The post-modern variant of autocracy is a thinly disguised plutocracy or oligarchy, buttressed by a populist swell of ochlocracy.
Institutional religion – hierarchical and utopian as it is – is an indispensable ally of such regimes.
Evangelicals support Trump, rabid Islamists spawn psychopathic movements like ISIS and Hamas, the religious right in Israel is Netanyahu’s bulwark, and Putin is chums with a nationalistic and obscurantist Pravoslav church.
But nowhere has this collusion been more evident than in the Third Reich. The similarities with the confluence of evangelism and Trumpism nearly a century later are blood-curdling.
The so-called “German Christians” within the “new church” understood their mission as MGGA (Make Germany Great Again) and, therefore, regarded the Nazis as natural collaborators.
Their agenda included the “Aryanization” of the church (by excluding Jewish converts to Christianity). Hitler’s agenda of race, blood, and soil felt divinely inspired and the Fuhrer was widely perceived to be a Messiah if not, sotto voce, the Second Coming.
Prominent theologian Paul Althaus argued that race was a “divinely ordained order of creation”. He welcomed with rupture Hitler’s brutal and gory ascension to power.
The German Christians regarded themselves as the newly chosen Volk and conflated the annals of Germany with the history of salvation.
Nazi Christians gravitated with ease to the new and virulent form of modern, industrial antisemitism. After all, the Jews, exiled from their homeland by the Romans, have always been immigrants in the diaspora. Antisemitism was not only a racial but also an anti-immigration, and an othering, xenophobic movement.
Mary Solberg in her book, “A Church Undone” has this to say:
“Most egregious of all, of course, was the church’s failure to act on behalf of the Jews. Ideologically, the German Christians outdid the Nazis. They married the racial antisemitism of the Nazis to the religious and theological anti-Judaism that had threaded its way through the Christian tradition for centuries. In this overwhelmingly Lutheran land, recruiting ‘the German prophet’ Martin Luther for their purposes was not difficult; his 1543 tract On the Jews and Their Lies, with its hateful and violent suggestions for how to treat the Jews in sixteenth-century Germany, seemed tailor-made for Nazi purposes in twentieth-century Germany. Perusing the documents in this volume, it appears that German Christians found it both convenient and compelling to embrace Luther, even to bracket him with Hitler as the two greatest Germans who ever lived.
German Christian leader Julius Leutheuser could write in 1935, ‘Our love for our fellow Germans is the confirmation of our faith in the fact that we are all children of God.’ No self-respecting Christian would object. To declare that Jews are no longer ‘fellow Germans’—after the Nuremberg Laws were promulgated (in 1935), they were no longer German citizens—is only a short step away from excluding them in thought, word, and deed, from the larger circle formed by all of us ‘children of God.’ Once that happens, all moral and ethical bets are off.”
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