WHAT WAS A NAZI CHURCH SERVICE LIKE?

[tulc]

What Was a Nazi Church Service Like?

We can easily forget how deeply Christian Nazi Germany was. As historian Doris L. Bergen puts it, “Christianity permeated Nazi society” (9).

Although Hitler was not very pious, the 97% of Germans who identified as Christian mostly convinced themselves that he was.

Most Protestant Christians at the time were ecstatic at the creation of a newly Nazified world. And they went to church.

This new world demanded a renewed church with reinvented liturgies. In the midst of a fierce struggle for control of the churches, the pro-Nazi “German Christian” faction preached sermons, edited Bibles, revised hymn-books, altered liturgies, and changed the church calendar.

Sometimes they made drastic changes. At the same time, they inherited a form of Christianity that offered little opposition to Nazism.

tulc(thought this was interesting)

 

[redleghunter]

Sounds like a cult.

Hitler's personal religion was Darwinian.

 

[ewq1938]

 

[FreeinChrist]

MOD HAT

This thread was moved from Controversial Christian Theology to Christian History. Please address this as a history topic only. ​

 

[JackRT]

Sounds like a cult.

Hitler's personal religion was Darwinian.

From ---- Hitler and evolution - RationalWiki

An imagined connection between evolutionary theory and the Holocaust relies on the fact that Hitler's conception of national struggle and supremacy was rooted in a type of social Darwinism, an obsolete political theory that holds that the concept of "survival of the fittest" applies to nations, races, or ethnicities. Social Darwinism was derived from a misapplication of scientific thinking, has no real basis in the biological theory of evolution, and was not an idea advanced by Charles Darwin, whom Hitler never mentioned in any of his surviving speeches or writings.

Even if Hitler believed that evolutionary theory justified his destructive and oppressive vision, this does not undermine the theory's basis; what people do with an idea has no bearing on the scientific validity of that idea. Using Hitler's supposed belief in evolution as an argument against evolutionary science is an example of the logical fallacy of an argument from adverse consequences, suggesting that we should not accept the theory of evolution because it could lead to the kind of racist views perpetuated by Hitler. It is also an example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, implying that because Darwin's theory came into being before Hitler's racism, the former necessarily caused the latter. Even if there were connections between the theory of evolution, social Darwinism and the Holocaust, this does not imply that evolution is a dangerous theory, only that Hitler perverted the theory to justify his beliefs and actions.

By way of contrast, Hitler admired Robert Koch, an important figure in the discovery of the germ theory of disease, and Hitler compared his campaigns against the Jews and other "undesirables" to a type of social or national disinfection. But this is completely irrelevant to the universal medical/scientific acceptance of germ theory.

However, it seems that there is at least some evidence to suggest that, far from embracing Darwin's work and social Darwinism, the Nazis tried to ban them. The 1935 edition of the official Nazi journal for lending libraries, Die Bücherei, contains a list of banned books. One of the entries in this edition of Die Bücherei is "Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel)".[1]

 

[redleghunter]

From ---- Hitler and evolution - RationalWiki

Thanks for the confirmation.

 

[lismore]

In my view anyone claiming to be a Christian and looking favourably on Hitler needed to see a psychiatrist.

Hitler was open about his extreme anti-semitism from the start.

Jesus Christ is a Jew.

We're following a Jew and we're anti-semitic?

 

[tulc]

In my view anyone claiming to be a Christian and looking favourably on Hitler needed to see a psychiatrist.

Hitler was open about his extreme anti-semitism from the start.

Jesus Christ is a Jew.

We're following a Jew and we're anti-semitic?

It's not as if antisemitism was born under Hitler or even in Nazi Germany. There was a strong streak of it all through Europe's history, and to be fair, there's a long history of it throughout Church history as well. Been here:
Christianity and antisemitism - Wikipedia
tulc(just thought that should be pointed out)

 

[lismore]

It's not as if antisemitism was born under Hitler or even in Nazi Germany. There was a strong streak of it all through Europe's history, and to be fair, there's a long history of it throughout Church history as well. Been here:
Christianity and antisemitism - Wikipedia
tulc(just thought that should be pointed out)

Hello Tulc. Thank you! I was aware that some denominations had (and have) strong anti-semitism in them. I think that's one of the ways to discern if you dealing with sheep or goats, how do they view the Jewish people? God Bless

 

[BryanJohnMaloney]

I heartily recommend the books of the "Third Reich Trilogy". They deal quite nicely with this issue. Briefly, it was not a simple matter. First, the elites of the Nazis were openly hostile to Christianity, at least among themselves. They considered it a "Jewish aberration", essentially a stain or weakness upon the German people. They considered Christian doctrine to be something to expunge from the German mind. However, they were also astute politicians, so they knew that they could not openly attempt to eradicate Christianity. Instead, they co-opted the long association between Protestantism and northern German political leadership. Simultaneously, they convinced the Catholics of the German south to abandon political roles by promising them toleration. That is, if they shut up and shut down politically, they would be allowed to be Catholic without German government interference. The idea of free reign to be Catholic was not simply accepted in German life. As recently as the German Empire (Second Reich), Bismarck had led a "culture struggle" specifically against the Catholic Church. So, the Catholics were bought off and the Lutherans were co-opted.

Individual Germans were given "official permission", as it were to simply not see any dissonance between Nazi practices and their religious beliefs (so long as they were on the proper list). However, as the Third Reich became more obvious, this started working. The Reich attempted to form an official Church, and attempts were made to explicitly limit the activities of all other organizations.

In the end, though, what happened was that most Germans simply excused whatever happened and didn't think too hard about it. They acted like most people act most of the time.

 

[FireDragon76]

It wasn't that difficult to integrate Nazi ideology in peoples heads with being a Christian, anymore than some Trump supporters are OK going to church and being a Christian. Lutheran theology was corrupted to allow the compartmentalization of religion from ordinary life altogether. Due to liberalism, nationalism, and romanticism, the concept of Volk (folk, people) took on theological significance (something similar had happened in Denmark due to the teachings of Bishop Nikolai Grundtvig in the 19th century, though Danish Lutherans later resisted Nazis when they invaded and were much less committed to antisemitism). People were taught it was their duty to obey secular authorities, and that blood and soil was the new state ideology and to question it was to question God.