Hitler and Christmas.

This is the reason that it is really hard to believe Richard Carrier's argument that "Hitler was a Christian."

Hitler and the Nazis hated Christmas.

//One of the most striking features of private celebration in the Nazi period was the redefinition of Christmas as a neo-pagan, Nordic celebration. Rather on focus on the holiday’s religious origins, the Nazi version celebrated the supposed heritage of the Aryan race, the label Nazis gave to “racially acceptable” members of the German racial state.

According to Nazi intellectuals, cherished holiday traditions drew on winter solstice rituals practiced by “Germanic” tribes before the arrival of Christianity. Lighting candles on the Christmas tree, for example, recalled pagan desires for the “return of light” after the shortest day of the year.

Scholars have called attention to the manipulative function of these and other invented traditions. But that’s no reason to assume they were unpopular. Since the 1860s, German historians, theologians and popular writers had argued that German holiday observances were holdovers from pre-Christian pagan rituals and popular folk superstitions.

So because these ideas and traditions had a lengthy history, Nazi propagandists were able to easily cast Christmas as a celebration of pagan German nationalism. A vast state apparatus (centered in the Nazi Ministry for Propaganda and Enlightenment) ensured that a Nazified holiday dominated public space and celebration in the Third Reich.//

This didn't happen without Hitler's approval.

Hitler hated Christmas. According to his press secretary, Otto Dietrich:

"Here in Munich he lived the life of a bachelor who did not care for any sort of family life. For example, on Christmas Eve he would give all of his followers leave to visit their families; then he and his adjutant Bruckner would go to motoring through the countryside because he wished to escape the Christmas atmosphere, which he thoroughly disliked. No amount of talk could change his attitude in this matter.” (p. 150.)

Weaponized Secularism.

Reading J.S. Conway's "The Nazi Persecution of the Churches 1933 - 1945," this observation strikes me with particular force:

Joey Fishkin has argued that Hobby Lobby is ultimately about “the politics of recognition,” and specifically about recognizing various conservative religious claims. Fishkin neglects the extent to which the Obama administration’s decision to fight Hobby Lobby over contraception mandate, and its initial decision to impose it on religious non-profits, is about recognizing certain claims made by liberal secularists, as Sanchez makes clear:

The outrage does make sense, of course, if what one fundamentally cares about—or at least, additionally cares about—is the symbolic speech act embedded in the compulsion itself. In other words, if the purpose of the mandate is not merely to achieve a certain practical result, but to declare the qualms of believers with religious objections so utterly underserving of respect that they may be forced to act against their convictions regardless of whether this makes any real difference to the outcome. And something like that does indeed seem to be lurking just beneath—if not at—the surface of many reactions.

It is the rising political assertion of the “nones,” or the religiously unaffiliated, that I find most interesting. America is developing a homegrown anticlerical politics, despite the fact that we’ve never had an established church. While chasing the mirage of theocracy, social liberals are increasingly embracing a weaponized secularism. This has led to sharp conflicts between right and left, and traditionalists seem to be finding themselves on the losing side of these debates as often as not. Going forward, though, I wonder if weaponized secularism will prove more divisive within the Democratic Party, which must appeal to the emphatically secular and the emphatically religious alike. 

Unlike Germany, Britain or France, America has not had an anti-clerical tradition - with all of its noxious hatred - because America has never had a state church.

What we are seeing, however, is the attempt to create - forcibly graft - that tradition into American culture, and it began when George Stephanopoulis lobbed the first question the first Republican debate of 2012 about whether Mitt Romney would make contraception illegal.  Here's a post from the debate:

During Saturday's Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire, hosted by ABC, co-moderator George Stephanopoulos bizarrely repeatedly pressed candidate Mitt Romney on whether the former Massachusetts governor believes the U.S. Supreme Court should overturn a 1965 ruling that a constitutional right to privacy bars states from banning contraception.

Romney, befuddled by the off the wall nature of the question on such an issue that is not on any state's legislative agenda, eventually observed that it was a "silly thing" for the ABC co-moderator to ask such an irrelevant question. Stephanopoulos's odd persistence which dragged on the discussion with Romney for more than three and a half minutes inspired a number of boos from the audience before Ron Paul and Rick Santorum were then allowed to weigh in.

So, at the time, everybody else, was going "WTF? Isn't this an issue that died in 1965?"

Two years later, we have a Supreme Court decision on whether private individuals can be forced to subsidize someone else's birth control, i.e., the exact opposite of what Stephanopoulis was implying in his dishonest question that was obviously scripted to "roll-out" propaganda that Joseph Goebbels would have envied.

We simply had no idea how much damage the Obama Left was willing to do to national unity in order to have its "War on Women" and "Emmanuel Goldstein" moment.

More on "Was Hitler a Christian?"...

...from No Pasaran.

With  pictures.

The Nazi War on Christmas.

I dove into reading scholarly books because of the atheist claims that "Hitler was a Catholic" or "Hitler was a Christian." After reading Richard Stegman-Gall's "Holy Reich" and Susan Heschel's "The Aryan Jesus" and Kevin Spicer's "Resisting the Third Reich" and Hubert Wolf's "Pope and Devil" and Derek Hastings' "Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism.", my conclusion is that the truth is far more complicated and far more interesting.

