HOW TO CAPTURE A ONCE GREAT NATION

Capturing a nation starts with capturing the mind through propaganda disguised as “the news.” In “When a Nation Forgets God,” Erwin W. Lutzer explained the ascendancy of National Socialism. Spirituality would be redefined as a “private matter” strictly between oneself and God:

·       Right from the beginning Hitler sought to marginalize the church to guarantee that no Christian influence would be allowed to inform government policy. Worship would have to be a private matter between a man and his God; at all costs the official state policy would have to be based on humanistic principles to give Hitler the freedom to do what was “best” for Germany. He said that the churches must be “forbidden from interfering with temporal matters.” The state would have to be scrubbed clean of all Christian convictions and values.

In order to accomplish this, any public manifestation of Christianity would have to be either removed or secularized for the sake of the “greater good” of the Volk:

·       Since Germans had for centuries celebrated Christmas and Easter, Hitler had to reinterpret their meaning. Christmas was turned into a totally pagan festival; in fact, at least for the SS troops, its date was changed to December 21, the date of the winter solstice. School prayers were banned, and carols and Nativity plays were forbidden in the schools; and in 1938 even the name Christmas was changed to Yuletide. Crucifixes were eliminated from classrooms. Easter was turned into a holiday that heralded the arrival of spring. If religion was tolerated, it had to be secularized so that it would be compatible with the state’s commitment to the greater good of a revived Germany. Most of the churches bowed to the cultural currents and endorsed the “Positive Christianity” that was in line with government policies. (Lutzer)

“Positive Christianity” was promoted by Hitler to bring Christianity into conformity with the goals of National Socialism:

·       Article 24 of the party platform demanded, “liberty for all religious denominations in the State so far as they are not a danger…to the moral feelings of the German race.”

The Church offered some token resistance. Therefore, Hitler invited some of the reluctant pastors to meet with him:

·       Hitler began by reproaching his guests, treating them to a tirade about how he was misunderstood. “Peace,” he said, is all that he wanted. “Peace between Church and state.” He blamed them for obstructing him, sabotaging his efforts to achieve it…”You confine yourself to the Church. I’ll take care of the German people.”

However, Pastor Martin Niemoller was not to be intimidated:

·       “You said that, ‘I will take care of the German people.’ But we too, as Christians and churchmen, have a responsibility toward the German people. That responsibility was entrusted to us by God, and neither you more anyone in this world has the power to take it from us.”

Niemoller paid dearly for his courage, and the fledgling movement was shattered:

·       More than two thousand pastors who had stood with Niemoller and Bonhoeffer withdrew their support. They believed that appeasement was the best strategy; they thought that if they remained silent they could live with Hitler’s intrusion into church affirms and his political policies. (Lutzer)

·       Niemoller was later imprisoned for what we today call “hate speech”…He had violated a new law for the “Prevention of Treacherous Attacks on State and Party.” (Lutzer)

Hitler’s propaganda machine was a restless beehive of activity. Evil was disguised as righteous concern for the welfare of the German people. According to Lutzer, all of “this happened under code words such as freedom, peace, and fairness.” He argues that:

·       With God and religion removed from government, the values of Hitler’s socialism filled the vacuum. The church would increasingly become the enemy of the state.

However, the Church is supposed to be the light of the world:

·       “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house.” (Matthew 5:13-15)

But wasn’t Germany as Christian nation? It seems that Germany had been ripe for Hitler. It also seems that the Lutheran Church, the largest German church, had, from the 18th century, largely abandoned their traditional faith. In “Hitler’s Religion,” historian Richard Weikart had written that, by the time of Hitler, much of German Christendom had already seriously compromised their Biblical faith:

·       Beginning in the eighteenth century and increasing dramatically through the nineteenth century, German Protestantism had largely adopted theological liberalism, especially in the university theology faculties. Theological liberalism tended to dismiss many parts of the Bible as historically unreliable and rejected the miraculous. It opposed the idea of the inherent sinfulness of humanity and stressed the immanence rather than the transcendence of God.

No wonder the Church was unable to stand! Their compromise had opened the door to pantheism, panentheism, positivism, and even spiritism. This “Christianity” had already ceased being the light of the world and had become focused exclusively on their private experiences. Weikart cites Heine to highlight the compromised status of the Church:

·       In 1835, the poet Heinrich Heine asserted, “Nobody says it, but everyone knows it: pantheism is an open secret in Germany. We have in fact outgrown deism. We are free and want no thundering tyrant.”

However, they were ripe to substitute one “thundering tyrant” for another. Weikart is convinced that Hitler represented one breed of pantheist who believed that serving god was a matter of acting as an agent of natural selection to remove the inferior races:

·       Hitler’s devotion to nature as a divine being had a grim corollary: the laws of nature became his infallible guide to morality. Whatever conformed to the laws of nature was morally good, and whatever contravened nature and its ways was evil. When Hitler explained how he hoped to harmonize human society with the scientific laws of nature, he emphasized principles derived from Darwinian theory, especially the racist forms of Darwinism prominent among Darwin’s German disciples. These laws included human biological inequality (especially racial inequality), the human struggle for existence, and natural selection. In the Darwinian struggle for existence, multitudes perish, and only a few of the fittest individuals survive and reproduce.

A Biblical faith should have stood confidently against such unbiblical nonsense, but the Church had already forgotten about the One who had given them birth and His Word.