In a series of posts (here and here) Jonah Goldberg has excerpted pages from his book Liberal Fascism that deal with "Hitler & Christianity." If you read further down this post, you will see tie-ins Goldberg makes with neo-pagan and New Age thought. Goldberg writes:
From pages 364-365 of my book:
Like the engineers of that proverbial railway bridge, the Nazis
worked relentlessly to replace the nuts and bolts of traditional
Christianity with a new political religion. The shrewdest way to accomplish
this was to co-opt Christianity via the Gleichschaltung
while at the same time shrinking traditional religion’s role in civil society.
To this end, Hitler was downright Bismarckian. The German
historian Götz Aly explains how Hitler purchased popularity with
lavish social welfare programs and middle-class perks, often paid for
with stolen Jewish wealth and high taxes on the rich. Hitler banned
religious charity, crippling the churches’ role as a counterweight to
the state. Clergy were put on government salary, hence subjected to
state authority. “The parsons will be made to dig their own graves,”
Hitler cackled. “They will betray their God to us. They will betray
anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes.”5
Following the Jacobin example, the Nazis replaced the traditional
Christian calendar. The new year began on January 30 with
the Day of the Seizure of Power.6 Each November the streets of central
Munich were dedicated to a Nazi Passion play depicting Hitler’s
Beer Hall Putsch. The martyrdom of Horst Wessel and his “old fighters”
replaced Jesus and the apostles. Plays and official histories
were rewritten to glorify pagan Aryans bravely fighting against
Christianizing foreign armies. Anticipating some feminist pseudo
history, witches became martyrs to the bloodthirsty oppression of
Christianity.
Under the progressives, the Christian God had been transformed
into the God of lower food prices. Under the Nazis, the Christian
God would be transformed into an Aryan SS officer with Hitler his
right hand. The so-called German Christian pastors preached that
“just as Jesus liberated mankind from sin and hell, so Hitler saves the
German Volk from decay.” In April 1933 the Nazi Congress of
German Christians pronounced that all churches should catechize
that “God has created me a German; Germanism is a gift of God.
God wills that I fight for Germany. War service in no way injures the
Christian conscience, but is obedience to God.”7
When some Protestant bishops visited the Fuhrer to register complaints,
Hitler’s rage got the better of him. “Christianity will disappear
from Germany just as it has done in Russia . . . The German race has
existed without Christianity for thousands of years . . . and will continue after Christianity has disappeared . . . We must get
used to the teachings of blood and race.” When the bishops objected
that they supported Nazism’s secular aims, just not its religious innovations,
Hitler exploded: “You are traitors to the Volk. Enemies of
the Vaterland and destroyers of Germany.”8
In 1935 mandatory prayer in school was abolished, and in 1938
carols and Nativity plays were banned entirely. By 1941 religious instruction
for children fourteen years and up had been abolished altogether,
and Jacobinism reigned supreme. A Hitler Youth song rang
out from the campfires:
We are the happy Hitler Youth;
We have no need for Christian virtue;
For Adolf Hitler is our intercessor
And our redeemer.
No priest, no evil one
Can keep us
From feeling like Hitler’s children.
No Christ do we follow, but Horst Wessel!
Away with incense and holy water pots.9
Meanwhile, the orphans were given new lyrics to “Silent Night”:
Silent night! Holy night! All is calm, all is bright,
Only the Chancellor steadfast in fight,
Watches o’er Germany
From pages 369-371:
...Just as the Nazi attack on Christianity was part of a larger war
on the idea of universal truth, whole postmodern cosmologies have been
created to prove that traditional religious morality is a scam, that
there are no fixed truths or “natural” categories, and that all
knowledge is socially constructed. Or as the line goes in The Da Vinci
Code, “So Dark, the Con of Man.”
The “con” in question is, in effect, a conspiracy by the Catholic
Church
to deceive the world about Jesus’ true nature and his marriage to Mary
Magdalene. The book has sold some sixty million copies worldwide. The
novel, and movie, have generated debates, documentaries, companion
books, and the like. But few have called attention to the ominous roots
and parallels with Nazi thought.
Dan Brown should have dedicated his book to “Madame” Helena Blavatsky, the theosophist guru who is widely considered the “mother” of New Age spirituality as well as a touchstone in the development of Nazi paganism and the chief popularizer of the swastika as a mystical symbol. Her theosophy included a grab bag of cultish notions, from astrology to the belief that Christianity was a grand conspiracy designed to conceal the true meaning and history of the supernatural. Her 1888 book, The Secret Doctrine, attempted to prove the full extent of the grotesque Western conspiracy that The Da Vinci Code only partially illuminates. Christianity was to blame for all the modern horrors of capitalism and inauthentic living, not to mention the destruction of Atlantis.
Alfred
Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, the second most important
book in the Nazi canon, borrowed ideas wholesale from Blavatsky.
Rosenberg lays out one Christian conspiracy after another. “Before it
could fully blossom, the joyous message of German mysticism was
strangled by the anti-European church with all the means in its power,”
he insists. Like Blavatsky and Brown, he suggests the existence of
secret Gospels, which, had they not been concealed by the Church, would
debunk the “counterfeit of the great image of Christ” found in Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John. “Christianity,” writes Hitler in Mein Kampf, “was
not content with erecting an altar of its own. It had first to destroy
the pagan altars.” It was “the advent of Christianity” that first
unleashed the “spiritual terror” upon “the much freer ancient world.”13
Large segments of the cultural left today subscribe to similar notions.
For
example, Wicca and paganism constitute the fastestgrowing religion and
religious category in America, with adherents numbering anywhere from
500,000 to 5 million depending on whosenumbers you accept. If you
add “New Age spirituality,” the number of Americans involved in such
avocations reaches 20 million and growing. Feminists in particular have
co-opted Wicca as a religion perfectly suited to their politics. Gloria
Steinem is rhapsodic about the superior political and spiritual
qualities of “pre-Christian” and “matriarchal” paganism. In Revolution
from Within she laments in all earnestness the “killing of nine
million women healers and other pagan or nonconforming women during the
centuries of change-over to Christianity.”14
The SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, was convinced that the antiwitch craze was an anti-German plot concocted in large part by the Catholic Church: “The witch-hunting cost the German people hundreds of thousands of mothers and women, cruelly tortured and executed.”15 He dedicated considerable resources for the SS to investigate the witch hunts and prove they were attempts to crush Aryan civilization and the true German faith. The SS put together what amounted to their own X-Files unit—dubbed Special Unit H (for Hexen, or “witches”)—to ferret out the truth of over thirty-three thousand cases of witch burning, in countries as far away as India and Mexico.
Indeed, most of the founders of National Socialism would be far more comfortable talking witchcraft and astrology with a bunch of crystal-worshipping vegans than attending a church social. Consider the Thule Society, named after a supposed lost race of northern peoples hinted at in ancient Greek texts. The society was founded as the Munich chapter of the German Order, and while its occult and theosophical doctrines were nominally central to its charter, the glue that held it together was racist anti-Semitism. Anton Drexler was encouraged by his mentor Dr. Paul Tafel, a leader of the Thule Society, to found the German Workers’ Party, which would soon become the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Its membership was a veritable Who’s Who of founding Nazis, according to Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw.