J. Matt Barber
No, Hitler was not a Christian
By J. Matt Barber
"[T]he only way of getting rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little."
– Adolf Hitler
Yes, there have been evil men who have done evil things in the name of false Christianity. To a limited degree, Adolf Hitler was one such man. Still, and as even he frequently admitted outside the public eye, he was no Christian.
As a counterweight to stigma associated with the tens of millions slaughtered in the 20th century alone under the atheist regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al., the secular left is quick to thunder, "But what about Hitler? He was a Christian!"
Bad news, kids. Herr Führer was your guy, too.
"I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie," Hitler confessed (audio transcribed in "Hitler's Table Talk" [1941-44]). "It would always be disagreeable for me to go down to posterity as a man who made concessions in this field [to be labeled a Christian]."
Did Adolf Hitler ever call himself a Christian? Certainly. He did so, and as he would later admit, for the singular purpose of disseminating political propaganda.
"To whom should propaganda be addressed?" he wrote. "It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses. ... The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real."
The Nazi Germans of the 1930s and '40s are not alone in swallowing Hitler's Christianese-peppered puffery. Today's secular-"progressive" establishment likewise bandies about a handful of carefully crafted Hitlerian quotes released for public consumption. His "pro-Christian" proclamations in "Mein Kampf" and elsewhere, for instance, were universally a perversion of biblical Christianity leveraged for the sole purpose of justifying the extermination of the Jewish people.
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter," he wrote. "In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge [the Jews] to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. ... For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people."
That was the extent of Hitler's plastic "Christianity." The Bible, always taken out of context, served as a twisted weapon to justify the mass slaughter of over 11 million Jews, Christians, disabled people and other "undesirables."
In reality Hitler insisted, "In the long run, National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together."
What Brutal Hitler and Softer Modern Day Progressives Share in Common
Sounds an awful lot like today's American church-state separatists. Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU, for example, held, "I am for socialism, disarmament, and, ultimately, for abolishing the state itself. ... I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal."
Indeed, the ACLU's promotional materials similarly advocate anti-Christian intolerance and mirror Hitler's directive that, "Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together." "The message of the Establishment Clause is that religious activities must be treated differently from other activities to ensure against governmental support for religion," imagines the "American" so-called "civil liberties" union.
That's viewpoint discrimination and it's unconstitutional.
This is secular socialism in a nutshell. It's a religion, and its devotees, be they Nazi Germans or American leftists, are Communist Manifesto-thumping fundamentalists.
"There is something very unhealthy about Christianity," Hitler opined. "As far as we are concerned, we've succeeded in chasing the Jews from our midst and excluding Christianity from our political life. ... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. ... Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless."
Indeed, Hitler's robust anti-Christian hatred lives on beyond the death of the Third Reich. Modern-day progressives like Hillary Clinton, though, tend to take a kinder, gentler, more surreptitiously totalitarian approach: "Rights have to exist in practice – not just on paper," the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee recently said in the context of some phantom "right" to exterminate undesirable infants. "Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed."
Yikes. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
While Hitler was more direct, he nonetheless shared Hillary's secular socialist vision: "We'll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State. We shall continue to preach the doctrine of National Socialism, and the young will no longer be taught anything but the truth."
Sound familiar? Progressive "truth," of course, invariably means Christian torment.
Hitler, borrowing from socialist icon Karl Marx, said that all Germans must "free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let's be the only people who are immunized against the disease." Marx, a hero to the secular socialist left, famously called religion, "the opium of the people."
Hitler a Christian? No chance.
Anti-Semitism, Islam and a Dash of Darwin
Moreover, like the preponderance of today's similarly anti-Semitic secular progressives, Hitler, too, was an apologist for Islam. As America's own Dear Leader has done, Hitler partnered with Iran, present-day "Palestine" and other Islamist regimes in the shared goal of eliminating the Jews: "The world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing was Christianity!" he fumed. "Then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so!"
Hitler also parroted the godless ideology of modern atheists. Like so many of today's secular progressives, he was an avowed materialist, neo-Darwinian evolutionist and hardhearted God-denier: "When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity."
"Christianity, of course, has reached the peak of absurdity," he said. "And that's why one day its structure will collapse. Science has already impregnated humanity. Consequently, the more Christianity clings to its dogmas, the quicker it will decline."
Two thousand years and still waiting.
And so Hitler endeavored to assist "natural selection" and, as he wrote in "Mein Kampf," "establish an evolutionary higher stage of being." He placed his hope in Germany's youth because they were "absolutely indifferent in the matters of religion."
A beloved Hitler Youth marching song captured the Führer's heart on matters of Christ and Christianity:
We follow not Christ, but Horst Wessel,
Away with incense and Holy Water,
The Church can go hang for all we care,
The Swastika brings salvation on Earth.
Today's progressive "social justice" warriors are angling for a dystopian, Swastika-free repeat. Their hope, too, lies in the youth (witness the socialism-fueled anarchist insurgence occurring on college campuses nationwide).
Like then, progressive secular socialists endeavor to rule the world.
And "Christianity alone," to update Hitler's own words, will "prevent them from doing so."
