Being Resolute Truth Tellers is the First Step

Establishing a Center of Spiritual Resistance (Pt.1)

I’ve put off writing this article for as long as I can – not because I didn’t know what to say, but because I have too much to say about this topic.

When it comes to the parallels between the German Christians of the Third Reich and Christian Nationalists today, where should one begin? There’s no doubt the alarm must be sounded, from as many of us as possible, as loudly as possible. We must, as Karl Barth implored the Protestants of 1933, form and maintain a “center of spiritual resistance” amid the abuse of the Christian faith in our time.

Yet, what angle should take priority? At some point, we can only stomach so much talk about Nazis before we grow fatigued, then numb, and finally become unreachable. One of my readers commented this week, in fact, that he found it difficult to open my last newsletter because of its title. He let it sit in his inbox for weeks before finally reading it. Though he was still gracious enough to thank me for writing it, I felt bad for placing that burden on him. Our current historical moment demands so much from us, with a daily onslaught of horrors from all over the globe delivered directly to our portable devices. I feel the weight of this too. Yet, we must hold the line when it comes to truth telling, especially in times like these when discernment is difficult and we’re forced to wade through swamps of conspiracy theories, historical revisionism and outright lies to claw the truth back from the abyss.

The German Christians didn’t contend for the truth. They were reactionaries.

They abhorred what their country and their culture was becoming – liberal, globalist, and unfamiliar in comparison to the Germany of old. Their fear of the unfamiliar and of being subordinated on the world stage made them prime targets for a strongman to come along with righteous anger and common-sense solutions to their problems. When he used tactics such as scapegoating the Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, and intellectuals, they were all too ready to buy into the narrative. If they had an enemy to fight, they could be righteous again, they could have purpose restored to them, and – most importantly -- they could hope for a better future because there was an endgame: the removal of all the “bad guys.” A solution was finally in sight, and it was relatively simple. They could remove the enemies from among them and then rebuild from the ground up – an exciting prospect!

To achieve this glorious end, they chose to believe a simple lie rather than grapple with the complexities of truth.

The lie: Germany was a victim of both globalism and the sneaky sabotage of the Jews, among others.

The complex truth: World War I was largely (though not entirely) Germany’s fault, they were seeking global power and miscalculated their abilities. The world had been forever altered by that war, and a new order was formed. Their national identity crisis needed to be addressed through a comprehensive and collaborative process of restoration.

Disturbingly, the German Christians re-worked their theology to accommodate the lie instead of leading by example as ambassadors of truth, peace and reconciliation. They called upon their heavyweight spiritual (and geographical) ancestor, Martin Luther, to help lend their dubious theology the credibility it needed to gain traction. They brought in serious, world-renowned German theologians to help them play a good game of proof-text poker with the likes of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. So confident were they of God’s blessing on their newly minted theology of a righteous, German volk (national identity), they hosted rallies, printed pamphlets and sermons, and recruited others relentlessly, like new Christians who had just heard the gospel for the first time.

Hitler was giving them something Christ never could – a reason to care about their homeland, pride in their (made up) ancestry, and hope that power on this earth would be restored to their country but, more importantly, to their German Christian Movement. Germany First! was the name of the game but German Christians First! was what they believed would be the outcome of the long game.

They didn’t follow Hitler, well past the point of no return, because they were monsters or brainless zombies. They followed him because he was a flesh-and-blood human being who seemed to care about their hardships, their fears, and their futures. He promised them a future in which Germany and Christianity would be aligned and unified.

Make Germany Religious Again!

They were willing to twist their own faith to fit Hitler’s agenda because it was practical for them to do so and, if they ever experienced doubts, they simply rehearsed all the failures of the previous government to distract themselves (and others) from the glaring red flags popping up everywhere.

Hitler leaving a German Protestant Church. He was never a Christian, obviously. Yet, the German Christians firmly believed he was and ardently defended him against all accusations otherwise.

This is reminiscent of J.D. Vance’s abuse of the Catholic concept of “ordo amoris” to justify developing a hierarchy for how Christians are to dole out compassion and love in the world. Vance twists scripture, as well as the teachings of Augustine and Aquinas, to serve his rhetorical purposes and establish political boundaries around love. He may not realize how closely his words echo those of the German Christians, who believed that God’s “orders of creation” justified a Germany First position by exalting love and loyalty to soil and blood above all else.

Gerhard Kittel, an antisemitic, Nazi German theologian who wrote his Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, which has continued to be used in seminaries worldwide (including in America), demonstrates for us the incredible lengths the German Christians were willing to go theologically to support their diabolical efforts in God’s name:

“Real Judaism remains true to its symbolic being as a restless and homeless sojourner wandering the earth…the ultimate solution to the puzzle of this most puzzling of all peoples is this: that this people become homeless because it crucified the one who was the fulfillment of its own history with God.”

