Confessional Indifference in East Frisia

Abstract

Questioning the idealized conception of confessionalization, recent research emphasizes that in a remarkable number of parishes, people showed meaningful religious identities that were not confessionally based. This paper takes up corresponding Dutch approaches and applies them to the county of East Frisia during the early modern period. It discusses both religious attitudes on all social levels within the East Frisian society and the efforts of local authorities and preachers to establish confessional identities. By doing this, it suggests the term ‘confessional indifference’ as a category of historical research, borrowing from religio-sociological studies about religion in the modern world.