The purpose of Part I of this study is to identify the religious and political threads of meaning that eighteenth-century Württemberg Protestants wove into a seamless web that had “meaning creating significance” for the culture of Old-Württemberg as a whole. The argument will be that this “web of signification” can be talked about in terms of the ideal of Protestant civil piety and that that ideal constituted the conceptual axis upon which discussion of religious and political matters in Old-Württemberg turned for most of the eighteenth century.

As has been noted, Württembergers borrowed from the theological anthropology of the Aufklärer to articulate this religiopolitical conception. There were, to be sure, many striking affinities between the Pelagianizing tendencies that were inherent in the Aufklärers' conception of homo religiosus and the requirements for citizenship that were implicit in the Württembergers' ideal of civil piety.