These Christians’ “merciful” solution to the Jewish Question (as they called it) was first to dehumanize and degrade the Jews, using both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to “prove” them untrustworthy, greedy, downright criminal, and accursed of God. This sentiment continues today in our own country, as many Christians on the far right and left deny the Holocaust, defend Hitler’s nationalism, and use the Bible to justify war, violence, and dehumanization of not only Jews but people worldwide.

The next step in these Christians’ solution was to deport the Jews. When other countries would no longer accept deportations from Germany, the solution changed to keeping them as second-class citizens, confined to ghettos and severely limited in freedom. They arrogantly proposed these plans, talked about them ad nauseum from pulpits no less, and gathered to create their own versions of Project 2025 that would help Germany realize it’s ultimate, glorious destiny even if it meant relegating human beings to ghettos and, eventually, concentration camps. These Christians had it all figured out – they could dehumanize, demonize, deport, and detain other human beings if they developed sophisticated theologies, cultural myths, and intricate philosophies to convince themselves and others that they were acting humanely, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Meanwhile, this is what the German government was planning according to the diary of Joseph Goebbels:

In all the world, he said, “the Jews are alike. Whether they live in a ghetto of the East or in the bankers’ palaces of the City or Wall Street, they will always pursue the same aims and without previous agreement even use the same means. One might well ask why are there any Jews in the world order?

That would be exactly like asking why are there potato bugs? Nature is dominated by the law of struggle. There will always be parasites who will spur this struggle on and intensify the process of selection between the strong and the weak. The principle of struggle dominates also in human life.

One must merely know the laws of this struggle to be able to face it. The intellectual does not have the natural means of resisting the Jewish peril because his instincts have been badly blunted. Because of this fact the nations with a high standard of civilization are exposed to this peril first and foremost.

In nature life always takes measures against parasites; in the life of nations that is not always the case. From this fact the Jewish peril actually stems. There is therefore no other recourse left for modern nations except to exterminate the Jew….”

Hitler and his henchmen were playing 4D chess with the German Christians all along, just not in the way the devoted Christians imagined. It was obvious to Hitler and Goebbels that the Jews (and many other “categories” of human beings) would need to be exterminated because of the global complexities preventing Germany from simply “sending them away.”

How does a group of people justify exterminating other people?

By classifying them as “parasites,” “criminals,” “terrorists,” “rapists,” “predators,” and titles such as these which invoke fear, hate, and disgust within the dominant culture. This, combined with a historical revisionism that cast Germans as a “pure, Nordic” people and theology which convinced the moralists that God was deeply invested in Germany’s unique and grand role on the world stage, supplied all the ingredients necessary for one of the world’s most heinous evils to occur.

The German Christians once again chose to believe a simple lie: Germany could “cleanly and ethically” remove all the “bad people” from among them and return to a “pure, Nordic” and Christian country of prosperity and peace.

They chose not to grapple with the complex truth: Their Dear Leader, who was never a Christian though they believed him to be, was using them for purposes of consolidating power. They were never going to see the Christian country they were imagining because nothing they were doing was aligned with Christ or His will for the earth. It’s an inconvenient fact, when we strive for power over others, that God deeply loves the entire world, which is why we must devise ways to ignore, obscure, or twist that fact.

All their theological gymnastics were only useful in bringing about the deaths and torture of millions of human beings. Their entire grand project had only ever been about power, not ever about righteousness. The scariest part is that they hid this truth from themselves by refusing to think critically and repent from their mistakes before it was too late.

There’s simply no doubt the Spirit of God was calling to them, compelling them to change course and to embrace the equalizing love and hope of Christ. But their will to power was too great. It blocked their spiritual eyes and ears.

In the next installment of this series, we’ll examine a few of the other traps the German Christians fell into which set things in motion they could not stop, even when the tide turned against them. We’ll get curious about the alternative paths they could have chosen and what we can gather for ourselves from this tragic story of Christians who abandoned their first Love in service to humans’ will to power. I’ll end with this quote from theologian and pastor Reinhold Krause taken from his incendiary speech at the Sports Palace in Berlin, 1933. I could just as easily be quoting any number of Christian Nationalist preachers today or lifting this directly from Project 2025 with all it’s framing of “us vs. them” and militant Christianity:

“We must demand a return to the heroic Jesus, whose life possesses exemplary meaning for us, and whose death is the seal upon this life, the resolution of a heroic and combative life in service to the mission the Father gave him. This is also why we must avoid exalting the Crucified One too much. We do not need as our Leader a distant, enthroned God; rather we need only the fearless combatant. Our church needs leaders (Fuhrer); it has a leader (Fuhrer) in our Redeemer. It needs leaders for here and now…Honoring heroes must become honoring God.”