Hence all attempts are “a priori” discredited that would overcome the present confliction strivings and needs of individuals and raise them to a true totality by means of a planned transformation of the social relations of production. Negations, p. 22.

A classless society…is the goal, but a classless society on the basis of the and within the framework of –the existing class society.
Negations, p. 21.

Christian Faith in Dark Times: Theological Conflicts in the Shadow of Hitler.
book reviews
by Keith Clements Findarticles.com
April, 1995

Fifty years after the surrender of Nazi Germany and the end of the second world war, the twelve years of Hitler's rule still put the most searching questions to Western society, and to the churches in particular. Why was Hitler's accession to power in January 1933 hailed so widely by Christians, Protestants and Catholics alike, and not only at the popular level of street or pew, but by some of the most renowned and sophisticated theologians of the day? It is right that we continue to be inspired by heroes such as Barth and Niemoller, and resisters like Bonhoeffer. But the more discomforting question is why they were untypical.

Jack Forstman's study is therefore to be welcomed as a contribution to a profoundly important, continuing enquiry. As he states in his eloquent introduction, it remains a crucial theological question for today whether and how we can recognize the demonic in society -- at the stage when the evil is still potential rather than fully manifest. Forstman concentrates on seven Protestant professors who were already into their academic maturity by 1933: Karl Barth, Emanuel Hirsch, Paul Tillich, Friedrich Gogarten, Georg Wunsch, Paul Althaus and Rudolf Bultmann. With admirable fairness and lucidity (in what could be a bewilderingly tangled story) he traces their respective stances towards each other, to the Nazi revolution, and in turn to each other's responses to that earthshaking event. Barth and Bultmann, early allies in the dialectical theology movement, remained consistently opposed to the Nazification of theology and church. Barth's great service in being the chief inspiration of the Barmen Confession always deserves underlining. Less often acknowledged is Bultmann's acerbic dismissal of the pseudo-religious Germanic mythology and his forthright denunciation of the proposed "Aryan paragraph". Tillich, largely on account of his religious socialism, fell foul of the regime very early on.

The most tragic figure in the whole drama is Emanuel Hirsch. Of brilliant mind and immense knowledge, and with a passionate desire to revitalize the life of his tired, dispirited and demoralized fellow-Germans after 1918, he was also remarkably close to Tillich on both a personal and intellectual level. Yet he hailed the Nazi era as (to use Tillich's kind of language) a positive kairos. Hitler, he believed, had a God-given mission to unify and uplift the German nation. Hirsch supported the anti-Jewish measures of the 1930s, by which "non-Aryans" were dismissed from civil office and excluded from business life, as an unfortunate necessity. Paul Althaus, perhaps the greatest exponent of Luther of the time, likewise greeted the new Nazi age -- though by 1937 he realized his mistake. Hirsch remained unrepentant for the rest of his life.

Even among those who agreed over the main issue, there were at times sharp disagreements. Barth disagreed with Tillich on the matter of membership in the socialist party, and with Bultmann on the oath of loyalty to Hitler. But overall perhaps the most illuminating case is the bitter dispute between Tillich and Hirsch, precisely because in many respects they were so close. They shared the insight that Christianity always requires a concrete, historical cultural context in which to express itself. But whereas Tillich maintained the "Protestant principle" that finite historical forms are never to be identified with the transcendent, unconditioned reality to which they point, for Hirsch the contemporary historical moment became everything in itself. Germany, its Volk and its national aspirations, became not just the context but the actual content of theology, ultimate concerns in themselves. For Tillich the scene had to remain open to the unremaining criticism of a transcendent perspective, otherwise there would be idolatry.

Obviously any such survey must be selective. But it is strange that no more than a footnote is given to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in whom German Protestantism found its most decisive anti-Nazi embodiment, both theologically and politically. Bonhoeffer may have received over-exposure in some respects, but that is all the more reason to bring him out of his "saintly isolation" into the context of these other figures. Nor can this exclusion be justified on the grounds that "Bonhoffer (sic) was just beginning his theological work in 1933, and his most important work came later". In fact by 1933 Bonhoeffer already had two major treatises to his credit, Sanctorum Communio (written in 1927!) and Act and Being (1930), in both of which he argued with Barth. Bultmann and several of the other senior contemporaries. Both works -- and others, especially his Berlin university lectures on Christology (1933) -- are crucially important for an understanding of his later ecclesiological and social thought.

However, this study will certainly make more accessible to English-speaking students a crucially important piece of modern theological history and some of its chief players. It complements Robert P. Ericksen's closely related study Theologians Under Hitler (Yale University Press, 1985), of which, surprisingly, there is no mention by Forstman, not even when dealing with Althaus and Hirsch who, along with Gerhard Kittel (whom Forstman does not mention either), form the focus of the earlier study. I would argue strongly for keeping Forstman and Ericksen as companion volumes. Forstman shows deeper and more precise understanding of the theological issues themselves, and deals with more figures. Ericksen, however, has a surer grasp of the wider social and intellectual context of post-1918 Germany, and above all of the crisis which modernity was posing for the theologians.

But in neither book is there finally a clear and satisfactory answer to this crucial question: whether one type of theology rather than another guarantees a surer perception and response to politicized evil. That is not necessarily a fault in these or any other such works. Perhaps the question itself is wrong. Maybe we are here expecting a little too much of theology in itself, as an intellectual discipline. Recognizing the devil (or not) takes place at a much more primal level, in the very guts of what it is to be human and to have faith.

Keith Clements is coordinating secretary for international affairs in the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland.

A Nation Under God
by John Sugg
November/December 2005 Issue
MotherJones.com

Let others worry about the rapture: For the increasingly powerful Christian Reconstruction movement, the task is to establish the Kingdom of God right now:from the courthouse to the White House.

TRINITY CHAPEL in suburban Atlanta’s Cobb County is hardly the picture of a revolutionary outpost. It’s a stylishly modern Church of God’a denomination that, though conservative, is certainly mainstream. Parishioners are drawn from a community whose average income is a comfortable 35 percent above the national norm, whose tree-lined country roads intersect McMansion subdivisions. If Norman Rockwell were painting suburban sprawl, he’d likely pick Cobb County.

On a Friday last April, Trinity’s parking lot filled with SUVs and luxury sedans as about 400 faithful gathered inside the sanctuary. The church was host to Restore America, a rally to ‘celebrate faith and patriotism’ sponsored by Christian publisher American Vision. In the lobby, neatly blue-blazered youths were hawking So Help Me God, Roy Moore’s account of his dethroning as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Tables were piled with textbooks for homeschoolers, tomes denouncing evolution, booklets waxing nostalgic for the antebellum South. That afternoon the congregants, who’d come to the conference from conservative churches around the region, would hear from Sadie Fields, president of Georgia’s Christian Coalition, and they’d sway in rhythm as country crooner Steve Vaus sang ‘We Must Take America Back.’

But the marquee pitchman of the day was Moore. Ruggedly handsome, with the military bearing he acquired at West Point, Moore has gained a rock-star following on the Christian right’a Moses to lead the chosen from a godless society. The judge has a stunning memory for long literary passages and judicial opinions, and he chants them in the singsongy, down-home style of Southern demagogues from Theo Bilbo to George Wallace’’God’ is ‘Gawud,’ with an upward lilt. When he proclaimed that ‘God is still sovereign, no matter what federal judges say,’ the crowd tittered and applauded. When he intoned that ‘there is no right to sodomy in the Constitution,’ they cheered. When he roared that unless judges ‘acknowledge God,’ they ‘should be impeached,’ the righteous noise shook the rafters.

It could have been nothing more than a half-hour rebel yell’except that Moore is more than the latest prophet of the religious right. He stands a good chance of being the next governor of Alabama; he’s also arguably the single most significant politician to owe his ascendancy to Christian Reconstruction’an obscure but increasingly potent theology whose top exponents hold that Christian crusaders must conquer and convert the world, by the sword if necessary, before Jesus will return.

Moore has never declared himself a Reconstructionist. But he is a frequent orator at gatherings whose organizers are part of the movement. The primary theologians, activists, and websites of Reconstruction laud him as a hero. Moore’s lawyer in the Ten Commandments fight, Herb Titus, is a Reconstructionist, as are many of his most vocal supporters, including Gary DeMar, the organizer of the Restore America rally and the head of American Vision, one of the most prolific publishers of the movement.

Reconstruction is the spark plug behind much of the battle over religion in politics today. The movement’s founder, theologian Rousas John Rushdoony, claimed 20 million followers’a number that includes many who embrace the Reconstruction tenets without having joined any organization. Card-carrying Reconstructionists are few, but their influence is magnified by their leadership in Christian right crusades, from abortion to homeschooling.

Reconstructionists also exert significant clout through front organizations and coalitions with other religious fundamentalists; Baptists, Anglicans, and others have deep theological differences with the movement, but they have made common cause with its leaders in groups such as the National Coalition for Revival. Reconstruction has slowly absorbed, congregation by congregation, the conservative Presbyterian Church in America (not to be confused with the progressive Presbyterian Church [USA]) and has heavily influenced others, notably the Southern Baptists.

George W. Bush has called Reconstruction-influenced theoretician Marvin Olasky ‘compassionate conservatism’s leading thinker,’ and Olasky served as one of the president’s key advisers on the creation of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Bush also invited Reconstructionist Jack Hayford, a key figure in the Promise Keepers men’s group, to give the benediction at his first inaugural. Deposed House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, though his office won’t comment on his religious views, governs with what he calls a ‘biblical worldview’’one of Reconstruction’s signature phrases. And, for conspiracy buffs, two heavy contributors to the Chalcedon Foundation’Reconstruction’s main think tank’are Howard Ahmanson and Nelson Bunker Hunt, both of whose families played key roles in financing electronic voting machine manufacturer Election Systems & Software. Ahmanson is also a major sponsor of ultraconservative politicians, including California state legislator and 2003 gubernatorial candidate Tom McClintock.

Yet for all its influence, Reconstruction is almost invisible to the media and secular society. Atlanta is ground zero for most Reconstruction activity’home office to DeMar’s publishing house and home district to movement prophet Larry McDonald, who served four terms in Congress in the 1970s and 1980s’but the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has done only one major article on the movement. The entire Lexis-Nexis database includes only 43 articles from all of the U.S. media that make reference to Reconstruction, and only a handful of those explore the movement. ‘A hundred years ago, newspapers published the sermons preachers preached on Sunday,’ notes Ed Larson, a University of Georgia historian. ‘Everyone knew what the Baptists believed, or the Lutherans or the Presbyterians. That’s no longer the case. And it has worked to the benefit of Reconstructionists as they doggedly pursued their goal.’

Reconstructionists aren’t shy about what exactly it is they are pursuing: ‘The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise,’ Gary North, a top Reconstruction theorist, wrote in his 1989 book, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism. ‘Those who refuse to submit publicly’must be denied citizenship.’

WITH HIS KHAKI PANTS and checkered shirts, Gary DeMar could be one of a million guys meeting weekly in men’s groups at churches around the country. Bright and articulate, he’s soft-spoken until he gets in front of a crowd. His publishing house distributes hundreds of tracts, more than 20 of them written by DeMar himself, with titles such as The Politically Incorrect Guides to Islam (and the Crusades), which promises ‘all the disturbing facts about Islam and its murderous hostility to the West,’ and The Marketing of Evil, which covers everything ‘from easy divorce and unrestricted abortion-on-demand to extreme body piercing and teaching homosexuality to grade-schoolers.’

I first met DeMar 18 months ago at his church, Midway Presbyterian, in the Atlanta suburb of Powder Springs, where he was teaching a class on government. During the session, a teenage homeschooler talked about how he had tried in a paper to prove that the family is a form of ‘Christian government.’ ‘You don’t have to prove that,’ DeMar gently chided, and then added, with more heat: ‘That’s established’established by God!’ DeMar’s lecture focused on the ‘three governments’’family, church, and state’all of which, he told me, should be ruled by God-fearing men.

The Old Testament’with its 600 or so Mosaic laws’is the inflexible guide for the society DeMar and other Reconstructionists envision. Government posts would be reserved for the righteous, as long as they are male. There would be thousands of executions a year, with stoning a preferred method because it would turn the deaths into ‘community projects,’ as movement theologian North has noted. Sinners in line for the death penalty would include women who commit adultery or lie about their virginity, blasphemers, witches, children who strike their parents, and gay men (lesbians, however, would be spared because no specific reference to them can be found in the Books of Moses). DeMar told me that among Reconstructionists he is considered something of a liberal, because he’d execute gays only if they were caught indulging in sodomy. ‘I’m happy to just drive them back into the closet,’ he said.

In introducing Moore at the Trinity Chapel rally, DeMar told the crowd that he supports a ‘jurisdictional separation of church and state.’ But he was not mounting a defense of the First Amendment so much as outlining an organizational distinction. In his book Liberty at Risk, DeMar writes that ‘the State cannot be neutral towards the Christian faith. Any obstacle that would jeopardize the preaching of the Word of God’must be opposed by civil government.’

Besides facilitating evangelism, Reconstructionists believe, government should largely be limited to building and maintaining roads, enforcing land-use contracts, and ensuring just weights and measures. Unions would not exist, and neither would unemployment benefits, Social Security, and environmental protection laws. Public schools would disappear; one of the movement’s great successes has been promoting homeschooling programs and publishing texts used by tens of thousands of homeschooling families. And, perhaps most importantly, the state is ‘God’s minister,’ as DeMar puts it in Liberty at Risk, ‘taking vengeance out on those who do evil.’ A major task for the government key Reconstructionists envision is fielding armies for conquest in the name of Jesus.

Reconstruction’s premises may fly in the face of mainstream Christianity, and some of its leaders’ beliefs would probably surprise even the movement’s own foot soldiers. But what has made the theology such an explosive addition to public life is not its dogma on individual issues so much as its trumpet call to action. This is a faith in which religion is not an influence on politics; it is politics.

FOR DECADES AFTER the 1925 Scopes monkey trial, Christian fundamentalists were almost invisible in civic discourse. Then, in 1981, a book by scholar Francis Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto, heralded a counterattack. America, Schaeffer argued, was careening into the abyss of humanistic secularism. Christians needed to take bold action to restore biblical principles and erase divisions between religion and civic life. To ignite the movement, Schaeffer mapped out a battle campaign’a crusade against abortion, which, he said, ‘would be worth spending much of our lifetimes to fight against.’

For years, the antiabortion movement had been mostly Catholic. Schaeffer understood that the cause had the potential to galvanize broad masses of Protestants. ‘Schaeffer made abortion an issue for Christians more than anyone else, and he commanded Christian soldiers to start marching,’ says the University of Georgia’s Larson. Manifesto sold almost 250,000 copies the year after Ronald Reagan became president’a period when the nation was veering to the right after becoming exhausted from the social movements of the previous two decades.

If Schaeffer was Reconstruction’s John the Baptist, Rushdoony was its pope. Born in 1916 to Armenian immigrants, Rushdoony graduated from the University of California-Berkeley before becoming an ardent foe of secular education and the author of a series of texts that redefined conservative theology.

Rushdoony, who died in 2001, articulated a doctrine called ‘presuppositionalism.’ All issues are religious in nature, he posited, and people don’t have the right or the ability to define for themselves what’s true; for that they must turn to a literal reading of the Bible. His defining tome, the 800-page Institutes of Biblical Law, was published in 1973. But because of its extremism and overt racism’Rushdoony denied the Holocaust and defended segregation and slavery’Institutes and its author were largely ignored in mainstream circles until the movement launched by Schaeffer found its intellectual grounding in Rushdoony’s writings.

At the heart of Rushdoony’s argument were two biblical passages. Genesis 1:28 commands men to have ‘dominion’ over ‘every living thing.’ And in Matthew 28:18-20, the ‘Great Commission,’ Jesus commands his followers to proselytize to the world. Thus was born dominion theology. (Not all dominionists are Reconstruction apostles’but the differences are a matter of theological finesse, and political strategies are largely indistinguishable.) Adam and Eve broke their covenant with God, and Satan seized dominion. Christian Reconstruction claims it has a reconstituted covenant with God and the right to a new dominion in his name.

In this worldview, the mandate for Christians is not just to live right or to help their neighbors: They are called upon to take over or eliminate the institutions of secular government.

This is what sets Reconstruction apart from the conventional Christian right and gives it a key advantage in organizing.

Traditionally, groups like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority were ‘premillennial’: They believed that humanity was inevitably headed for Armageddon, which would most likely arrive with a nuclear blast, whereupon Christ would appear in the Second Coming and set things right. ‘The debate was over whether Brezhnev was the Antichrist,’ says the University of Georgia’s Larson.

Reconstruction’s alternative was ‘postmillennialism’: Christ would not return until the church had claimed dominion over government, and most of the world’s population had accepted the Reconstruction brand of Christianity. The postmillennial twist offered hope to the pious that they could change things’as long as they got organized. (Reconstructionists angrily denounce end-times visions like those of Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series: If these are the Last Days, American Vision’s website points out, ‘then why bother trying to fix a broken world that is about to be thrown on the ash heap of history? Why concern ourselves with education, healthcare, the economy, or peace in the Mideast? Why polish brass on a sinking ship?’)

For premillennialists, Reconstruction’s revolutionary philosophy offered an opportunity to turbocharge the religious right. Most conservative churches opposed abortion, for example, but Reconstruction-influenced groups such as Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue were willing to field soldiers and take the fight to the enemy. This not only emboldened activists, it gave Reconstructionists a chance to spread their organizing message: If you want to do God’s work, this needs to be God’s nation.

Similarly, Baptist morality focused on personal choices, such as avoiding drinking. But Reconstructionists didn’t tell believers to shun sin. They said to conquer it, even if the price was jail or martyrdom. Paul Hill, the antiabortion activist executed two years ago for the 1994 murders of abortion clinic workers in Pensacola, Florida, had been a minister in the Reconstruction-dominated Presbyterian Church in America.

The old left’the Communist Party and its many splinters’used organizing tactics called popular fronts, in which people were recruited through specific causes into a movement tacitly guided by the Party. Reconstruction has married those Leninist tactics to the causes of the right’abortion, evolution, gay marriage, school prayer. Gary North wrote in 1982, in an effort to reach Baptists,’We must use the doctrine of religious liberty’until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy constructing a Bible-based social, political, and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.’ Nowhere at the Restore America rally did anyone hoist a banner for Reconstruction; those attending came to develop a united front supporting such things as displaying the Ten Commandments in public buildings. But they were also introduced’and recruited’to the broader program.

Reconstruction’s major impact has been through helping to found and guide cross-denominational and secular political organ-izations. The Council for National Policy’a group that holds meetings for right-wing leaders, once dubbed ‘the most powerful conservative group you’ve never heard of’’was founded in 1981 as a project of top John Birch Society figures (see ‘The Fountainhead’). Its members included Rushdoony, Gary North, Tim LaHaye, former Reagan aide Gary Bauer, and activist Paul Weyrich, who famously aimed to ‘overturn the present power structure of this country.’

Another group, the Coalition on Revival, brings together influential evangelicals to produce joint statements and theological white papers. North and DeMar are among the coalition’s most influential members; one of its founding documents is signed by 116 Christian right activists, including Rushdoony, mega-evangelist D. James Kennedy, and Roy Jones, a top staffer at the Republican Senatorial Committee.

When I last saw Gary DeMar, he was shepherding Roy Moore through a crowd of true believers at the Restore America rally. As they walked by, I asked Moore, ‘Do you favor a theocracy?’ The judge turned and looked at me, shook his head, frowned, and walked away. But DeMar, in our interview, had already answered the question.

‘All governments are theocracies,’ he said. ‘We now live in a secular humanist theocracy. I want to change that to a government with God at its head.’

John Sugg is senior editor for the Creative Loafing group of alternative newsweeklies. Before joining Tampa's Weekly Planet in 1995, he wrote and edited for the Miami Herald, Atlanta Constitution, Palm Beach Post, and American Lawyer. He is at work on a book on the history of the antievolution movement in Georgia.

The Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism
by Chris Hedges
Nov 15, 2004
ThirdworldTraveler


Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School , told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global, Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as The Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States . It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolph Hitler placed over the contents inside his suitcase to hide the rolls of home movie film he took of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied them, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the top of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Fuhrer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black and white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge .

He saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of religion, rise to dismantle the open society. He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil nor the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand wringing by Democrats in the wake of the election, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them "demonic" and "satanic," would not have surprised Adams . Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the Biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.

His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was no less withering. These institutions, self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort. He told me that if the Nazis took over America "60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures with the Nazi salute." This too was not an abstraction. He had watched academics at the University of Heidelberg , including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class.

Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian Right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian Right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Christian fundamentalists now hold a majority of seats in 36 percent of all Republican Party state committees, or 18 of 50 states, along with large minorities in 81 percent of the rest of the states. Forty-five Senators and 186 members of the House of Representatives earned between an 80 to100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups - The Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma , has included in his campaign to end abortion a call to impose the death penalty on doctors that carry out abortions once the ban goes into place. Another new senator, John Thune, believes in Creationism. Jim DeMint, the new senator elected from South Carolina , wants to ban single mothers from teaching in schools. The Election Day exit polls found that 22 percent of voters identified themselves as evangelical Christians and Bush won 77 percent of their vote. The polls found that a plurality of voters said that the most important issue in the campaign had been "moral values."

President Bush must further these important objectives, including the march to turn education and social welfare over to the churches with his faith-based initiative, as well as chip away at the wall between church and state with his judicial appointments, if he does not want to face a revolt within his core constituency.
Jim Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, who held weekly telephone conversations with K arl Rove during the campaign, has put the President on notice. He told ABC's "This Week" that "this president has two years, or more broadly the Republican Party has two years, to implement these policies, or certainly four, or I believe they'll pay a price in the next election."

Bush may turn out to be a transition figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck used "values" to energize his base at the end of the 19 th century and launched "Kulturkampt", the word from which we get "culture wars," against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck 's attacks split the country, made the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of the civil discourse and paved the way for the more virulent racism of the Nazis. This, I suspect, will be George Bush's contribution to our democracy.

DOMINIONISTS AND RECONSTRUCTIONISTS

The Reconstructionist movement, founded in 1973 by Rousas Rushdooney, is the intellectual foundation for the most politically active element within the Christian Right. Rushdooney's 1,600 page three-volume work, Institutes of Biblical Law, argued that American society should be governed according to the Biblical precepts in the Ten Commandments. He wrote that the elect, like Adam and Noah, were given dominion over the earth by God and must subdue the earth, along with all non-believers, so the Messiah could return.
This was a radically new interpretation for many in the evangelical movement. The Messiah, it was traditionally taught, would return in an event called "the Rapture" where there would be wars and chaos. The non-believers would be tormented and killed and the elect would be lifted to heaven. The Rapture was not something that could be manipulated or influenced, although believers often interpreted catastrophes and wars as portents of the imminent Second Coming.

Rushdooney promoted an ideology that advocated violence to create the Christian state. His ideology was the mirror image of Liberation Theology, which came into vogue at about the same time. While the Liberation Theologians crammed the Bible into the box of Marxism, Rushdooney crammed it into the equally distorting box of classical fascism. This clash was first played out in Latin America when I was there as a reporter two decades ago. In El Salvador leftist priests endorsed and even traveled with the rebel movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador, while Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, along with conservative Latin American clerics, backed the Contras fighting against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the murderous military regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile and Argentina.

The Institutes of Biblical Law called for a Christian society that was harsh, unforgiving and violent. Offenses such as adultery, witchcraft, blasphemy and homosexuality, merited the death penalty. The world was to be subdued and ruled by a Christian United States. Rushdooney dismissed the number of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust as an inflated figure and his theories on race echoed Nazi Eugenics.
"The white man has behind him centuries of Christian culture and the discipline and selective breeding this faith requires...," he wrote. "The Negro is a product of a radically different past, and his heredity has been governed by radically different considerations."

"The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and the purposes of the magic are control and power over God, man, nature, and society. Voodoo, or magic, was the religion and life of American Negroes. Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo, a modernized power drive." (see The Religious Right , a publication of the ADL, pg. 124.)

Rushdooney was deeply antagonistic to the federal government. He believed the federal government should concern itself with little more than national defense. Education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches. Biblical law must replace the secular legal code. This ideology remains at the heart of the movement. It is being enacted through school vouchers, with federal dollars now going into Christian schools, and the assault against the federal agencies that deal with poverty and human services. The Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is currently channeling millions in federal funds to groups such Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing , and National Right to Life, as well as to fundamentalist religious charity organizations and programs promoting sexual abstinence.

Rushdooney laid the groundwork for a new way of thinking about political involvement. The Christian state would come about not only through signs and wonders, as those who believed in the rapture believed? , but also through theestablishment of the Christian nation. But he remained, even within the Christian Right, a deeply controversial figure.

Dr. Tony Evans, the minister of a Dallas church and the founder of Promise Keepers, articulated Rushdooney's extremism in a more palatable form. He called on believers, often during emotional gatherings at football stadiums, to commit to Christ and exercise power within the society as agents of Christ. He also called for a Christian state. But he did not advocate the return of slavery, as Rushdooney did, nor list a string of offenses such as adultery punishable by death, nor did he espouse the Nazi-like race theories. It was through Evans, who was a spiritual mentor to George Bush that Dominionism came to dominate the politically active wing of the Christian Right.The religious utterances from political leaders such as George Bush, Tom Delay, Pat Robertson and Zell Miller are only understandable in light of Rushdooney and Dominionism. These leaders believe that God has selected them to battle the forces of evil, embodied in "secular humanism," to create a Christian nation. Pat Robertson frequently tells believers "our aim is to gain dominion over society." Delay has told supporters, such as at a gathering two years ago at the First Baptist Church in Pearland , Texas , "He [God] is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for biblical worldview in everything I do and everywhere I am. He is training me, He is working with me." Delay went on to tell followers "If we stay inside the church, the culture won't change."

Pat Robertson, who changed the name of his university to Regent University , says he is training his students to rule when the Christian regents take power, part of the reign leading to the return of Christ. Robertson resigned as the head of the Christian Coalition when Bush took office, a sign many took to signal the ascendancy of the first regent. This battle is not rhetorical but one that followers are told will ultimately involve violence. And the enemy is clearly defined and marked for destruction.

"Secular Humanists," the popular Christian Right theologian Francis Schaeffer wrote in one of numerous diatribes, "are the greatest threat to Christianity the world has ever known."

One of the most enlightening books that exposes the ultimate goals of movement is America's Providential History , the standard textbook used in many Christian schools and a staple of the Christian home schooling movement. It sites Genesis 26, which calls for mankind to " .have dominnion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth" as evidence that the Bible callls for "Bible believing Christians" to take dominion of America.
"When God brings Noah through the flood to a new earth, He reestablished the Dominion Mandate but now delegates to man the responsibility for governing other men." (page 19). The authors write that God has called the United States to become "the first truly Christian nation" (page 184) and "make disciples of all nations." The book denounces income tax as "idolatry," property tax as "theft" and calls for an abolish of inheritance taxes in the chapter entitled Christian Economics. The loss of such tax revenues will bring about the withering away of the federal government and the empowerment of the authoritarian church, although this is not explict in the text.

Rushdooney's son-in-law, Gary North, a popular writer and founder of the Institute for Christian Economics, laid out the aims of the Christian Right.

"So let's be blunt about it: We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God." (Christianity and Civilization, Spring, 1982)
Dominionists have to operate, for now, in the contaminated environment of the secular, liberal state. They have learned, therefore, to speak in code. The code they use is the key to understanding the dichotomy of the movement, one that has a public and a private face. In this they are no different from the vanguard, as described by Lenin, or the Islamic terrorists who shave off their beards, adopt western dress and watch pay-for-view pornographic movies in their hotel rooms the night before hijacking a plane for a suicide attack.

Joan Bokaer, the Director of Theocracy Watch, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University , who runs the encyclopedic web site theocracywatch.org, was on a speaking tour a few years ago in Iowa . She obtained a copy of a memo Pat Robertson handed out to followers at the Iowa Republican County Caucus. It was titled, "How to Participate in a Political Party" and read:
"Rule the world for God."
"Give the impression that you are there to work for the party, not push an ideology.
"Hide your strength.
"Don't flaunt your Christianity.
"Christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control political parties and so it is very important that mature Christians have a majority of leadership whenever possible, God willing."
President Bush sends frequent coded messages to the faithful. In his address to the nation on the night of September 11, for example, he lifted a line directly from the Gospel of John when he said "And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it." He often uses the sentence "when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law," words taken directly from a pro-life manifesto entitled "A Statement of Pro-Life Principle and Concern." He quotes from hymns, prayers, tracts and Biblical passages without attribution. These phrases reassure the elect. They are lost on the uninitiated.

CHRIST THE AVENGER

The Christian Right finds its ideological justification in a narrow segment of the Gospel, in particular the letters of the Apostle Paul, especially the story of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus in the Book of Acts. It draws heavily from the book of Revelations and the Gospel of John. These books share an apocalyptic theology. The Book of Revelations is the only time in the Gospels where Jesus sanctions violence, offering up a vision of Christ as the head of a great and murderous army of heavenly avengers. Martin Luther found the God portrayed in Revelations so hateful and cruel he put the book in the appendix of his German translation of the Bible.

These books rarely speak about Christ's message of love, forgiveness and compassion. They focus on the doom and destruction that will befall unbelievers and the urgent need for personal salvation. The world is divided between good and evil, between those who act as agents of God and those who act as agents of Satan. The Jesus of the other three Gospels, the Jesus who turned the other cheek and embraced his enemies, an idea that was radical and startling in the ancient Roman world, is purged in the narrative selected by the Christian Right.

The cult of masculinity pervades the ideology. Feminism and homosexuality are social forces, believers are told, that have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus is portrayed as a man of action, casting out demons, battling the Anti-Christ, attacking hypocrites and castigating the corrupt. This cult of masculinity brings with it the glorification of strength, violence and vengeance. It turns Christ into a Rambo-like figure; indeed depictions of Jesus within the movement often show a powerfully built man wielding a huge sword.

This image of Christ as warrior is appealing to many within the movement. The loss of manufacturing jobs, lack of affordable health care, negligible opportunities for education and poor job security has left many millions of Americans locked out. This ideology is attractive because it offers them the hope of power and revenge. It sanctifies their rage. It stokes the paranoia about the outside world maintained through bizarre conspiracy theories, many on display in Pat Robertson's book The New World Order . The book is a xenophobic rant that includes vicious attacks against the United Nations and numerous other international organizations. The abandonment of the working class has been crucial to the success of the movement. Only by reintegrating the working class into society through job creation, access to good education and health care can the Christian Right be effectively blunted. Revolutionary movements are built on the backs of an angry, disenfranchised laboring class. This one is no exception.

The depictions of violence that will befall non-believers are detailed, gruesome and brutal. It speaks to the rage many believers harbor and the thirst for revenge. This, in large part, accounts for the huge sales of the apocalyptic series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. In their novel, Glorious Appearing , based on LaHaye's interpretation of Biblical Prophecies about the Second Coming, Christ eviscerates the flesh of millions of non-believers with the mere sound of his voice. There are long descriptions of horror, of how "the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin." Eyes disintegrate. Tongues melt. Flesh dissolves. The novel, part of The Left Behind series, are the best selling adult novels in the country. They preach holy war.

"Any teaching of peace prior to [Christ's] return is heresy." said televangelist James Robinson.
Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, instability in Israel and even the fighting of Iraq are seen as signposts. The war in Iraq was predicted according to believers in the 9 th chapter of the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of men." The march towards global war, even nuclear war, is not to be feared but welcomed as the harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms millions of non-believers to a horrible and painful death.

THE CORRUPTION OF SCIENCE AND LAW

The movement seeks the imprint of law and science. It must discredit the rational disciplines that are the pillars of the Enlightenment to abolish the liberal polity of the Enlightenment. This corruption of science and law is vital in promoting the doctrine. Creationism, or "intelligent design," like Eugenics for the Nazis, must be introduced into the mainstream as a valid scientific discipline to destroy the discipline of science itself. This is why the Christian Right is working to bring test cases to ensure that school textbooks include "intelligent design" and condemn gay marriage.

The drive by the Christian Right to include crackpot theories in scientific or legal debate is part of the campaign to destroy dispassionate and honest intellectual inquiry. Facts become interchangeable with opinions. An understanding of reality is not to be based on the elaborate gathering of facts and evidence. The ideology alone is true. Facts that get in the way of the ideology can be altered. Lies, in this worldview, become true. Hannah Arendt called this effort "nihilistic relativism" although a better phrase might be collective insanity.

The Christian Right has fought successfully to have Creationist books sold in national park bookstores in the Grand Canyon , taught as a theory in public schools in states like Alabama and Arkansas . "Intelligent design" is promoted in Christian textbooks. All animal species, or at least their progenitors, students read, fit on Noah's ark. The Grand Canyon was created a few thousand years ago by the flood that lifted up Noah's ark, not one billion years ago, as geologists have determined. The earth is only a few thousand years old in line with the literal reading of Genesis. This is not some quaint, homespun view of the world. It is an insidious attempt to undermine rational scientific research and intellectual inquiry.

Tom Delay, following the Columbine shootings, gave voice to this assault when he said that the killings had taken place "because our school systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial mud." (speech Delay gave in the House on June 16, 1999 )
"What convinces masses are not facts," Hannah Arendt wrote in Origins of Totalitarianism, "and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the "masses" inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important because it convinces them of consistency in time." (p.351)
There are more than 6 million elementary and secondary school students attending private schools and 11.5 percent of these students attend schools run by the Christian Right. These "Christian" schools saw an increase of 46 percent in enrollment in the last decade. The 245,000 additional students accounted for 75 percent of the total rise in private school enrollment.

THE LAUNCHING OF THE WAR

Adams told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to homosexuals. He has seen how the Nazis had used "values" to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered culminating with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin . Thousands of volumes from the institute's library were tossed into a bonfire. Adams said that homosexuals would also be the first "deviants" singled out by the Christian Right. We would be the next.

The ban on same sex marriages, passed by eleven states in the election, was part of this march towards our door. A 1996 federal law already defines marriage as between a man and a woman. All of the states with ballot measures, with the exception of Oregon , had outlawed same sex marriages, as do 27 other states. The bans, however, had to be passed, believers were told, to thwart "activist judges" who wanted to overturn them. The Christian family, even the nation, was under threat. The bans served to widen the splits tearing apart the country. The attacks on homosexuals handed to the foot soldiers of the Christian Right an easy target. It gave them a taste of victory. It made them feel empowered. But it is ominous for gays and for us.

All debates with the Christian Right are useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday School. These naive attempts to reach out to a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to them that we too have "values," would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. They hate us. They hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution. Our opinions do not count.

This movement will not stop until we are ruled by Biblical Law, an authoritarian church intrudes in every aspect of our life, women stay at home and rear children, gays agree to be cured, abortion is considered murder, the press and the schools promote "positive" Christian values, the federal government is gutted, war becomes our primary form of communication with the rest of the world and recalcitrant non-believers see their flesh eviscerated at the sound of the Messiah's voice.

The spark that could set it ablaze may be lying in the hands of an Islamic terrorist cell, in the hands of the ideological twins of the Christian Right. Another catastrophic terrorist attack could be our Reichstag fire, the excuse used to begin the accelerated dismantling of our open society. The ideology of the Christian Right is not one of love and compassion, the central theme of Christ's message, but of violence and hatred. It has a strong appeal to many in our society, but it is also aided by our complacency. Let us not stand at the open city gates waiting passively and meekly for the barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching rudely towards Bethlehem . Let us, if nothing else, begin to call them by their name.

Chris Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times, is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning . He holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School . His next book , Losing Moses on the Freeway: America 's Broken Covenant With The Ten Commandments is published by The Free Press.

Yesterday and Today: Nazis and the Righteous Right
by Donna Glee Williams
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0502-33.htm

History is tapping us on the shoulder and pointing. The sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz followed so closely by the popification of an ex-member of the Hitler Youth combine to force our attention back to the Nazi catastrophe. We study World War II and the Holocaust and ask ourselves “How could it happen? How could civilized people let it come to this? How could they consent to let their flag become the registered trademark for collective evil and let their country walk into history with the blood of millions on its conscience?” We shake our heads and turn away from the questions because our historical gaze is dazzled by the enormity of what happened in the 1940’s. “Never again!” we say with tears in our eyes.
But if we truly want some calamity to happen Never Again, we won’t just study that calamity. We’ll study what went before. We’ll study its precursors. What allowed, invited, or caused it to happen? Who were catastrophe’s midwives? If we learn to recognize them, there is hope that we can turn them away when they again show up, smiley-faced, at our door. Before World War II and the Holocaust, there was Germany of the 1920’s and ‘30’s. That’s where we need to focus our cross-generational telescopes.

If we take a look at pre-WWII Germany, we notice it has some things in common with the United States now. Start with the concept of exceptionality. Nazi ideology grew out of Germans’ belief that their country was uniquely privileged because it was uniquely valuable. This made them an exception to rules and norms. The average “Proud to Be an American” bumper-sticker-buyer believes the same thing. (I’m still waiting for some churchgoing patriot to notice that being born American is a gift of grace and to begin marketing “Humble to be an American” decals.) A belief in your country’s exceptionality takes you way out beyond the warm self-appreciation of patriotism; in naming your heritage “exceptional,” you cut your ties to the family of nations and set yourself above the rules. Our belief in our own exceptionality erodes the walls that hold back human greed, fear of otherness, and violence. Exceptionality makes the unthinkable possible, even reasonable.

Before the Nazi rise to power, German society bloomed with cultural, artistic, and social openness, as did the United States in the last third of the twentieth century. The dominant culture enriched itself by cross-pollinating with other groups. Creativity, innovation, and freedom held sway in art, music, drama, and dance. In lifestyle choices, openness and experimentation were possible.

A part of this bubbling cultural ferment was caused by physics. We think of physics as an esoteric branch of science that is of interest only to the The Few, The Proud, The Geeks whose quirky neuroanatomy makes them able to emote in equations. But where physics goes, culture follows. The big metaphors in all areas are based on the physics of our time. And both Nazi Germany and the American Whatever-the-Hell-You-Call-What-We-Are-Becoming were preceded by advances in physics that announced reality to be much different from what we’d always assumed it to be. In the early part of the twentieth century, Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s physics of relativity and uncertainty—largely centered in German universities—proclaimed that some of our most fundamental understandings about the universe were Wrong, Wrong, Wrong. As quantum mechanics and the new cosmology developed in the later part of the twentieth century—largely centered in U.S. universities—their outrageous paradoxical observations once again taught the lesson that common sense isn’t always right. Things aren’t always—or ever—the way they seem.

In physics as in lifestyle and the arts, Germany and the United States both saw a great questioning of old values, limits, and presuppositions of all kinds—followed by an iron backswing of the pendulum rushing to shut down all the openness, answer all the questions, replace uncertainty with certainty, and relativism with absolutes. Does our anxiety in the face of uncertainty and relativity drive us to cook up fake certainties, like which language is better, who is going to Hell, who must live, and who should die? Did Germany, and will the United States, overcompensate for being uncertain like Napoleon did for being short?

Another family resemblance between Germany of the ‘20’s and ‘30’s and the Righteous Right of today is the feeling that somebody done us wrong. For Germany, the sense of being aggrieved was related to the famously vindictive Treaty of Versailles that settled the overt hostilities of World War I but left Germans with smoldering bitterness against what they saw as injustice and injury. The core resentment that energizes the swing toward right-wing “Christian” totalitarianism is the confusing, painful panic at seeing The Way and The Truth become one of many ways and many truths. As one pulpiteer expressed it, “having our culture become a subculture” is felt as a wound, an assault. On September 11th, the cultural assault on our inner landscape then manifested as a physical attack on our outer landscape, echoing the unsolved burning of the Reichstag building in 1933. Then, as now, terrorism coupled with an effective propaganda machine helped those in power to bring the country together while separating it from its civil rights. Once we feel ourselves to be under attack, are there any limits to what we will permit in the name of “self-defense?”

The backlash against openness and uncertainty, together with perceived national victimization, led Germany to begin to pick off voices of dissent in its own house. Some of these were political. Some were religious. German Christian churches were systematically nazified. The governing boards of seminaries were taken over seat by seat. Seminary faculties were pruned of opposition, guaranteeing that the pulpits of Germany would spout preaching that supported the Nazi agenda. The prophetic voice of the church was silenced. The systematic right-wing takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, board by board, professor by professor, pulpit by pulpit, is so eerily similar that it could be an echo of the same shout.

And then there were the Jews. For historical reasons, the Nazi party had, ready to hand, a tiny subgroup of people that they could call “evil” and have that name stick. Once the “evil” was identified, people projected onto the Jews every disowned trait they hated in themselves. Enormous energy was mobilized to oppress, exile, and destroy the theoretically contagious corruption of Jewishness. The righteousness of the cause was “proved” by the visceral disgust the oppressors felt towards the oppressed. Hatred kept the dominant group bonded, energized, focused, and easy to manipulate. Today, similar rhetoric is mobilizing hatred for another tiny minority, homosexuals, who are similarly represented as undermining the entire fabric of American life and values. In the same way, appeals to disgust as a moral arbiter “prove” the validity of the argument. Incidents of violence against gays remind us of the spotty street violence against Jews that came before the systematic, state-sponsored violence of the Holocaust.


They say that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat trite sayings. But when history lands a big one-two punch like “Happy Birthday, Auschwitz Survivors, Now Guess Who’s Pope?” the teacher gets our attention. And what we notice are a lot of parallels between the Nazi rise to power 80 years ago and the “Christian” right-wing rise to power today. Do we keep our wide-eyed mystification—“How could they have done those things?”—or do we do what Germans failed to do, what we revile them for not doing: Do we recognize the road we’re on, wrestle the steering wheel away from the mad bus-driver, and stop the bus before we get to the last stop, the town of Ultimate Consequences, Pop. 11 Million?

Donna Glee Williams is the Director of the Holocaust Education Program at the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching and a free-lance writer. In 2005, NC Governor Mike Easley appointed her to the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust. She is also a registered nurse.

Muscular Christianity: Masculine Christianity vs Feminized Christianity
From Austin Cline
Source

What is Muscular Christianity?:
Because churches had become so associated with women and feminization, in the late 19th century Christian men began seeking changes in the nature of Christianity and Christian churches which reflected “masculine” values. In America, this early form of Muscular Christianity used sport as a conveyor or moral values, like manliness and discipline. Today sport is used mostly as a vehicle for evangelization, but the basic principle that Christianity must be “manly” survives in other contexts.

Christianized Germans & Warrior Christianity:
War and the warrior life were central to the Germanic tribes which assumed control of the Roman Empire. In order for Christianity to survive, Christian leaders had to adapt their religion to the Germanic warrior ethos. The Germans were Christianized, but Christianity was militarized in the process. Jesus became a young warrior, Heaven became Valhalla, and the disciples became a war band. This was the earliest effort to transform Christianity from something soft or feminine into something manly.

Muscular Christianity in Nazi Germany:
Traditional masculine qualities played a very important role in Nazi rhetoric, so of course Nazi Christians preferred a masculine Christianity over a feminine one. True Christianity, they claimed, was manly and hard, not feminine and weak. Adolf Hitler described Jesus, “my Lord and Savior,” as “a fighter.” His Jesus, and the Jesus of German Christians generally, was a militant warrior fighting for God, not a suffering servant accepting punishment for the sins of the world.

Muscular Chrisitianity & American Fundamentalism:
An important aspect of early American fundamentalism was reclaiming the Christian church for men. This meant first reducing women’s power in churches by questioning the legitimacy of their authority, and second, injecting the language of virility, heroism, and militarism into Christian doctrine. Contemporary clergy was derided as too weak and feminine; a call went up for manly ministers like the early American pioneers. They wanted a militant, aggressive Christian church.

Muscular Christianity with a Muscular Jesus:
Successfully transforming Christianity into a more militant and muscular ideology required a role model, a muscular and militant Jesus. Stories of Jesus’ aggressiveness, like cleansing the temple, received new emphasis. Even iconography of Jesus was transformed, with Jesus becoming portrayed literally with large muscles and in fighting stances. American Christians developed a muscular Jesus to lead a new, muscular Christianity in conquering modernity and disbelief.

Muscular Christianity & Sports:
Given how men have historically dominated sports, it’s only natural that they would become a locus of Muscular Christianity. In the late 19th century, Christian men joined fraternal groups which emphasized exercise. With the growth of professional sports during the 20th century, Christian athletes argued that the body is a temple to God, making athletes quasi-priests. Of particular importance for evangelical Christians has been the use of high school and college sports to promote Christianity.

Muscular Christianity & Christian Women:
Because Muscular Christianity focuses on replacing feminine qualities with masculine virtues, it necessarily involves attacks on women in the church. The attacks may be subtle, but there is an inevitable denigration of everything associated with women. By insisting that Jesus, God, and the Christian church are masculine and specifically not feminine, the message is sent that feminine qualities are inferior to everything masculine. Women are also blamed for problems in the church.

Muscular Christianity and the Promise Keepers:
Perhaps the latest and most prominent example of a public push for a more Muscular Christianity is the rise of the Promise Keepers movement. Founded by Bill McCartney, a football coach, it was deigned to provide a forum for men to explore their Christianity in the exclusive company of other men. The Promise Keepers was created to promote masculine values, manly virtues, and ultimately a transformed Christian church in America where men can feel more at home and (of course) in charge.

Women, Men, and Gender Demographics in Christianity:
An important assumption used in the promotion of Muscular Christianity was the idea that women had taken over the Christian church — that at one time in the past, Christianity had been a masculine religion but something had been lost. Evidence indicates, however, that Christian demographics have always trended primarily female. Women have always held important leadership roles in the churches, but men have resented this and kept them as far in the background as possible.

Muscular Christianity as an Assault on Liberalism, Modernity:
Muscular Christianity was founded upon a radical, as well as theological, distinction between supposedly masculine and feminine values. Becaue of this, it was possible for fundamentalists opposed to modernity to transfer what they disliked about modernity to the “feminine” category. Thus women became bearers of all that was hated about the modern world while men were invested with everything good and positive.

A significant impetus behind the assault on women and modernity was the feeling that women had encroached upon traditional male spheres like the workplace and colleges. Furthermore, women’s leadership in the churches had harmed Christianity by creating an effeminate clergy and a weak sense of self. All of this was associated with liberalism, feminism, women, and modernity.

Although examples of something like muscular Christianity can be found in ancient Christianity and in Europe, it is primarily an American phenomenon and an American fundamentalist reaction against the modern era of equality and liberty. Muscular Christianity pushes masculinity in part by pushing traditional hierarchies and traditional structures of authority — structures which, naturally, are run and controlled by men. Fighting against the “feminization” of church or society is, thus, a fight against the loss of traditional privileges and power.

Indeed, the development of fundamentalism and later the Christian Right can be described, at least in part, as a reaction against equality and an attempt to defend or restore traditional privileges. Because so many privileges are bound up with traditions which themselves are tied closely with religion, it’s natural that assaults on traditional privileges will be seen as assaults on religion.

In a way, they are an assault on religion — religion is partially to blame for the persistence of unjust privileges in society. Just because inequality and privilege have religious backing doesn’t make them exempt from rational evaluation and criticism.

Muscular Christianity
pacificviews.org

The National Council of Churches recommended a new documentary looking at the state of Christianity under Hitler. They noted that in the 1930s Germany thought of itself as a most Christian country and that Hitler was a blessing from God because he was bringing the word of God to the world.

The church under Hitler: unified and defiant? Look again.

The documentary film, Theologians Under Hitler, examines post-war Allied revisionism and the portrait of a German church unified, defiant against Nazism. Historical research uncovers a very different story. The film, scheduled for PBS release November 9 (check local listings), is an effort by producer Steven D. Martin and his company; Vital Visuals, Inc., to ask what this history teaches us about religious faith, institutions, ourselves and evil. Based upon the research of Robert Erickson, Ph.D. (Pacific Lutheran University), the film introduces the viewer to three of the greatest Christian scholars of the twentieth century: Paul Althaus, Emanuel Hirsch, and Gerhard Kittel, -- men who were also outspoken supporters of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

You can watch a excerpt from the film here.

In the Germany of the 1930s, the most renowned theologians were firmly in the camp of Hitler.

This film, based upon groundbreaking research, introduces the viewer to three of the greatest Christian scholars of the twentieth century: Paul Althaus, Emanuel Hirsch, and Gerhard Kittel, men who were also outspoken supporters of Hitler and the Nazi party. In 1933 Althaus spoke of Hitler's rise as "a gift and miracle of God." Hirsch saw 1933 as a "sunrise of divine goodness." And Kittel, the editor of the standard reference work on the Jewish background of the New Testament, began working for the Nazis to find a "moral" rationale for the destruction of European Jewry.

According to the film, religion was transformed from the meek and apologetic Christianity which many thought was too feminine to a muscular movement which attracted strong young men and those who found their brand of forceful and righteous anger attractive. The churches gloried in their patriotism, displayed national flags and honored the war heroes. And those who found this message compelling were strongly anti-intellectual. Too many brains and too much reason was seen as suspect. They compared Hitler to Jesus (favorably) and declared that the "Third Reich is God's Kingdom".

Today, concerned Christian leaders are asking, can what happened in Germany happen again? And what could we learn from the experience of Germany?

There are some signs that our own religious tradition is displaying some of the same ominous traits. During the last days in the runup to war, there were many stories about how George W. Bush had come to believe that he was the arm of God, put on this earth to smite the infidels.

Gary Wills wrote an oped before the start of the war worrying about how [url=http://mars-or-bust.blogspot.com/2003_03_30_mars-or-bust_archive.html#91899449Christianity was being co-opted [/url] by the warriors. He wrote about the lengths the American Christian leaders had gone in justifying the upcoming war. Even Catholic priests found reason to beat the drums of war rather than listen to their Pope who was actively trying to stop the illegal war.

The priests who do not bow to the War God are, in a chaplain's words that Dreher quotes with approval, reinforcers of the notion that ''religion is for wimps, for prissy-pants, for frilly-suited morons.'' This is what used to be called ''muscular Christianity,'' and Dreher thinks it is the only authentic form of his faith.

This year in May Harper's Magazine had several investigative pieces on the Christian Right. One of the movements they investigated was the most powerful Mega-Church in the US: the New Life Church, run by Pastor Ted Haggard. As Harper's reported, Haggard's New Life Church defines what it means to be evangelical:

...[evangelicals are an] army of Christian capitalists.... "They're pro-free market, they're pro-private property," he said. "That's what evangelical stands for."

...he describes the church that good Christians want: "I want my finances in order, my kids trained, and my wife to love life. I want good friends who are a delight and who provide protection for my family and me should life become difficult someday... I want stability and, at the same time, steady forward movement. I want the church to help me live life well, not exhaust me with endless 'worthwhile' projects." By "worthwhile projects" Ted means building funds and soup kitchens alike. It's not that he opposes these; it's just that he is sick of hearing about them and believes that other Christians are, too. He knows that for Christianity to prosper in the free market, it needs more than "moral values" - it needs customer value.

New Lifers, Pastor Ted writes with evident pride, "like the benefits, risks, and maybe above all, the excitement of a free-market society." ... He believes it is time "to harness the forces of free-market capitalism in our ministry."


Pastor Ted sees the New Lifers as the bulwark against Islam.

"My fear," he says, "is that my children will grow up in an Islamic state."

And that is why he believes spiritual war requires a virile, worldly counterpart. "I teach a strong ideology of the use of power," he says, "of military might, as a public service." He is for preemptive war, because he believes the Bible's exhortations against sin set for us a preemptive paradigm, and he is for ferocious war, because "the Bible's bloody. There's a lot about blood."


If Pastor Ted is the leader of the fastest growing church and he wields the power on politicians that this article says, then I fear our some American versions of Christianity have way too much in common with that of Hitler's Germany.

Update: rephrasing the conclusion as Jack K's point is valid. There is a faux-Christianity in this country that gets too much attention. Describing it as Christianity is a blasphemy on what Jesus actually preached.

Nazism had Strong Ideological Roots in Christianity
A new book by Richard Steigmann-Gall called The Holy Reich argues Nazism was not just a neo-pagan movement.

The ABC radio network in Australia has a project called The Religion Report which on Septembe 17, 2003, presented an interview with Richard Steigmann-Gall concerning his book The Holy Reich. We are reprinting the transcript of the interview below for archival purposes due to its significance for the topic of public theology.

Public Theology

--------------------

The Religion Report: 17 September 2003 - The Holy Reich

[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/relrpt...ies/s946813.htm]

Stephen Crittenden: Welcome to the program.

*Radio introduction plays MUSIC – PARSIFAL OVERTURE

Who said that Jesus was “the true God”, that the goal of his own movement was to “translate the ideals of Christ into deeds”; who said “we are the first to exhume these teachings through us alone, and not until now do these teachings celebrate their resurrection. Mary and Magdalene stood at the empty tomb, for they were seeking the dead man, but we intend to raise the treasures of the living Christ”.

Well, you may be surprised to learn that those are the words of Adolf Hitler, quoted in an important new book that challenges the conventional wisdom that Nazism was a neo-pagan movement, and that it was hostile not just to the Christian churches, but to Christianity itself.

Richard Steigmann-Gall is Assistant Professor of History at Kent State University in Ohio, and his new book The Holy Reich has just been published by Cambridge University Press.

He argues that far from being anti-Christian, Nazism saw itself as the embodiment of practical Christianity. Indeed, Point 24 of the Nazi Party Program of 1920 says the Party represents the standpoint of “positive Christianity”, without tying itself to a particular confession. Many Nazi Party elite had a serious interest in religious questions that went well beyond the pragmatic or cynical manipulation of conservative mainstream German public opinion. Some leading Nazis even saw the movement as a completion of the Reformation begun by Martin Luther.

Richard Steigmann-Gall is speaking to me from the studios of Radio WKSU-FM in Ohio.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: What we’ve learned a great deal about in the last several decades is that churchmen in Germany – and churchwomen for that matter – oftentimes held a very favourable view of Nazism, but that has always been assumed to be part of a larger picture where the Nazis never reciprocated the affections. Hitler’s Pope is a book that’s just come out, as well as others, that suggests that even as far up as the Papacy, the Vatican, you had either an ambivalent attitude towards Nazism or outright affection for Nazism – but again, the flipside of the coin, what the Nazis had to say about Christians has until now, not really been systematically analysed.

Stephen Crittenden: Well, let’s come to the Catholics in a moment, but let’s start with the idea that Nazism was a neo-pagan movement. That’s a very widely held popular view, isn’t it, that Nazism grew out of the secularisation of German culture in the 19th century, and that it’s particularly associated with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and his idea of the death of God? Now, having read your book, you come away with the sense that it was anything but.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: In a word: yes. There is a branch of the Nazi movement, which I label paganist, and they are people who supposed that they were trying to propagate a new faith which was actually based on an old faith, that Nazis supposed that the Teutonic forefathers of Germany back in the misty Middle Ages, had been worshipping more Germanic religions, Wotan, this sort of thing.

Stephen Crittenden: Blood and soil.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Exactly. And Himmler and his cohorts profess an interest in resurrecting these older religions.

Stephen Crittenden: Right. And what about Rosenberg, who is the ideologue of this kind of view?

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Absolutely. He’s front and centre, he writes prolifically about the new religion that he wants to shape for the “New Germany”, as the Nazis call it, and so he is very much squarely in the middle of this movement to put in a new religion, if you will.

Stephen Crittenden: There’s a key book by Rosenberg, isn’t there, called The Myth of the 20th Century?

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Yes, absolutely, a very thick book, seven-hundred-plus pages, which – as he discovered after 1945 during the Nuremberg trials – few of his colleagues ever actually read, it was just so ponderous. The point I would make, Stephen, about that cohort – again, I call them the paganists – is that they were not as hegemonic in their religious views as historians have conventionally assumed. In other words, because Rosenberg called himself the Party ideologue, and because he wrote so prolifically on this new religion he was trying to set up – which was actually in his view an old religion being restored – there’s a tendency in certainly the popular culture, there’s a presumption that somehow every Nazi was to some degree a paganist or a mystic – and in fact it is limited to a small cohort, I would say. I don’t mean to diminish the importance of the individual players, but to presume that these people had religious ideas that all Nazis had to subscribe to, is completely false. If you look at Hitler’s own ideas, and his reactions to Himmler’s and Rosenberg’s writings, he (if anything) ridiculed the paganism of these sort of second-tier Nazi henchmen.

Stephen Crittenden: Yes that’s very interesting, isn’t it, that Hitler could love Wagner’s music, and love Wotan when he was on the stage, but he very definitely differentiated between that and any idea that you would import those kind of 19th century Wagnerian – or indeed pre-Christian – ideas into contemporary politics in Germany.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: That’s absolutely right. And actually, when it comes to Wagner himself, you will actually find in his operas certain pagan appropriations of sort of a misty German religious past. But in Wagner’s operas you also find very strong Christian metaphors, and this is especially notable in Hitler’s favourite opera Parsifal, which many commentators of the day have noted as a sort of metaphor for Christ. The Parsifal opera is in many ways a metaphor of Christ’s life, and this was Hitler’s favourite opera of all of Wagner’s. And furthermore, if you go into Wagner’s own writings, you’ll see that Wagner himself did feel himself to be a Christian. Now, when you say “what does that mean?” – or, for that matter, what does the idea that Hitler thought of himself as a Christian mean – then you have to obviously acknowledge that Wagner’s and Hitler’s religious views were not exactly orthodox. But insofar as Wagner wrote a lot with his wife about Jesus – about how he loved Jesus, how Jesus was important for him and for his art – then you see that in fact Wagner is not so clearly a pagan as some people might suppose. He in fact himself thought of himself as a Christian, I would suggest.

*Radio introduction plays MUSIC

Stephen Crittenden: Music from Wagner’s Parsifal.

Richard, if you think of Hitler or Goebbels, both baptised Catholics, or Goering, a pretty active Protestant, none of them is an orthodox Christian, they’ve all got some pretty peculiar ideas.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Right. And it should be noted right off the bat that when I discuss Hitler’s conceptions of Christianity in the book, and contend that in some way or other Hitler regarded himself to be a Christian, that’s not to say that Hitler went by the benchmarks of typical Christian practice, and his religious views were unorthodox, as were those of his immediate associates. As you say, Goering was notable for being a Protestant. He wasn’t particularly an active churchgoer either, but what’s interesting is that the leadership of the Nazi party embraced the idea – at least those who weren’t the Pagans like Himmler and Rosenberg – embraced the idea of what got called “positive Christianity” within the Nazi party. And among other things, positive Christianity attempted to bridge the sectarian divide that had fractured German society between Catholic and Protestant. Hitler talks – in private as well as in public, but more especially in private – about the meanings of positive Christianity for him, and one of the things that became clear to me as I was analysing what the Nazis meant when they kept using this expression “positive Christianity” was that it would be a faith which no-one was ever baptised into, but rather would be a set of ideas and ethics, according to the Nazis, that would among other things emphasise commonalities – and including, in Hitler’s mind of course, anti-Semitism, which he I think (rather successfully, when you look at how people reacted to it), tied in with Christianity.

Stephen Crittenden: Richard, can we turn to the I think very ambiguous and ambivalent connection between Nazism and Catholicism. A lot of the Nazi leaders, Hitler and Himmler originally, Goebbels, are baptised Catholics, but there’s a lot of ambivalence from the word go about the Catholic Church, even to the point of some of these Catholics being quite pro-Protestant. So, quite open to Luther, for example.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Yes, absolutely. You hear a lot about the fact that the Nazi leadership seemed to be disproportionately Catholic. Again, through the device of positive Christianity, when I looked at this concept and tried to explore it a little more deeply, what I discovered was that these Nazis, even the Catholic Nazis – especially, as odd as it may sound, Hitler himself – suggested that while everybody, Protestant and Catholic alike, could be embraced under the banner of positive Christianity, when you look at the actual discussions that they have of Protestantism and Catholicism, they keep privileging Protestantism over Catholicism. They believe that if Catholicism is an international religion, with a leader who is not part of Germany – obviously in Rome – that by contrast, Protestantism is more innately amenable to nationalist politics. They cast Luther as not just the first Protestant, but also the first German. Hitler’s saying this, but it’s certainly not new. What is notable about it, is that even nominal Catholics – as you point out, like Hitler – seem to have a greater appreciation for at least the political and social dimensions of Protestantism than they do their own nominal faith Catholicism. And so again, it’s no surprise when you look at it that way, that Hitler obviously had long before 1933, when he comes to power, stopped attending Catholic church; for him, Protestantism was more valued. Now, because he was a politician, and he wanted to get Catholics on board his movement, he wasn’t about to convert to Protestantism, but when you look at his private conversations behind closed doors – when the curtain of Nazi performance, if you will, comes down – what you hear Hitler saying over and over again, is among other thing, a much higher estimation of Protestantism as what he calls “the natural religion of the German”.

Stephen Crittenden: Richard, I think because of a lot of recent attacks on Pope Pius XII and his failure to do enough in support of European Jewry, we also have a somewhat distorted picture of the relationship between Nazism and the Catholic Church. You make it clear that was mutually hostile from the word go, and that the Catholic Church actively opposed Nazi racial policies, even though there was a lot of Catholic anti-Semitism in this period as well.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Well, I would say that it’s right that the Nazis had an antagonistic view to Catholicism, certainly when certain scholars today seek out the roots of Nazi anti-Semitism and claim to find the roots in Catholic anti-Semitism, I think they’re not getting as close to the matter as had they not gone to an alternative, and namely, that is Protestant sources. Because within certain Protestant religions, you find a much closer theological accommodation of racialism or racism. Now you talked, Stephen, a while ago about active Catholic resistance to Nazi racism. In Germany itself, of course, it’s hard to gauge just how active it was. You do have a couple of outspoken clergymen in Germany, like the famous Bishop von Galen, who from the pulpit decries the euthanasia campaign. But he was much more of an exception than the rule.

Stephen Crittenden: But the German bishops, as a group, do come out and officially express their opposition to Nazism fairly early on, don’t they?

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Before 1933, correct, yes. Things change after the Nazis come to power in ways that I think you had an interview some months ago with Michael Marrus at the University of Toronto, in which you talked with him about this so-called hidden encyclical which never came to light.

Stephen Crittenden: This is Pope Pius XI’s hidden encyclical for 1938.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Right. I would agree with Michael’s estimation that there’s ambiguity, yes: the Catholic Church is, from a doctrinal point of view, taking a clear stance against racism, but in ways that paradoxically leave open the idea that had been long current in Catholic thinking: that the Jews were still somehow responsible, for instance, for the death of Christ, and they still had to atone for that. But, Stephen, your larger point – that the Catholic Church took a doctrinal stand against racism, and contrast that to the Protestant churches, many of which actually embraced racialism from the theological point of view – that is absolutely correct.

Stephen Crittenden: Let’s stick to the Protestant churches now. There’s wide public awareness, these days, of Christian anti-Semitism, and that Christian anti-Semitism was almost a necessary precondition for Nazi anti-Semitism. What I don’t think many people will be aware of, is the extent to which Nazi persecution of the Jews was underwritten by German Protestant theology in particular, and that it wasn’t just sort of contemporary 1920s theology, it pre-existed Nazism.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: That’s absolutely right, and one can start with Luther’s infamous tract called On the Jews and their Lies, in which Luther says, among other things – and this quote is to this day almost unbelievable when it’s heard – but Luther is known to say “we are at fault in not slaying them”. So Luther himself, certainly, was unfortunately rather a virulent anti-Semite. Now, that’s not to say that every single Lutheran after Luther had to be as intensely anti-Semitic as he was. I would put it this way though, and that is that within Lutheranism rested certain traditions of anti-Semitism which Nazis could and did draw upon.

Stephen Crittenden: Apart from the fact of Luther being a nationalist figure, if you like, one of the key ideas is the idea that Jesus was not a Jew – an idea that I think came from Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the idea that the Galileans weren’t Jews, that Jesus was is fact an archetypal – even the original – anti-Semite. And at one point you even quote Martin Bormann’s father-in-law, Walter Buch, who believes that Jesus’ entire character and learning betray the fact that he was German.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Yes, there are the most notable aspects of – if it could be called this – Nazi theology. Almost to a man, the Nazis insisted (a) that Jesus was in fact not Jewish but an Aryan; and (b ) that the Old Testament should be dispensed with as a Jewish tract, and that it should be removed from the Christian canon. Now, Christians these days, at least in mainstream culture, would claim either of these things. And yet these were ideas that were not invented by the Nazis, no-one would ever suggest that Hitler had any ingenuity as a thinker, he was no bona fide intellectual in his own right, his ideas were borrowed – and in the same way, the idea of Christ being an Aryan was also borrowed. Now, as you indicated, Stephen, it sort of begins with Houston Stewart Chamberlain; I would suggest it goes back even a little further than that, within the theological tradition in the 19th century known as biblical criticism. One of the leaders of the biblical criticism movement, if it could be called that, is a Frenchman actually, Ernest Renan, and Renan anticipates later Nazi thinking, he refers to Jesus as someone who almost is entirely Aryan, and uses a great deal of racialist discourse, which the Nazis will later adapt. So it’s about Houston Stewart Chamberlain, you’re quite right, this notable philosopher of the Wilhelmine German period, but it’s also about this larger movement of biblical criticism – which was pan-European, in fact.

Stephen Crittenden: Hitler really has this expectation that the Protestant churches – in Germany, at least – will unify themselves and bring themselves into some kind of co-ordination under Nazism. There’s this key figure, the Reich Bishop Muller, who turns out I think to be pretty incompetent as a politician, doesn’t he, and in the end it appears that Hitler moves away from this idea – and really, what starts to happen as the 1930s wear on, is that he distances himself from the Protestant churches slowly, doesn’t he?

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Yes, he does. There is a movement within Protestantism – it’s not an imposition by the Nazis upon Protestantism, but rather begins within Protestantism – to unite all the different state churches within Germany into one big national church, what the Germans call a Reichskirche, to be headed by a Reich Bishop, as you said. And the advocates of this are known as the “German Christians”, they call themselves the German Christians.

Stephen Crittenden: And it’s important to say, too, isn’t it, that Hitler’s idea is that this will happen more or less at arm’s length from the Nazi party.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Right. But having said that, it is the case that you have very revealing overlaps in personnel. In other words, some of the most important players in the German Christians are also rather high up in the Nazi party hierarchy, and that’s a revealing overlap. But they do remain institutionally distinct. And when, as you say Stephen, that the idea of unifying all of these separate Protestant churches ultimately comes undone, then it becomes clear that these are two distinct bodies. Because the Nazis begin to give up on the idea; after four years of trying, finally in 1937 they decide “well, let’s forget about this, it’s not ever going to happen”, and then you see the German Christians more and more being ignored by the Nazi party – much to the disappointment of the German Christians, obviously.

Stephen Crittenden: You get this slow increase in sort of antipathy towards the institutional churches at first, but perhaps then even later, towards Christianity in general.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: I would say that certainly before 1937, the Nazis always had displayed some sort of anti-clericalism, but it was always when you looked at the specific targets of anti-clericalism, it would always be the Catholic Church, that the Protestant Church would always be somehow left untouched in anti-clerical attacks.

Stephen Crittenden: But what about during the war years?

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Yes, I was going to say after 1937 you do see a big change. Because now it seemed that the Protestant national church just is never going to come into reality, and Hitler, being the sort of megalomaniac that he was, when he became sufficiently frustrated with a particular institution – or even an ally, a particular individual who had been a friend of his – he would sort of cast the whole thing off, and reject it entirely. So in the same way, Hitler seems after 1937 to become increasingly anti-clerical vis-a-vis both churches, not just the Catholic Church but the Protestant churches as well. Now, to the point of how anti-Christian he then became, there’s more ambivalence there. I analysed very carefully the various sources that historians use, namely Hitler’s so called “table talk”, conversations Hitler had with his confidants during the war years, where it is alleged, or where it is professed, that Hitler’s true feelings about Christianity – in other words, his anti-Christian feelings – really come out. And having explored those, Stephen, I came to the conclusion that in fact Hitler’s table talk, this one particular source, shows in fact ambivalence and ambiguity about Hitler. On the one hand he claims yes, Christianity should be rejected as Jewish; on the other hand he still is saving Jesus, the person of Jesus is never touched in his tirades. Jesus is always elevated as the Aryan; Jesus’ ideas were different.

Stephen Crittenden: The first Socialist, a muscular “doer”.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Exactly.

*Radio introduction plays MUSIC

Stephen Crittenden: Richard, I want to turn if I could to the active support for Nazi eugenics – forced sterilisation and so forth – that comes from the Protestant church, particularly a group within the Protestant church called the Inner Mission, which I guess is essentially a Protestant welfare organisation. This is perhaps one of the most shocking parts of your book. It’s not just active support; you actually have this group, the Inner Mission, voluntarily sterilising people in its asylums, handing thousands of people over to be killed at one point, but also providing a kind of theological underpinning.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Yes, and I think that’s really the crux. The question is, how could good Christians – good Protestants, running a group like the Inner Mission, devoted to Protestantisation of social policy in Germany – how could such a group advocate sterilisation, and even end up being drawn into the Nazi euthanasia program? And I think it’s very important to keep in mind that these are not people who didn’t realise what they were doing. The theological underpinnings of this, to borrow your expression, also in a broader sense explains why those Protestants who went to Hitler, did go to Hitler. And it’s an expression which is used in Germany – I won’t give you the German word, Stephen, but it translates roughly into “the theology of the orders of creation”. And what you start getting in Protestant circles is the idea – certainly by the turn of the century, this idea is getting currency – that the Volk, or the race, is one of God’s orders of creation. Now, Lutheran theology had always maintained that God had created certain orders in society, like the family, and the law and the state. And what you see increasingly among Luther scholars is the idea being suggested that the Volk as well – and again, Volk is a word which doesn’t translate easily into English, it’s translated as “people” or “race” – but the Volk is a divine order of creation. And here again I have to draw a parallel, Stephen, at least in my context in the United States, with the idea among people like Strom Thurmond in the United States, that miscegenation was something that God was opposed to.

Stephen Crittenden: And so what you get in Germany is the Inner Mission puts out a public statement saying that the thirty thousand inmates of its asylums are victims of guilt and sin, you get a formulation: “life that is unworthy of life”.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Yes, I don’t claim in the book that that expression “life unworthy of life” is an invention of a Protestant pastor or a Protestant theologian, but the key ingredient here is that if you believe that God created the races as distinct, and that God is opposed to any intermixing of the races, what you also are implying is that God believes that the body of the Volk needs to be preserved, and that the Volk as an organic whole needs to be protected as much as the individual does. So you get this idea that the strength and purity of the race is willed by God, and then it becomes possible, as perverse as it sounds, for Protestant theologians in the Inner Mission to suggest that we need to sterilise these people as being the issue of sin, the guilt and sin –

Stephen Crittenden: People with physical disabilities or who were mad, or whatever.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Right. And if you believe that God created races, then you will also believe that it was pleasing to God that these imperfections be removed from his holy creation of the Volk.

