a movement, originating in the Lutheran Church in Germany in the 17th century, that stressed personal piety over religious formality and orthodoxy.
the principles and practices of the Pietists.
(lowercase) intensity of religious devotion or feeling.
(lowercase) exaggeration or affectation of piety.
a less common word for piety
excessive, exaggerated, or affected piety or saintliness
1690–1700; < German Pietismus < Latin piet ( ās ) piety + German -ismus -ism
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The difference was that he could not imagine finding that experience within Pietism.
From The New Yorker ● Nov. 12, 2018
His faith was grounded in personal Pietism, a doctrine that ignored the political origins of injustice.
From Economist ● Mar. 28, 2018
Renewed spiritual fervor and personal conviction gripped the German churches in a movement known as Pietism.
From Textbooks ● Jan. 18, 2018
He does offer some valuable hints, insisting, for example, on the importanceof the 17th- and 18th-century religious revival known as Pietism, which urged believers to devote themselves to improving life on earth.
From New York Times ● Jul. 16, 2010
Though he might not have recognised the label, Bach’s faith falls within the movement known as German Pietism, which reached its high-water mark in his lifetime.
From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall
He “decries Irish society’s conservatism, pietism and blinkered nationalism” in his writing, according to an essay from the Irish Emigration Museum curator Jessica Traynor.
From The Guardian ● Oct. 17, 2019
Father James is a modest, deeply humane man of the cloth: gruff, taciturn, utterly innocent of the cruelty, corruption and overweening pietism for which the Catholic church has been criticized in recent years.
From Washington Post
Everything which even remotely smacked of mysticism and morality, of pietism and romanticism, or even of idealism, was suspected and sharply interdicted or bracketed with reservations which sounded actually prohibitive!
From Time Magazine Archive
The girl is obviously intended to personify what is false in Spanish pietism; the uncle signifies the sickness of the ruling classes.
From Time Magazine Archive
His style and thought were strongly tinged with mysticism, and with a singular undogmatic pietism, as well as with strong but speculative republicanism in politics.
From A Short History of French Literature by Saintsbury, George
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
