V re Bush's paranoid, neo-facist, Christian world view

[Richard Ryan]

This is not a subject that I know very much about, and I suspect the primary
and the secondary literatures are vast and daunting.  What little I have
seen, however, has strongly suggested that Hitler and the other core Nazi
ideologists regarded Christianity as a "slave" religion, and that they
tolerated it only to the extent that they found such tolerance politically
useful.

For a noted archive of documents on the persecution of the Christian
churches by the Nazis see:

http://www.lawandreligion.com/   [under The Nuremberg project]

For a crushing refutation of Daniel Goldhagen's much-publicized assertion
that the Roman Catholic church collaborated with the Nazis, see:

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0206/articles/rychlak.html

I don't know to what extent the German resistance was motivated by religious
belief: it's a interesting question.  Dietrich Boehoffer, as I understand
it, was a traditional Lutheran, rather than an evangelical member of the
"Confessing Church" like Niemoeller.

Certainly there were plenty of devoutly Christian resistors around Europe --
whose resistance was motivated by Christian principles. One classic account
of such resistance is Phillip Hallie's "Lest Innocent Blood be Shed"


http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060925175/qid%3D941348824/sr%3D1-1/1
02-4079988-9447362

Please understand that I'm not saying that of this material is definitive
(though the Rychlack essay is written with great authority) -- I just
haven't seen much scholarly evidence either that Nazism and Christianity
were intertwined or that devout Christians as a whole were more inclined to
support the Nazis than oppose them.


-----Original Message-----
From: KXX4493553 at aol.com [mailto:KXX4493553 at aol.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2003 6:57 AM
To: davidmmonroe at yahoo.com; himself at richardryan.com; pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: V re Bush's paranoid, neo-facist, Christian world view


In einer eMail vom 12.03.2003 04:22:24 Westeuropäische Normalzeit schreibt
davidmmonroe at yahoo.com:




"Analyzing the previously unexplored religious views
of the Nazi elite, Richard Steigmann-Gall argues
against the consensus that Nazism as a whole was
either unrelated to Christianity or actively opposed
to it. In contrast, Steigmann-Gall demonstrates that
many in the Nazi movement believed the contours of
their ideology were based on a Christian understanding
of Germany's ills and their cure. He also explores the
struggle the 'positive Christians' waged with the
party's paganists and demonstrates that this was not
just a conflict over religion, but over the very
meaning of Nazi ideology itself...."



The only real Christian resistance group in the Third Reich was the
"Bekennende Kirche". (Confessing Church). The catholics had trouble with the
Nazis more for "symbolic reasons" (using Christian symbols instead of Nazi).
And of course the protest against the "Euthanasie"in 1941. That's, more or
less, all...
kwp