Nazism, Christianity and Political Religion: A Debate

Abstract

The relationship of German National Socialism to religion in general, and Christianity in particular, has recently moved to the forefront of historical enquiry. The postwar decades saw the Churches publishing a large quantity of research and documentation testifying to their sufferings under nazism. Hundreds of priests and pastors had been arrested, many had been killed, lay organizations connected with the Churches had been forcibly closed down, and persecution had been general and severe. By the same token, it was argued, the Churches had offered more sustained resistance to the nazi regime than any other German institution had dared to do. Figures like the Protestant pastor Martin Niem6ller and the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer had protested loudly and clearly against nazism's inhumanity, while a series of critical encyclicals from the Vatican had been followed up in 1941 by possibly the single most effective act of resistance in the history of the Third Reich, the sermon preached by the Catholic Archbishop of Miinster, Cardinal Clemens von Galen, against the nazis' programme of mass murder directed against the allegedly mentally handicapped and mentally ill, a sermon that was distributed throughout the land and brought the programme to an abrupt end. Nazism, it was maintained, was a profoundly anti-Christian movement that preached an alternative, paganist religion founded on mythical gods of the Germanic Middle Ages, on Thor and Woden and their ilk. From Himmler's SS, which founded pseudo-pagan rituals of marriage and initiation for its officers, to the nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, whose widely-read book The Myth of the Twentieth Century preached a gospel of hatred against Christianity as essentially un-Germanic, the nazis rushed into the arms of a new, brutal pseudo-religion that sought to replace Christianity altogether. More recently, a variety of historians, particularly the Swiss specialist on nazi Germany Philippe Burrin, have taken up contemporary writings by philosophers such as Eric Voegelin, who saw in the entire practice of nazism a kind of political religion, where banners, rituals, ceremonies, the adoration of the Leader, the cult of sacrifice and much more, inspired the unthinking and fanatical devotion of millions by providing for their deepest emotional needs in an age rendered spiritually prosaic and meaningless by the decline of the Christian Churches and the inexorable processes of secularization. These various arguments have all encountered serious problems, however. Recent historical literature has been far more critical of the Churches than was the case in the 1950s and 1960s, when the idea of Christianity as funda-