if they aren’t practicing Christianity, they can’t be Christian

That’s a sectarian screedal declaration, not an objective factual distinction.

All Christian sects “aren’t practicing” Christianity while insisting all the others aren’t instead, which include all non-Trinitarian sects, all Mormon sects, Prosperity Gospel, Episcopalians, Anglicans, Catholics, Separatist Catholic Traditionalists, Orthodoxists, Lutherans, Southern Baptists, Methodists both pre and post schism(s), Copts, Assyrians, Ethiopians, Marcionites, Torah-observant Christians (literally the original Christians), the Nigerian Brotherhood of the Cross and Star, the Ku Klux Klan and other Neoconfederate and Nationalist Christianities, Sovereign Citizen Christians, the Gun Church of Pennsylvania, Libertarian Christians, Socialist Christians, Modern Flat Earth Christians, Jonestown Christians, Umbandan Christians, Amish and Mennonite Christians, even Eastern Lightning and the Xiaoping Movement.

If you worship and believe Christ is your savior, you’re a Christian. And if 95% of the apparatus of your belief system derives from historical Christian sects, you’re a mainstream Christian. Nazi Christianity just combines Lutheranism with Non-denominationalism and the same Confederate, Neoconfederate, or Antizionist Christian Nationalisms rampant in America today. It’s pretty mainstream conservative Christianity actually. They fully adopted Luther’s Program Against the Jews point by point. They adopted an anti-Jewish exegesis of the Bible like most medieval and much modern traditionalist Christianities. They adopted free exegesis like all liberal exegetical (antifundamentalist) sects of Christianity today. They adopted Old Earth Creationism (and denounced Young Earth Creationism) like most Christianities do today. They adopted Red Letter Christianity (which also rejected Paul for the Gospels and Acts; as have the Unity Church, some variants of Christian Science, Tolstoyanism, and Swedenborgianism).

And so on.

So special pleading by saying only “your” Christianity is real and Catholic Traditionalists and Red Letters and Jonestown and the original Torah observant Christianity are all fakers is just rhetoric, not reality. Almost zero modern Christians are practicing the real Christianity, which was 100% kosher, not trinitarian, and did not canonize Paul. So if Positive Christianity is “not” real Christianity, no modern Christianity is “real” Christianity.

Except if they aren’t practicing Christianity, they can’t be Christian. The Nazis wanted a new religion based around “National Socialism”. Heck, many Soviets romanticize Balto Slavic pagaism. Science rattled Christianity alot.

Holy shit.

Do I really have to explain why the mythology that these people were dangerous and could become parasites would inspire the idea that “Work makes you free” and justify that they should be slaves, in addition to the general idea that Jews collectively owed Germany reparations?

You’re looking at anti-Semitic rhetoric and then saying that it couldn’t inspire anti-Semitic rhetoric. It’s utterly contemptible. Do better.

In case you need a pat on the head to think correctly: No one is saying all Lutherans are Nazis. A particular offshoot of an idea inspiring something awful doesn’t mean the idea has no other better incarnations. This is pretty obvious. Rather, the point is that Nazi ideology was a metastasizing, a development, of already existing anti-Semitism that was rooted in Lutheran and broad Christian ideas. Like the explicit position the Catholic Church held until very recently that the Jews were collectively guilty of the death of the Messiah.

Nothing you are saying here makes any logical sense.

I am forced to conclude from this that I no longer have any confidence in your ability to understand essays and chapters you read, or what a sound or even relevant argument looks like.

Anyone reading this, be advised: read Avalos’s actual chapter in Christian Delusion. It does not resemble any of the weird ideas being depicted by our North Korean friend, and already refutes or moots every point here (insofar as any of these points are even intelligible).

I’ve checked the Christian Delusion essay, and there are a few poibts.

> “Luther’s seventh point had a correspondence in Nazi labor camps, with their infamous Arbeit macht frei (“work liberates”) slogan.”

This is borderline Holocaust denial. There were death camps for the physical extermination of the Jewish kind, not simply to turn them into wholesome chungus hard-working Christians.

> “Catholic Christians have an even longer history of anti Judaism. Canon Sixteen of the Council of Elvira (ca. 306), for instance, prohibited marriage between Christians and Jews. Thus the Nazi Nuremberg laws, which prohibited marriages between Germans and Jews, are simply an extension of a Christian tradition, not a radical departure as D’Souza would have us believe.”

This is completely ridiculous as a Jew could not convert to Hitlerism and thus acquire the rights either to marry Aryans or avoid being gassed, whereas the whole point of the Christian laws was to foster conversions.

> “Since anti Judaism was not associated with Darwin’s own writings, then it is a history of Christian anti Judaism that would be much more effective in convincing the Christian masses.”

Darwin prophecised the extinction of the lower races of man, Jews are a different race to the Germans, ergo Darwin can be used to inspire a race war in Germany… That’s quite obvious, no?

Overall, this feels like an outrageous and indefensible position. Nazis were not universalist, were not proselytising the gospels, were not promoting individual salvation outside biological race, and were definitely not submerging racial aliens in holy water to make them part of the People’s Community.

