Fascists and Nazis Have To Destroy Christianity To Use It To Their Ends

The article by Tara Isabella Burton at Vox yesterday, The Bible says to welcome immigrants. So why don’t white evangelicals? made me think of another article, just a year ago by the great scholar Susannah Heschel  Aryan Jesus, on the Reformation’s Troubling Legacy, in which she points to some of the features of Protestant tradition and culture, its central focus on the test of The Bible and the history of historicism in Protestantism that began in the 18th century has made it vulnerable to similar political interpretations that the "Evangelicals" in the quickly congealing and not at all Nazi-unfriendly, American fascism.  First Vox:

The Bible contains numerous passages that seem to straightforwardly exhort care for the poor, immigrants, and refugees. Isaiah 10, for example, sees God excoriating those who “turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right.” In Matthew 25 (which a Methodist pastor quoted to Jeff Sessions Monday while protesting his speech), Jesus warns his followers that those who withhold care from the poor or the refugee — “the least of these” — are seen as having done it to Jesus himself. Plenty of other verses — Leviticus 19:33–34, Jeremiah 7:5–7, Ezekiel 47:22, Zechariah 7:9–10 — express similar sentiments.

[Note that that is a teaching which Christianity took from the Jewish tradition because Christianity IS INESCAPABLY JEWISH and that goes to the very substance of it and not as a mere act of adopting the Jewish Scriptures which Jesus and Paul and James cite and quote.  When the Nazis cut everything they deemed to be Jewish, to produce Die Botschaft Gottes (sometimes called "Hitler's Bible")they had to cut out about 60% of the contents of the hardly Jewish friendly Martin Luther's translation of the Second Testament.  I would say that pretty much shows that the major part of Christianity is Jewish. ]

Generally speaking, white American evangelicals have, at least since the 1970s, been wary of counting nonwhites or non-Americans among this “least.” As historian Randall Balmer has frequently argued, the rise of the Moral Majority and the Reagan-era political evangelical religious right in America was due as much to objections to desegregation as to more obvious contentious issues like LGBTQ rights and abortion. For as long as white evangelicals have been a politically robust force, white American identity, GOP party politics, and evangelical theology have been all but inextricable.

That said, the age of Trump — and the Christian nationalism he has frequently evoked as a rhetorical campaign strategy — has seen white evangelical nativist rhetoric take on a more politicized role. As Messiah College professor and historian John Fea told Vox in September, white evangelical pastors — and thus their parishioners — are increasingly willing to take their sermon talking points and “marching orders” from an administration buoyed, in part, by its embrace of nativism.

And Susannah Heschel on the insane attempt by Lutheran theologians and pastors to do the impossible, remove the Jewish content of Christianity:

Various theological strategies were employed during the nineteenth century to distance Jesus from Judaism, but with the rise of racial theory suggestions began to circulate that Jesus was not a Jew, but rather an Aryan, born in the Galilee, where an ethnically mixed population lived. Pastors and theologians called for a Germanic Christianity, with some arguing that each race and nationality should have its own, separate church. A large and powerful pro-Nazi faction within the Protestant church of Germany, called the “Deutsche Christen,” arose in 1932 and developed a Christianity that was manly, antisemitic, and anti-doctrinal, as the historian Doris Bergen has shown. In Germany some of the most prestigious professors of theology joined the effort during the Third Reich, including Paul Althaus, Emanuel Hirsch, and Gerhard Kittel.

Despite protests from other theologians, these efforts did not disappear during the first years of the Third Reich, but reached a climax in 1939 with the establishment of an “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life.” At the forefront of the Institute was the eradication of Judaism: the Old Testament was eliminated from the Christian Bible, Jesus was declared to have been Aryan not a Jew, and the Epistles of Paul (himself a Jew) were reduced to a few hortatory lessons.

The effort to dejudaize Christianity was not simply a response to a theological problem, but to Nazi antisemitism, using its language and images. Grundmann, who joined the Nazi party in 1930, warned in 1933 of “the syphilization of our Volk though sexual relations, miscegenation, and the hybridization of races” that was destroying its cultural-building capacities. He lauded Hitler’s recognition that racial mixing was a “sin against nature and an injustice against the Creator.” The aim, in other words, was not only to shape a pure, un-Jewish Christianity, but to create a Germany free of Jews. Ridding Germany of Jews was not only a goal serving the German people, but also Germany’s world-historical mission.

