That They Intended To Destroy Christianity Has Been Known In The English Speaking World For More Than Half A Century But The Lie Lives

It is a strange business, all of the arguing about whether or not Nazism was a product of Christianity when the most obvious of all facts in that arguments is that it would be impossible to make a rational link between the primary source material of Christianity, the Gospels, the Acts, the various epistles and the ideology and, most important of all, the actions of the Nazis.  In almost any other part of life, if someone professed their motivation in their conduct as being x but their actions contradict everything about x the logical conclusion which would be universally accepted would be that they were lying about their real motivation.  Through cultural habits among the anti-religious elite, in this instance we are to believe that the x of Christianity is responsible for actions that were not only the opposite of what its founding documents commanded, but done by people who attacked and who stated an objective of destroying Christianity and were, indeed, in the process of doing that, replacing the real thing with its own, invented, Anti-Jesus who was stripped of his heritage as a Jew, turned into an Aryan, who had his words ripped from his mouth to be replaced by Nazi slogans in a cartoon balloon.   "Positive Christianity", an invention of the Nazi's official ideologue, hater of Christianity and atheist,  Alfred Rosenberg.   That "Positive Christianity" was, itself, a ruse to gull the German people who had been gulled in so many other ways, was evident from its stated intentions.  That has been known in the English speaking world for the past fifty-five years, since William Shirer wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  Page 240 is frequently cited because it gives the definitive evidence that any profession of Christianity by the central authority who defined Nazism and dictated its actions was as much a fraud and a sham as anything else they did or said.

What really aroused the Germans in the Thirties were the glittering successes of Hitler in providing jobs, creating prosperity, restoring Germany's military might, and moving from one triumph to another in his foreign policy.  Not many Germans lost much sleep over the arrests of a few thousand pastors and priests or over the quarreling of the various Protestant sects.  And even fewer paused to reflect that under the leadership of Rosenberg, Borhmann and Himmler, who were backed by Hitler, the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists.  As Bormann, one of the men closest to Hitler, said publicly in 1941,  “National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.”

What the Hitler government envisioned for Germany was clearly set out in a thirty-point program for the “National Reich Church” drawn up during the war by Rosenberg, an outspoken pagan, who among his other offices held that of “the Fuehrer's Delegate for the Entire Intellectual and Philosophical Education and Instruction for the National Socialist Party.”  A few of its thirty articles convey the essentials”

1.  The National Reich Church of Germany categorically claims the exclusive right and the exclusive power to control all churches within the borders of the Reich:  it declares these to be national churches of the German Reich.

5.  The National Church is determined to exterminate irrevocably… the strange and foreign Christian faiths imported into Germany in the ill-omened year 800.

7. The National Church has no scribes, pastors, chaplains or priests, but National Reich orators are to speak in them.

13.  The National Church demands immediate cessation of the publishing and dissemination of the Bible in Germany . . .

14.  The National Church declares that to it, and therefore to the German nation, it has been decided that the Fuehrer's Mein Kampf is the greatest of all documents.  It . . . not only contains the greatest but it embodies the purest and truest ethics for the present and future life of our nation.

18.  The National Church will clear away from its altars all crucifixes, Bibles and pictures of saints.

19.  On the altars there must be nothing but Mein Kampf ( to the German nation and therefore to God the most sacred book) and to the left of the altar a sword.

30.  On the day of its foundation, the Christian Cross must be removed from all churches, cathedrals and chapels . . . and it must be superseded by the only unconquerable symbol, the swastika. 

And that isn't even to mention the very heart of the matter, the complete and utter inversion of Christian morality that Nazism was and, unfortunately, still is.   Nazism is still influential in places wherever anti-semitism is prevalent.   In a number of countries it is a popular ideology, tellingly, in many places in Eastern Europe where the Communists suppressed its overt expression for a while, that the assumptions about religion and its place in the world, under the government is the definition of how religion under Communist regimes is regarded is, I think, instructive.   Article 1 as quoted above is certainly a common point between Nazism and most of the Communist governments.  I will note that it is reminiscent of some of the more clueless comments of "secularists" 

As an aside, I look at the "Reich Church" program and see a lot of what the Republican-right has done with religion in the United States, up to and even editing the Bible to alter the very heart of the Gospel because it is entirely incompatible with capitalism, especially in its most recent and most predatory forms.   The pseudo-Christianity of such "Christians" has more in common with the Nazis and the phony state-controlled churches of the most brutal Communist regimes than it does with any church that takes what Jesus said seriously.  That's what happens when you put Mammon before God. Corporate or state Mammonism is Mammonism. 

The other day I noted that mere profession of Christianity has never, from the time Jesus spoke the Gospel, been the definition of who was really following his teachings, he noted there would be frauds and phonies who spoke in his name.  The defining thing is the course of action and behavior of people, not their mere profession.  If the frequently misunderstood Lutheran idea of justification by faith and not "works" had something to do with making Germans susceptible to a bizarre falsification of Christianity, I don't know.  Lutherans weren't the only ones who were taken in and a lot of them weren't for a second.  When you're talking about religion, the mere classifier doesn't tell you a lot though in the casual generalization commonly taken to be intellectual activity that is the practice.  Things are never as neatly stated as serves ideology or any kind of lazy conclusion.  But the wide-spread and lazy-assed assertions about the relationship of Nazism to Christianity is only evidence of the decadence and rot and ideological dishonesty that our own, would be, public-intellectual class practices.  That there are real intellectuals, seldom those you hear on TV or on the radio and who seldom get printed in even the more popular of the "high-brow" magaznies who have done real research into discerning some of that truth, is also a fact of life.  Their work is ignored because it doesn't suit the commonly promoted line of thought which is as vulgar, intellectually, as it is pretentious and dangerous.  

Secularism, materialism, atheism has proven to be ineffective in countering fascism, right wing or pseudo-leftwing.  None of them have what it takes to avoid complete depravity, they are far more likely to contribute to it.   That faith that it would bring about a better life is a definitively failed religion that is based on lies.