Stephen Crittenden: You’ve got the Lutheran Neuendetteslau Asylum in Franconia, in 1937 handing over 1900 of its 2100 patients to be killed.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: That’s right. Euthanasia is something that the Protestant – and, for that matter, Catholic – welfare organisations find themselves drawn into. And you find actually a lot of Protestants do begin to object not to sterilisation – again, many of these people within the Inner Mission actually had advocated laws for the sterilisation of certain types of people in Germany – when it comes to euthanasia, the actual killing of these people, a lot of Protestants begin to trip, they begin to ask themselves “oh, wait a minute, is this how far we really wanted this to go?” And because they have been so implicated in the logic of racial thinking, they find they’ve already entered into the euthanasia program with one hand tied behind their back, in a way, unable to defend their own charges when the Nazis come to basically round them up and mass murder them. The Inner Mission oftentimes will simply turn a blind eye, they’ll tell the Nazis “well, we’re not going to help you with getting our inmates out of our institutions, but here’s a list of people who are the really worst off”, and of course this is to give sort of sanction and at least acquiescence to Nazi euthanasia in ways that show that if they’re not completely approving of euthanasia, they’re certainly far from being condemning of it.

Stephen Crittenden: Indeed, you say that not one public protest against euthanasia was ever launched by a German Protestant churchman.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Correct.

Stephen Crittenden: Let me take you beyond the scope of your book, right up to 1945 to the fall of Berlin and beyond. Given this kind of theological underpinning was provided by German Protestantism, given this level of active assistance of all of the worst aspects of the Nazi program had occurred, what was the reaction of the Lutheran church in 1945? I mean, why didn’t it just close down, wind itself up out of shame? What happened in 1945? It must have been an incredible story in itself.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Yes, and there’s growing literature that addresses this question. One of the interesting things about German Protestantism is its institutionally fractured nature. So you had twenty-eight separate state churches – again, the Nazi ambition of uniting all the churches falls apart, so you get institutional fracturing – not only that, you get this internal war within Protestantism between the so-called German Christians and the so-called Confessing Church. And that has the effect, Stephen, of after the war, basically allowing Germans to believe a half-truth: that all Protestants in Germany belonged – or were at least ideologically allied – with the so-called Confessing Church, and the main figureheads of the Confessing Church were people who are well-known today.

Stephen Crittenden: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and people like that.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Yes.

Stephen Crittenden: So in other words, Bonhoeffer enables German Protestants to tell themselves a much sanitised story.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Exactly. And of course the German Christians, those who had been very pro-Hitler and pro-Nazi – even when the Nazis began to tire and increasingly reject the German Christians, these were people who had always been essentially pro-Nazi, certainly virulently anti-Semitic – after 1945, you get from them an embarrassed silence.

Stephen Crittenden: Richard Steigmann-Gall, thank you very much for joining us on The Religion Report. It’s been a most interesting conversation.

Richard Steigmann-Gall: Thank you very much, Stephen.

Stephen Crittenden: ”Our religion is Christ, our politics is Fatherland”. Richard Steigmann-Gall, Assistant Professor of History at Kent State University in Ohio, and his book The Holy Reich is published by Cambridge University Press.

That’s all this week, thanks to David Rutledge and John Diamond.

Misogyny and fascism
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/
Monday, October 23, 2006

Hitler was fond of complaining about "feminized" Christianity and consistently prescribed a vision of Christ as "a fighter" and of the faith as "manly" and "hard." The Nazis' Christian wing, the Deutsche Christen, likewise railed against how "feminized" the church had become, and argued for a "virile" vision of the faith.

After Hitler's defeat, this pathology again slithered to the fringes. Mostly you could find complaints about "feminized" Christianity from folks like Identity pastor Pete Peters and Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler. The former, in fact, was fond of describing the source of the "feminization" thus:

The Jewish leaders believe they already control America. Recently, one of them stated publicly: "We have castrated Gentile society, through fear and intimidation. It's manhood exists only in combination with a feminine outward appearance. Being so neutered, the populace has become docile and easy to rule. As all geldings are by nature, their thoughts are not concerned with the future, or their posterity, BUT ONLY WITH THE PRESENT and the next meal." What a perfect "word picture of modern American society. It is the attitude of Christians, who don't want to be involved, and allow Jews, to control the school and often the church. We MUST break these fatal bonds, if we are to remain free.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, however, a lot of this talk -- as well as the vision of the "warrior Jesus" -- has returned with some intensity to the mainstream, though there had already been some seepage from the far right in the previous decade. Much of it, in fact, is closely associated with the increasing prevalence of pseudo-fascist thought as part of our political discourse. As we've well established by now, any American fascism is going to be wrapped in a flag and thumping on a Bible, extolling the virtues of "tradition" that includes sex and gender roles. And that's what we're getting.

It cannot be a mere coincidence, in fact, that while this is occurring, we're seeing more psychotic murders by controlling males whose chief mission seems to be to bring women under control and to avenge the damage done to their own twisted souls.

Stan Goff at Truthdig has been paying attention to the fascist undertow, and he notes:

The rise of fascistic masculinity prefigures systemic fascism, often in the form of vigilantism. Gun culture is steeped in vigilantism, which is steeped in military lore. Guns in this milieu transcend their practical uses and take on a powerful symbolic significance.

In the last decade, the National Rifle Association (NRA), which has always had close ties with the military, has been taken over from what are considered within the organization as "moderates," that is, those whose message emphasizes peaceful, law-abiding gun use, like hunting (which is not peaceful for the game animals, but that's another issue).

During my service with 3rd Special Forces Group in Haiti in 1994, members of the SFU initiated back-channel communications in support of the right-wing death squad network, FRAPH.

Two of the favored preoccupations of [Steve] Barry, the SFU, Soldier of Fortune, and the NRA were Ruby Ridge, where Vicki Harris, the wife of an ex-Special Forces white supremacist (Randy Weaver), was killed by an FBI sniper with her baby in her arms, and the outrage at Waco against the Branch Davidians.

... My critique of gun culture is a critique of those sectors for which guns have been combined with imaginary enemies and taken on a deeply symbolic value as tokens of a violent, reactionary masculinity that fantasizes about armed conflict as a means to actualize its paranoid male sexual identity.

The problem is that this reaction is far from ab-normal.

There is a kind of interlocking directorate between white nationalists, gun culture, right-wing politicians, mercenary culture (like Soldier of Fortune), vigilante and militia movements, and elements within both Special Forces and nowthe privatized mercenary forces. It is hyper-masculine, racialist, militaristic and networked.

If one simply pays attention to cultural production in the United States, especially film and video games, it is fairly easy to see that the very memes that are the cells within the body of white nationalist militarism are ubiquitous within our general cultural norms. The film genre that most closely corresponds to a fascist mind-set is the male revenge fantasy, wherein after some offense is given that signifies the breakdown of order (usually resulting in the death or mortal imperilment of idealized wives or children) in which Enlightenment social conventions prove inadequate, and the release of irrational male violence is required to set the world straight again. Any reader can list these fantasies without a cue. It is one of the most common film genres in American society.

It’s Time To Man Up You Girly Christian Men!
by gasmonso

Thanks to Itanshi for providing this ridiculous story. Secondly, if you haven’t heard of the term “man up” then you are obviously a girly man and need a little reeducation .

Gone are the days where Jesus was viewed as a passive, peaceful, loving and caring individual. Let’s face it, that’s boring. In this day and age where Hollywood action films reign supreme, there isn’t any room for a wimpy Jesus. It’s time for Jesus and his male followers to MAN UP damnit!

Brad Stine, comedian and founder of GodMen, has had enough of all this feminine church crap. He’s set off to create a manlier version of Christ. A Christ that doesn’t take sh*t from anyone — “the Christ who took a whip to moneychangers, and used the word “dung” when he had to.” The Terminator ain’t got nothing on this Jesus.

Stine is fed up with Christian men getting in touch with their feminine side and singing sissy songs in church. In Stine’s church you can be a real man. Wanna talk about porn? Go ahead! Wanna bend metal frying pans with your bare hands? This is your place. Hell, there’s even a TV for watching NFL clips. And the best part is there are no women to bother you. Got a girlfriend? Leave her at home; she’s not welcome. Oh but what about my wife? Too bad, tell her to clean the house and have your dinner ready when you come back home.

Now many of you are probably thinking this is a joke, but fortunately for this site it isn’t. I watch this video and can’t help but to laugh. Is Christianity so desperate now, that they have to resort to these antics? Christianity has turned into a product that is losing business and thus the marketing has changed to improve market share. This group is just one of many resorting to these desperate measures because consumer demand is falling.

Do you all see this the same way or am I just delusional?
See ABC Video story.

Hitler With Whip (acting like 'Jesus')

Hitler's close friend, Dietrich Eckart, told of overhearing Hitler showing off to a lady by denouncing Berlin in extravagant terms: ". . . the luxury, the perversion, the iniquity, the wanton display and the Jewish materialism disgusted me so thoroughly that I was almost beside myself. I nearly imagined myself to be Jesus Christ when he came to his Father's Temple and found the money changers." Eckart described Hitler as "brandishing his whip and exclaimed that it was his mission to descend upon the capital like a Christ and scourge the corrupt."

And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting: And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables.
--John 2:14-15

“Hitler had appointed a Nazi lawyer friend, Dr. Hans Kerrl, to be Minister for Church Affairs, with instructions to make a second attempt to co-ordinate the Protestants…. He succeeded not only in winning over the conservative clergy, which constituted the majority, but in setting up a Church Committee headed by the venerable Dr. Zoellner, who was respected by all factions, to work out a general settlement…. On February 12, 1937, Dr. Zoellner resigned from the Church Committee-he had been restrained by the Gestapo from visiting Luebeck, where nine Protestant pastors had been arrested-complaining that his work had been sabotaged by the Church Minister. Dr. Kerrl replied the next day in a speech to a group of submissive churchmen. He accused the venerable Zoellner of failing to appreciate the Nazi doctrine of Race, Blood and Soil, and clearly revealed the government's hostility to both Protestant and Catholic churches.

The party [Kerrl said] stands on the basis of Positive Christianity, and Positive Christianity is National Socialism... National Socialism is the doing of God's will.... God's will reveals itself in German blood... Dr. Zoellner and Count Galen [the Cath