Pre-Nazi Germany was an Unchristian Nation
By Bruce Walker (06/15/08)
Few myths warm the hearts of Leftists as much as the myth that Germany was a Christian nation which voted Adolph Hitler and his National Socialists into office. This allows Leftists who hate Judeo-Christian moral traditions, which almost, all Leftists, to cow Christians into silence (didn’t you Christians let Hitler take power?) And it allows Leftists to spread the seeds of distrust between Christians and Jews(see what happens when Christians have power?) Also, because of the doctrinal divisions within Germany, Protestants and Catholics too often tried to defend only their branch of Christianity and leave the other undefended from defamation. So it is that even books written by Christian authors that explore the relationship between Nazism and Christianity blithely assume that the German people, before the Nazis came to power, were predominately Christian – and that these Christians only belatedly discovered the depth of Nazi evil.
The only problem with this analysis is that the German people in the decades leading up to Hitler had increasingly rejected Christianity. This is a topic I explore in depth in my new book, The Swastika Against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity. (Outskirts Press: 2008) The abandonment of Christianity in Germany began before the First World War. Books of that period note how, uniquely, the German people were turning into a nation of unbelieving people and at the same time, the German people were increasingly embracing anti-Semitism. They commented on the connection between the two trends. Writers before the First World War were also observing that the intellectual class in Germany increasingly disliked Christianity because it was an “imported” religion, and not a German religion. Significant numbers of Germans before the First World War formally abandoned their Christian faith.
So long before the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles or the horror of the Western Front, the German people and their professional classes were running away from Christianity as fast as they could.
The rejection of Christianity continued during the First World War when, again, large numbers of Germans formally abandoned their Christian faith. Perhaps as importantly, pivotal generals like Lundendorff were overtly and passionately hostile to Christianity. Lundendorff regretted that Germany could be called a Christian nation during the First World War, but he noted that vast numbers of Germans were Christian in name only.
During the thirteen years between the Armistice and the ascension of Hitler to power, the flow of Germans away from Christianity turned into a flood. In a nation of about eighty million people, perhaps a quarter of a million Germans were formally abandoning Christianity each year.
What do I mean by “formally abandoning Christianity”? One reason so many people assume that Germany was a Christian nation is because a large percentage of Germans were born into a particular Christian denomination. These “Christians” may never have set foot in a church or ever asked to be called a Christian. They simply were Christian by virtue of being born in a particular place. Such a “Christian” had to take affirmative legal action to cease being a Christian.
This sounds odd to Americans, but this was true of much of Northern Europe. Until 1996, anyone born in Sweden was formally a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church and it was not until 2000 that Sweden completely abandoned the “Christian by birth” laws. Yet few serious Christians would assert that Sweden, which embraced a vast range of vices and which punished religious believers at times, was a “Christian nation” filled with “Christian people.” Christianity was dead in Sweden, just as Christianity was dead in Weimar Germany (the German nation that existed after the First World War and before the Nazis came into power.)
The utter absence of any Christian faith among the vast majority of German people was also a salient characteristic noted by many writers observing pre-Nazi Germany at the time. In some places only ten percent of those people who had not formally renounced their Christianity still went to church; in other places only five percent of the Christians went to church; in other areas only one percent of the Christians went to church.
Authors spoke of German cities as being “spiritual cemeteries” and of church services being “lifeless.” The Weimar Republic, very much like Sweden in the last thirty years, was inundated with prostitution, drug use, nature worship, and pornography. Books sold openly in the front of bookstores in Germany would be considered only in adult bookstores of America today. The moral degeneracy of pre-Nazi Germany was consistent only with the shrinking of Christian influence to almost nothing.
Germany, before the Nazis, had been abandoning the only protection which could have saved it from the oncoming horrors of Nazism: faith in the living God of Christians and Jews. It was this rejection of Judeo-Christian faith, particularly the predominate religion of Christianity, which led directly to the rise of Hitler, the construction and operation of the death camps, and the descent of Germany into Hell. Those who hate Christianity will never believe otherwise, but those who hate Christianity will never accept truth.
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