Germans had prevailed. This tradition of anti-Catholicism came to expression in Bismarck’s Kulturkampf (struggle for civilization). To Bismarck, the Roman clergy, clothed in arcane vestments, looked like foreign agents, a threat to the goals of the German empire. Although Bismarck’s efforts to suppress the Roman Catholic Church largely failed, the dominance of Protestant Christianity remained uncontested. Although political and social liberalism was in decline, theological liberalism ascended in