Hitler was a political opportunist who was willing to adopt any pose necessary to advance his true mission - his god, as it were - namely, his vision of the destiny of hte German people and his role in that destiny.  Nazism started out in Catholic Bavaria as a political party within the cultural and religious Catholicism of the region.  This phase lasted for only a few years - perhaps three to five prior to the Munich Putsch.  Shortly before, the putsch, Hitler decided that his future lay in breaking out of the minority status that being a "Catholic" regional party would consign the National Socialists to, and he formed an alliance with arch-anti-Catholic Erich Ludendorff and emerged onto the national stage. 

From that point on, Nazism decisively broke with the traces of political Catholicism. Priests were no longer welcome in the Nazi party, Jesuits and "political Catholicism" were linked into a triumverate of all things that were not German, including Jews and Marxists, and the Nazis turned to Protestantism as the sect it favored.  Hitler identified Luther and Frederich the Great of Prussia as model heroes of the German nation, something which appealed to Protestants and was a bete noir to Catholics. Protestant pastors and devout Protestants joined the Nazi party in droves.  On the other hand, the Catholics who joined were lapsed Catholics, such Himmler and Hitler himself.

The broad logic of this was that Protestantism in Germany was inherently nationalistic in a way that Catholicism with its ultramontane allegiance to an Italian Pope could never be. A Nazi party member could be a pious Protestant in a way that he couldn't be a devout Catholic.  Thus, Hermann Goering could claim to be a "good Lutheran" up to the time of his death; Catholics like Himmler, on the other hand, apostized early in their career, and sought more outre religious options, like paganism or occultism or other weird made-up beliefs.

The "Protestant option" came with a price, and that price was remodeling Protestantism into a bizarre version of Christianity as if it had been envisioned by a bad science fiction writer. Thus, the Nazi "German Christian" version of Protestantism stripped the Old Testament out of the Bible, envisioned Jesus as the first Anti-Semitic warrior against the Jews, demanded that Christians of Jewish descent be barred from being pastors and segregated within the local churches, and re-wrote Christian Hymns.

The stripping of the Old Testament from the canon sparked the revolt of Confessing Church, led by of Martin Niemoller, who was a member of the Nazi party, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was not.

Eventually, Hitler and the Nazis, particularly the evil atheist Martin Bormann decided Martin Bormann decided that the Protestant option, even mediated through an "L. Ron Hubbard-like" fantasy filter was too much trouble.  After the war, all of the Christian sects would be broken by the policies that were being implemented against Catholicism.

So, was Hitler a Catholic?  Was he a Christian?  The answer would seem to be: What year are you talkng about? And, it depends on what you mean by Christian.

The clear arc of the Nazi program was anti-Christian insofar as Christianity was an institution or belief system that could oppose the totalizing program of National Socialism.  If it could be modified, castrated, mutated and then incorporated into Nazism, then they were "Christians" of the religion they invented.  If not, they weren't.

But Christianity isn't something that can be re-invented like that.  It has a tradition, history and core text.  In Christ, there is no gentile or Jew, said Paul.  That the Nazis got as far as they did is amazing, but there were limits after which Christianity was not Christian, and those limits had been reached in the early '30s.

Modern atheists like the late Christopher Hitchens can make the claim that the Nazis were Christian, but that mistake was not made by Christians of the period.  No Pasarin points out that Christians of the period lived through a "War on Christmas" that was like no other:

The alleged link between Christianity and Nazism is quickly debunked by a few seconds' thought. Think about it, indeed: how many times, in how many World War II books, in how many documentaries with 1940s footage, have you seen pictures — whether fake poses deliberately prepared for propaganda purposes or simply "innocent", matter-of-fact news shots — of Adolf Hitler or any high-level Nazi official in silent (Christian or other) prayer? Hands joined and/or eyes closed with head down?

How many times have you seen photos of Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, or any SS member seated in a pew or even simply appearing inside a church?

That's right, it's like snapshots, or films, of ostriches sticking their necks in the sand: there ain't any.

Pictures of Nazis honoring traditional religion and religious traditions simply do not seem to exist.

(Unless, of course, the presence of the high-level Nazi inside or in front of a given church has nothing to do with religion per se. For instance, there may exist photos of der Führer in front of the Sacré-Cœur cathedral — just like when he poses at the Trocadéro with the Eiffel Tower in the background — but that is as a tourist visiting a foreign capital or, rather, as a war leader visiting a defeated city.)

Now, should the need for more confirmation really exist, we have the 75 Years Ago section in the International Herald Tribune.

It is edifying — to say the least.

1937 — ‘Neo-Pagans’ Target Carols

BERLIN — De-Christianization of famous German Christmas hymns, such as “Silent Night, Holy Night,” is the outstanding contribution to the current holiday season of the rapidly spreading German faith movement or “religion” of National Socialism. In the new versions of the old songs reference to Nazi tenets of race, blood and soil replace familiar words concerning Christ, Child and the like. The accepted English translation of Mohr’s “Silent Night,” stanza three lines two and three is: “The Son of God loves pure light, radiant beams from thy Holy faith.” Equivalent lines in the Nazified version are “German blood, O how laugh the lips of thy children, blessed with joy.”

 

Of course, another reason a Nazi leader might meet with a religious leader might be for reasons of diplomacy with an ally — but again, no pictures seem to exist with any Catholic priest or Protestant preacher, German or foreign
 

I think a fair point to thinking about history is to ask, "what did the people living at the time think was happening?"  It seems apparent that outside observers, like William Shirer, saw paganism in Nazism, not Christianity.