© J. Matt Barber
May 23, 2016
"[T]he only way of getting rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little."
– Adolf Hitler
Yes, there have been evil men who have done evil things in the name of false Christianity. To a limited degree, Adolf Hitler was one such man. Still, and as even he frequently admitted outside the public eye, he was no Christian.
As a counterweight to stigma associated with the tens of millions slaughtered in the 20th century alone under the atheist regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al., the secular left is quick to thunder, "But what about Hitler? He was a Christian!"
Bad news, kids. Herr Führer was your guy, too.
"I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie," Hitler confessed (audio transcribed in "Hitler's Table Talk" [1941-44]). "It would always be disagreeable for me to go down to posterity as a man who made concessions in this field [to be labeled a Christian]."
Did Adolf Hitler ever call himself a Christian? Certainly. He did so, and as he would later admit, for the singular purpose of disseminating political propaganda.
"To whom should propaganda be addressed?" he wrote. "It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses. ... The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real."
The Nazi Germans of the 1930s and '40s are not alone in swallowing Hitler's Christianese-peppered puffery. Today's secular-"progressive" establishment likewise bandies about a handful of carefully crafted Hitlerian quotes released for public consumption. His "pro-Christian" proclamations in "Mein Kampf" and elsewhere, for instance, were universally a perversion of biblical Christianity leveraged for the sole purpose of justifying the extermination of the Jewish people.
"My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter," he wrote. "In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge [the Jews] to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. ... For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people."
That was the extent of Hitler's plastic "Christianity." The Bible, always taken out of context, served as a twisted weapon to justify the mass slaughter of over 11 million Jews, Christians, disabled people and other "undesirables."
In reality Hitler insisted, "In the long run, National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together."
What Brutal Hitler and Softer Modern Day Progressives Share in Common
Sounds an awful lot like today's American church-state separatists. Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU, for example, held, "I am for socialism, disarmament, and, ultimately, for abolishing the state itself. ... I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal."
Indeed, the ACLU's promotional materials similarly advocate anti-Christian intolerance and mirror Hitler's directive that, "Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together." "The message of the Establishment Clause is that religious activities must be treated differently from other activities to ensure against governmental support for religion," imagines the "American" so-called "civil liberties" union.
That's viewpoint discrimination and it's unconstitutional.
This is secular socialism in a nutshell. It's a religion, and its devotees, be they Nazi Germans or American leftists, are Communist Manifesto-thumping fundamentalists.
"There is something very unhealthy about Christianity," Hitler opined. "As far as we are concerned, we've succeeded in chasing the Jews from our midst and excluding Christianity from our political life. ... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. ... Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless."
Indeed, Hitler's robust anti-Christian hatred lives on beyond the death of the Third Reich. Modern-day progressives like Hillary Clinton, though, tend to take a kinder, gentler, more surreptitiously totalitarian approach: "Rights have to exist in practice – not just on paper," the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee recently said in the context of some phantom "right" to exterminate undesirable infants. "Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed."
Yikes. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
While Hitler was more direct, he nonetheless shared Hillary's secular socialist vision: "We'll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State. We shall continue to preach the doctrine of National Socialism, and the young will no longer be taught anything but the truth."
Sound familiar? Progressive "truth," of course, invariably means Christian torment.
Hitler, borrowing from socialist icon Karl Marx, said that all Germans must "free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let's be the only people who are immunized against the disease." Marx, a hero to the secular socialist left, famously called religion, "the opium of the people."
Hitler a Christian? No chance.
Anti-Semitism, Islam and a Dash of Darwin
Moreover, like the preponderance of today's similarly anti-Semitic secular progressives, Hitler, too, was an apologist for Islam. As America's own Dear Leader has done, Hitler partnered with Iran, present-day "Palestine" and other Islamist regimes in the shared goal of eliminating the Jews: "The world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing was Christianity!" he fumed. "Then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so!"
Hitler also parroted the godless ideology of modern atheists. Like so many of today's secular progressives, he was an avowed materialist, neo-Darwinian evolutionist and hardhearted God-denier: "When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity."
"Christianity, of course, has reached the peak of absurdity," he said. "And that's why one day its structure will collapse. Science has already impregnated humanity. Consequently, the more Christianity clings to its dogmas, the quicker it will decline."
Two thousand years and still waiting.
And so Hitler endeavored to assist "natural selection" and, as he wrote in "Mein Kampf," "establish an evolutionary higher stage of being." He placed his hope in Germany's youth because they were "absolutely indifferent in the matters of religion."
A beloved Hitler Youth marching song captured the Führer's heart on matters of Christ and Christianity:
We follow not Christ, but Horst Wessel,
Away with incense and Holy Water,
The Church can go hang for all we care,
The Swastika brings salvation on Earth.
Today's progressive "social justice" warriors are angling for a dystopian, Swastika-free repeat. Their hope, too, lies in the youth (witness the socialism-fueled anarchist insurgence occurring on college campuses nationwide).
Like then, progressive secular socialists endeavor to rule the world.
And "Christianity alone," to update Hitler's own words, will "prevent them from doing so."
© J. Matt Barber
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