At a rally in 1936, Grundmann declared, “there is an assault against the West, unleashed by the Bolsheviks of the world, behind whom stands the Jew, and the Germans are once again the Reich Volk. . . . Our Volk has been chosen to halt the avalanche of the Bolsheviks and the Jews on behalf of the entire West – and therefore in its deepest sense the word receives its meaning: the German Volk are the Anti-Jews [Gegenvolk der Juden]!” With the outbreak of the war, the Institute viewed itself as essential to victory: “the struggle against the Jews has been irrevocably turned over to the German Volk.” The war against the Jews was not simply a military battle, but a spiritual battle: “Jewish influence on all areas of German life, including on religious-church life, must be exposed and broken.”

The Institute’s goals were stated forthrightly at its opening by Grundmann, who delivered the keynote lecture on “The Dejudaization of the Religious Life as the Task of German Theology and Church.” The present era, he declared, was similar to the Reformation: Protestants had to overcome Judaism just as Luther had overcome Catholicism. “The elimination of Jewish influence on German life is the urgent and fundamental question of the present German religious situation.” Yes, Grundmann noted, people in Luther’s day could not imagine Christianity without the Pope, just as today they could not imagine salvation without the Old Testament, but the goal could be realized. Modern New Testament scholarship had made apparent the “deformation of New Testament ideas into Old Testament preconceptions, so that now angry recognition of the Jewishness in the Old Testament and in parts of the New Testament has arisen, obstructing access to the Bible for innumerable German people.”

It is incredibly ironic that the very thing that the Reformation was based in, at least on an intellectual basis, the text of The Bible, made it necessary for those who wanted to have Protestantism without Judaism shred the very text, bastardize it, distort it and twist it in the very same ways that American "Evangelicals" have in order to make Evangelical "Christianity" conform to the worst of American racist tradition.

It's no coincidence that both verses in the Saga of Depravity rhyme and even repeat, that is always necessary when the pretense is that you are going to take the religion of Jesus and turn it into everything that he, Paul, James, and all of those through whom his substance is translated rejected.

In the fourth chapter of Luke, he begins with Jesus after his baptism, having gone into the desert fasting and praying for 40 days, Satan, not knowing just what kind of man he's watching,  comes to tempt him.  First he tempts him through his hunger, no doubt aided by the pangs of hunger Jesus would have been feeling, to break his fast. He tells him that he can turn stones into bread.  Jesus answers, "Scripture says, People cannot live on bread alone."  Then Satan tempts him by taking him up to a high place and presenting him a vision of the entire world, promising it to Jesus if he would worship him he would give him all of the power and wealth of the world.  Jesus again answers from scripture, "You shall worship the Lord your God and serve God alone".   Then Satan brings him center of official Jewish worship, The Temple and sets him on a high wall and challenges him to throw himself off - which I interpret to be his challenge to Jesus to prove he is not mortal - But this time unlike the other two, Satan quotes scripture to make his challenge, "For it is written that "God will order his angels to take care of you," and "they will hold you in their hands for fear you'll hurt your foot on a stone".   Satan was tempting Jesus through fear of mortality, perhaps the most basic of human fears, to prove to himself what Satan believed was his greatest vulnerability.  Jesus used Scripture to answer that, noting that Scripture forbids testing God.

The people who have monopolized the term "Evangelicals" do the same thing that Satan does in that story and, since one thing is true about all of us, whatever else we are, we ain't no Jesus, they have a lot more success with doing that than Satan did in that story.

These issues deserve a lot more time than I can give them here and now.  Please do read both articles.  Susannah Heschel, especially, is always worth reading and listening to.

NOTE: There are a significant number of people who accept the label "Evangelical" who don't do that, though they are certainly a minority in the American evangelical wing of Protestantism.  There are liberal Evangelicals who organized against Trump and for Hillary Clinton in the election, though they, like all Christian liberals in the United States are disappeared by the media.  I certainly don't include them in this anymore than Susannah Heschel included all German Protestants in her brilliant article.

The "white Evangelicals" who comprise the group referred to as that are not any more Christian than the Nazis who shredded the Bible into Die Botschaft Gottes to make it conform to their politics and economic convenience.  They are just another group of European baptized pagans whose politics and economics have always been as destructive of Christianity no matter what the framing and naming of it has been over the centuries.