iPods at Nuremberg Rallies

Conservative religious critiques of modern culture have often focused on things like consumerism and materialism. This is understandable and there are even secular critiques of those things, but what's the purpose behind comparing consumerism with Nazism?

Daniel P. Moloney writes:

What Pius XII diagnosed as the sin of the 20th century — the loss of a sense of personal guilt and sin — Benedict XVI thinks helped make great evil seem so ordinary. This is the theological solution to Hannah Arendt’s puzzle about how such boring bureaucrats as Himmler and Eichmann could bring about the Holocaust. The Nazis taught, repeatedly and in numerous different ways, that there is no God, no sin, and no personal guilt. Relentless propaganda made it easy for people to avoid feeling guilty, and, since everyone was complicit, nobody was made to answer for his sins.

It strikes me as rather implausible that Daniel Moloney is completely unaware of the degree to which Christian churches, Christian leaders, and Christian laity in Nazi Germany were not only complicit with the Nazi regime, but actually regarded Christianity and Nazism as fully compatible. If that's the case, though, what are we to make of his insinuation that there was a radical separation between Nazi ideology and Christianity?

In this regard, the consumerism and relativism of the West can be just as dangerous as the totalitarianism of the East: It’s just as easy to forget about God while dancing to an iPod as while marching in a Hitler Youth rally. There’s a difference, to be sure, but hardly anyone would contest the observation that in elite Western society, as in totalitarian Germany, the moral vocabulary has been purged of the idea of sin. And if there’s no sense of sin, then there’s no need for a Redeemer, or for the Church.

Andrew Sullivan comments on this:

A free society where people can listen to iPods and freely debate their own ideas of truth and the good life is all but indistinguishable from a Nuremberg rally? And we have no notion of sin? None? That's just bizarre. We simply have a somewhat different idea of sin and immorality than the theocons. But from the theocon point of view, the glorious achievement of the secular West is as nihilistic and as dangerous as the Nazis. That is Benedict XVI's view. I don't think people have a clue how radical this man is. And how ferocious a culture war he is about to unleash.

The problem with the arguments being offered by Benedict XVI and others is that they have a very poor grasp of what "relativism" is. Too often what they describe as "moral relativism" is actually just a different set of moral standards — sometimes just as absolute as theirs and sometimes more flexible, but not truly "relativist." It seems to be a common trend for religious conservatives to use the label "relativism" to attack any ethical standards they don't happen to like.

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