the May Laws (Maigesetze) of 1873, often considered the legislative engine of the Kulturkampf. They placed the training, appointment, and discipline of clergy under state supervision, giving officials leverage over who could be recognized as a legitimate priest. In practical terms, the state now decided what kind of clergy could exist and on what terms.

Pressure escalated in 1874. Civil marriage displaced religious marriage in legal standing. Civil marriage became mandatory in Prussia by 1874 and then across the full German Empire by 1875, shifting marriage from a sacrament to a state-administered contract. Religious orders were restricted, and church property and internal governance were subjected to state approval. Bishops and clergy who resisted were fined, imprisoned, or removed.

The fight intensified in 1875 with the passing of the “Breadbasket Bill”, which allowed the state to withhold grants to dioceses if clergy refused to comply with the new laws. In some cases, Church assets were placed under state control or legal trusteeship, reducing bishops’ direct control over Church property. Kulturkampf was not a metaphor—it was an attempt at comprehensive state control. By the mid-1870s, thousands of clergymen faced prosecution or disciplinary action, and multiple Prussian dioceses were left effectively incapacitated as bishops were arrested, exiled, or blocked from exercising authority. Religious life was being damaged by design.

The Kulturkampf was a coordinated effort—supported by allied or quasi-public institutions—to subordinate competing moral voices, especially religious ones, under the banners of modernization, civic order, and social cohesion. It was a dark era of attempted social reconstruction. The state’s strategy was to re-engineer the religious community by controlling its institutions, leaders, language, and education.

History does not repeat itself neatly. Yet some of the impulses that powered the Kulturkampf have returned in our era. The comparisons rarely arrive as direct raids or explicit anti-church rulings. They act instead as aspirations rooted in contemporary progressivism. Traditional institutions must either bow to new moral orthodoxies or be treated as discriminatory and therefore unworthy of public standing. The spirit of the Kulturkampf shows itself whenever courts, agencies, and local jurisdictions re-script school curricula and professional standards in ways that treat dissent—especially on questions of sex, family, and anthropology—as actionable harm. 

That is the danger: a second Kulturkampf would likely arrive not as a single dramatic edict, but as a slow ratchet delivered in polite language and administered as speech codes, proxy censorship, deplatforming, even donor threats. Religious communities would be “tolerated” only on the condition they surrender their distinctives and moral beauty to the state. What begins as “harm reduction” and “inclusion” can harden into dogma that treats traditional belief as pathology, and once belief is diagnosed as a social illness, intimidation becomes easy to rationalize.

A modern Kulturkampf would not merely erode religious liberty in the abstract; it would tear at the fabric of healthy pluralism. Kulturkampf suffocates the freedom of public life. Debate and the collective good end once a state—or a state-like apparatus of institutions—learns how to bully into silence the moral contributions of its rival.

Another Kulturkampf is clearly possible. Even now, apprehension between secular and religious interests is high enough to ignite radical thinking. The deeper question is not whether society will change—it always does—but how it will change: through pendulum swings of radicalization, or by means of a healthy democracy that preserves basic rights while still making room for sincere dissent, especially through institutions like schools, charities, and religious communities—whose determination is to embody and transmit a moral vision.

Transmitting a moral vision is what the original Kulturkampf could never accomplish during its seven-year reign as a political movement. Instead, it caused widespread damage to the German people. Kulturkampf proved a clear failure. Rather than bringing the new Germany together, Bismarck’s approach created hostile divisions and weakened trust in the state’s moral standing, paving the road to the rapid acceptance of socialism. 

What the era of Kulturkampf did accomplish was clarifying the essential question for all governments: When does the state’s interest become strong enough to override conscience and institutional autonomy?

The answer is never.

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