WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN CHRISTIANITY WITHERS?

In a 2010 interview with The Times of London, the militant atheist, Richard Dawkins, admitted:

• “There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death...I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, insofar as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.” 

Dawkins raises a timely concern, but it is more than a concern, but an historical reality.

What do we find when Christianity is forced to go underground by our Western idealistic experiments? I think that the recent resulting slaughter of 150 million by ex-Christian secular states give us some irrefutable clues.

Admittedly, the record of the Christian West’s imperialistic hegemony over the rest of the world had not been stellar. However, to be fair, we shouldn’t compare this Western performance to our idealistic mental constructs but instead to the performance of other world powers - namely to the genocidal practices of Islam, atheistic communism, National Socialism, or Shinto-Buddhist Japan?

Can we point to a world leader who would be a better alternative to the Christian West? Caesar? Genghis Khan? Attila the Hun? Hardly!

Instead, there seems to be a persistent reluctance to acknowledge the role played by Western Christianity in restraining evil. Regarding this silence, former professor, Jeremiah Johnston, has rhetorically asked, What happens when Christianity becomes silenced:

• We can look at Hitler’s Germany and the Communist states of the last century or so, where atheism is or had been the official worldview and Christianity was driven to the margins.

According to historian Richard Weikart, National Socialism (Nazism) provides an illuminating example of what happens when Christianity loses its grip.  The Lutheran Church, the largest German church, had, from the 18th century, largely abandoned their traditional faith, paving the way for Hitler:

• 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. (Weikart)

Liberalism had opened the German door to pantheism, positivism, and even spiritism. Weikart adds a prophetic hint to the Hitlerian puzzle:

• 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.” (Weikart)

Weikart is convinced that Hitler represented one breed of pantheist which 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.

Accordingly, after he came to power, Hitler proclaimed that his vision was Volk-centered, rather than Christ-centered. Nevertheless, he was glad to make use of Christian terminology:

• This “miracle of renewal in our people (Volk),” Hitler suggested, came about not as a “gift from heaven for unworthy people” but because they had fanatically sacrificed for the “resurrection of a Volk.” “It is the faith in our Volk that has made us small people (Menschen) great,” Hitler pronounced. The future, he believed, was auspicious because the German Volk was “born again.”

However, after Hitler consolidated his power, mention of “God” was removed in favor of a modified statement of faith: “One Empire—One Volk—One Führer!”

Nevertheless, Hitler’s movement was also “messianic,” according to Weikart:

• The messianic thrust of the Hitler cult manifested itself frequently, as in this Hitler Youth song at the 1934 Nuremberg Party Rally: “We are the joyful Hitler Youth We need no Christian virtue For our Führer Adolf Hitler Is ever our Mediator. No pastor, no evil one, can hinder Us from feeling as Hitler’s children. We follow not Christ but Horst Wessel, Away with incense and holy water. The church can be taken away from me, The swastika is redemption on the earth, It will I follow everywhere, Baldur von Schirach [leader of the Hitler Youth], take me along! 

Hitler’s religion was one of race and world conquest, according to Weikart. Therefore, when it came to strictly spiritual matters that didn’t conflict with Hitler’s vision, he was tolerant:

• Hitler was completely apathetic about religious practices in his personal life, and he did not really care what others believed about the nature of God or the afterlife. He consistently tried to separate politics from religion, insisting that Nazism as a political movement was neutral on religious questions. As long as the churches or other religious organizations allowed him to rule this world, they could say whatever they wanted about the spiritual realm.

With few exceptions, the compromised, liberalized, and paganized church allowed him to rule, even to their bloody end. However, Hitler’s holocaust had also been foreseen by Friedrich Nietzsche:

• They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to the Christian morality… When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. (Twilight of the Idols)

Truly, Christian morality rests upon an absolutely immutable and universal standard – God - but does it really matter? Yes! Our beliefs have consequences. The German Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, had also foreseen the holocaust back in 1832:

• It is to the great merit of Christianity that it has somewhat attenuated the brutal German lust for battle. But it could not destroy it entirely. And should that taming talisman break – the Cross - then will come roaring back the wild madness of the ancient warriors.

Once again, we are hearing their battle cry disguised in idealistic terms - “equality,” “freedom,” “brotherhood,” and “peace,” but each carries a deadly dagger.