Studies of the Max Kade Institute

also the nemesis of confessional Lutherans in outstate Missouri
because he used his enormous prestige to encourage congregations
not to demand strong dogmatic commitments from either members or
pastors.1 The prevailing style of the newspapers of St. Louis, and of
the vocal elements of German society prior to 1848, was sceptical of
dogmatic religion, even anticlerical, but not specifically antireligious.
When the Old Lutherans arrived in St. Louis from Saxony in 1839
under the leadership of Bishop Martin Stephan, they were greeted
with hoots from the Anzeiger des Westens. Themostradicalenemy
of organized religion in St. Louis, Heinrich Koch, then wrote for the
Anzeiger, but later he also edited several anticlerical or communist
papers of his own, with time off to fight in the Mexican War.3
The failed 1848 revolution led to an emigration of a much
sterner variety of rationalist, one who was nurtured on the severe
critique of religion itself by such men as Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer,
Arnold Ruge, or Karl Marx-a critique which had surfaced in the
course of the 1840s. Their specific theological teacher was the
revolutionary Anglo-American Thomas Paine, understood in a rather
dogmaticTeutonicmanner.4 There were still many revolutionaries,
true republicans, whose vision of religious liberty remained rather
traditional, if only because they viewed established religion as a
moral framework necessary to public life: a draft constitution for a
German republic in the papers of Friedrich Hecker of Mannheim
and Summerfield, Illinois, appeared to concede religious liberty
only within the four walls of a private person's lodgings, while
beyond those confines the "Christian moral teaching" (christliche
Tugendlehre), free from all sect-making (Sektenmacherei), was the
state religion.5
The turn to the new variety of freethinker in St. Louis was
marked by the arrival of two Forty-Eighters, Franz Schmidt and
Heinrich Bdrnstein. Schmidt's brief and stormy life has yet to find
its biographer, but at least its outlines are clear. Born in Nieder-
Saltzbrunn in Upper Silesia on 28 November 1818, Schmidt had
come to radical politics out of a religious commitment, and there are
signs that he remained essentially a religious thinker to the end. The
Silesian weavers' revolt of 1844 had caused many to ask critical
questions about the existing political and economic system. By
1846 at the latest, Schmidt was corresponding with the leaders of
the Communist League (Bund der Kommunisten), whose secretary

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