First and perhaps most important, the German Christians strove to redefine the very nature of the Christian church itself. Instead of a universal community of believers, the idea of the Christian church was transformed so that it was partially dependent upon German notions of race and ethnicity — thus, the church became an expression not only of Christian doctrine but also German culture:
- “The German Christian believed that God revealed himself to humanity not only in Scripture and through Jesus but in nature and history. Together the German Christian view of race, the visible versus invisible church, and revelation formed a mutually reinforcing system. By separating the earthly church from the universal community of believers, German Christians freed that church from any obligation to universality. By allowing for God’s revelation through nature, they could claim race was sanctified, part of a divine plan for human life.”
- “[Within the people’s church, the German Christians] foresaw a hierarchy based on gender. The people’s church, German Christians insisted, would be a “manly” church that enshrined and promoted masculine qualities. With that stance, German Christians both expressed their view of proper gender relations and responded to attacks from denigrators. Nazi and neopagan critics accused Christianity of preaching weakness, humility, and defeatism, feminine traits antithetical to National Socialist values. In their efforts to defend against those charges, German Christians showed how they shared the principles of their attackers. True Christianity, they argued, was not feminine and weak but manly and hard.”
As disturbing as all of that might sound to the average Christian in America, even more disturbing should be just how similar the above sounds to what some American Christians promote. The second paragraph, describing the emphasis on a masculine Christianity ruled by men, has too many parallels in modern American Christianity to count.
The first paragraph contains equally disturbing parallels with American Christians who argue that God is revealed in American history: America is the shining city on the hill, the instrument of God’s will for the world, and as a consequence American Christianity is uniquely situated to bring God’s message to the world. The connections between hyper-nationalism and religion run very deep.
Although it is true that many important Nazis looked down upon attempts to fuse Christianity and Nazism, that doesn’t change the fact that they relied heavily on the help of German Christians. Nazi society was a racialized society: everything turned on what race you were, Aryan, non-Aryan, Jew, etc. This, however, required it to be known who was who, and that information was willingly supplied by German Christians who turned over baptism records so that the state could discover who was baptized when and how far back any Jewish blood might reach. The German Christian, then, helped make genocide possible.
And what happened after the war? Not all Christians in Germany were “German Christians” and after the war there were efforts to rebuild, not just the physical structures of society but also the spiritual structures of the church — with mixed results. There were certainly attempts to de-Nazify the pulpit, but the German Christians themselves were hardly apologetic: “After the demise of National Socialism, German Christians did not necessarily abandon their old ideas, but they restated those notions in the forms of self-justification and denial.”
Bergen‘s work provides very important insights into both the history of Nazi Germany as well as the nature of Christianity itself. There can’t be any question that Christians in Germany not only aided Nazism, but did so out of their religious convictions. Christianity, or any religion for that matter, is not inherently incompatible with great evils like those of Nazism. People who imagine themselves inoculated against evil because they are religious are not only fooling themselves, they’re actually leaving themselves open to committing crimes of their own.
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