Soren Kierkegaard

This journal entry is from 1849 and is one of the first in which Kierke-
gaard has begun to jack up the ideological price. That same year he read
A. G. Rudelbach’s work on the church constitution, and he fastened his
attention on a few pages that dealt with the threat to the state constituted
by the proletariat. Rudelbach maintained that the widespread poverty in
the country had been occasioned by war, population growth, and exploita-
tion, but he insisted that the real cause of the misery was that the church
had failed those without means, abandoning them to public relief and the
correctional system. Therefore, according to Rudelbach, in addition to the
causes already cited, there was the fact that “the State Church, with all its
worldly tendencies, is itself an essential cause of the formation of the modern proletar-
iat.” Kierkegaard declared himself in complete agreement and stressed that
the book’s “merit” was that it had shown “that the State Church had given
rise to or contributed to giving rise to the proletariat.” In other respects,
however, Kierkegaard felt that Rudelbach’s diagnosis had not been radical
enough. “Rudelbach himself seems not to have realized how much is im-
plied by all this,” Kierkegaard commented. “What is unchristian and un-
godly is to base the state on a substratum of people whom one ignores
totally, denying all kinship with them—even if on Sundays there are mov-
ing sermons about loving ‘the neighbor.’”
Once again, what Kierkegaard took exception to was the contradiction
between pastoral eloquence and everyday reality, but now his critique was
taking on a much more material “substratum.” In the same entry he re-
marked that, for him, this was a “dearly bought discovery.” The economic
allusion that echoes in his metaphor is scarcely accidental. Years earlier, he
had been a well-situated rentier with a high standard of living and relatively
little understanding of social questions, but now his fortune was so dimin-
ishedthatinhisdarkestmomentshebelievedthatabeggar’sstaffwasalready
waiting impatiently at the door.
Thus Kierkegaard had come to the realization that clerical conservatism
had enlisted Christianity in the service of social oppression, and that in so
doing the clergy had been guilty of fraud, both with respect to social issues
and with respect to Christianity. For Christianity is not primarily the reli-
gion of the establishment, but of vulnerable and marginalized people, out-
laws: “If Christianity has any special affinity for anyone,... then it is for
those who suffer, the poor, the sick, the lepers, the mentally ill and similar
people, sinners, criminals. And look what Christendom has done to them,
see how they have been removed from life so as not to create a distur-
bance—earnest Christendom....Christ did not divide people in this man-
ner; it was precisely for these people that he was pastor....What has hap-
pened to Christianity in Christendom is like what happens when you give