During the Prussian Landtag debate of 7 May 1875 on the prohibition of religious orders and congregations, the National Liberal deputy Georg Jung lent expression to a central feature of the Kulturkampf: the symbolic exclusion of Catholicism from the hegemonial version of national culture. This process had been underway since the end of the eighteenth century. To enlightened Protestant North Germans, Catholicism appeared exotic and alien. In the nineteenth century, the ‘orientalist’ image of a static, historyless Catholic world served as a foil to the construction of a modern identity that was secular but confessionally coloured. While the decisive protagonists of the Kulturkampf, the liberals, saw Protestantism – which for most was their own confessional affiliation – as compatible with modernity, they perceived Catholicism as ‘modernity's other’.

At first glance, this perceived dichotomy appears to be borne out by the inner development of both confessions.