You should treat any Christian pronouncements by the Nazis as a necessary atavism, as part of the language, the same way as how Juche Koreans “liberated the women”… for them to have the happiness to worship the bronze idols of Kim Il Sung, not to make the proverbial OnlyFans accounts. The language might be similar, but as a historian you should focus on the context and the particular to the times and places meanings of the words.

The fact that you think that Luther wanted to forcibly convert a group he clearly thought of as ethnic and religious outsiders to Christianity somehow indicates that the Nazis did not inherit his platform is so morally odious as to be below comment. Do better.

That’s all well said, Fred. I concur.

The rank and file of Nazis and Germans who accepted Nazi rule were Christian. Period. This isn’t in dispute. So it’s already a shell game and a goalpost move to talk about the Nazi leadership. The best case scenario for Christians is that a lot of Christians were suckers who got manipulated (in part using their Christianity) to do evil, hateful shit and support an authoritarian regime, apparently by people who were non-Christian. Which does not inspire confidence that Christianity actually stops atrocities, or empowers people to be skeptical of authorities.

But once that fact is in evidence, it then actually requires a sociological explanation: How did so many people get manipulated? And the most obvious answer is that the people who manipulated them had enough cultural cache, enough credibility, could speak the language well enough, to be treated as insiders. At some point, one gets to the point of just having to assert that people with that much understanding of Christianity who claimed to be Christians weren’t Christians “in their heart” or “in their minds”, based on no evidence.

So the argument that the Nazi movement was fundamentally Christian isn’t just informed by the fact that the rank and file were, and so by definition the vast majority of people who ever called themselves Nazis were Christians of some variety, but also by the prior probability that a movement that engages with people that way is just simply part of their group. It’s not impossible or even vastly unlikely that the alternative is true, but naively, you would go into an ultranationalist movement and assume that it’s being led by people within ultranationalist communities.

(Of course we can always ask how sincere elites ever are about any belief system they profess compared to cold self-serving pragmatism and the need to manipulate others, but this is of no help to the apologist trying to divorce Nazism from Christianity, because, well, that suspicion applies to them too).

And, not to put too blunt of a point on it, but today’s fascist and Nazi-like rhetoric among Christian nationalists is just yet further proof that even fervently believed Christianity is not inconsistent with racism, ultranationalism, violence, authoritarianism, etc. Any Christian nationalist who sincerely wonders how Christians could be Nazis (and isn’t lying in order to avoid being associated with the group they know in fact they are like)

In comments you address the neo-Wodenist and “pagan” parts of the party, which were indeed minorities. But they were able to do things like get those volk ideas into the Hitler Youth to some extent. So the atheist and folk wings of the party still had some power, just like the working class ones had some power even post-Long Knives. How would you conceptualize that?

My immediate thought is that even that doesn’t actually distance Nazism from Christian nationalism. As you’ve documented, we have countless open secular or non-Christian fascists saying very openly and/or in their safe spaces when they think they won’t be detected that they support Christianity despite thinking it’s false because they know it creates power and because of Western chauvinism. (Ignoring that it’s not a Western religion at its base, but that’s not new for Nazis). And, of course, countless Christians who are devout nonetheless believe in fairies, or ghosts, or UFOs, or practice meditation, or practice magic, or use Tarot or astrology.

Religion is far more porous at the boundaries even for the supposed fundamentalists, and folk beliefs stick around. So identifying a folk belief or a heterodox opinion of any kind that is common among a community is not sufficient to diagnostically eliminate them as Christian, or else no Christian community would be Christian. My perception of the Nazi religious melange is that they were syncretists, as fascists very often especially have to be because fascists want to use every ideology and asset they can as a proxy for power, and so they will engage in crank sleight of hand and rhetorical bullshit in order to pretend that their non-Christian beliefs really are totally super Christian and how dare you suggest otherwise. The neo-pagan Nazis probably did the same thing, or at least those who wanted to bridge with them and maintain alliances did.

And, of course, you’ve identified the dishonest trick that people like Craig pull where to maintain a big tent they’ll say “Well, I believe in hell, but you can’t condemn Christianity for it because it’s not essential to the belief system”. As the Red Pen Logic fraud put it, “Christian brothers and sisters” can disagree about what eternal consequences are present. Nazis could do the same thing if pressed: “Well, yes, those guys over there sure are worshiping Woden and using rune magic, but that’s not all of us, and who are you to say they’re not Christian?”

See the study by Hector Avalos. It corrects your misunderstanding in detail.

But for your specific claim, late in life Martin Luther declared “We are at fault for not slaying them.”

So, you’re the one who’s wrong here.

I’m sorry but claiming Luther to be equal to Hitlerian Germany’s treatment of the Jews is bizarre and obviously factually incorrect? Even in his final years, Luther was explicitly calling for converting the Jews to Christianity, whereas Nazis always treated the Jews as a race, not a religion (see the Nuremberg blood laws).

“However, if they are converted, abandon their usury, and receive Christ, then we will willingly regard them our brothers. Otherwise, nothing will come out of it, for they do it to excess.”

If you are claiming such a falsehood, your entire edifice must be highly suspect. No, the Nazis did NOT endorse a massive campaign of sprinkling holy water on Jews to spare them from gas chambers, you’re effectively denying the Holocaust in the most ridiculous way I could never imagine.