When Nazism enters the chat...

If you’ve watched the newly released documentary God & Country, you may have noticed a moment where they cut to me, but then there’s a noticeable pause before I start talking. That pause was in reality much, much longer. The reason? I was debating whether to raise the issue of Nazi Germany in the context of the dangers Christian nationalism poses to our own democracy.

I hesitated for several reasons. I knew how easy it is for something like this to get misinterpreted and misapplied, by both friend and foe. I also knew that filmmakers can cut and splice however they see fit. Once you utter them, your words are theirs to use however they want to. (Before they begin recording, we sign away all rights!) But I thought the time had come to voice some of the resonances historians have been quietly noting, and so I thought carefully about how to phrase what I needed to say as precisely as possible.

More than a year passed between the filming and when I saw the first cut, and I had entirely forgotten about that decision. My heart sank a bit, and I braced myself for the pushback that was sure to come. Pushback, however, is part of the deal in this line of work. Moreover, if anything, our situation had become more alarming since I’d recorded the interview, and I stood by my words.

The first reviewer (I’ve seen) to mention the German connection, however, didn’t note my words. Instead, Tyler Huckabee pointed to Rob Schenck’s contribution, and his complaint was that the film didn’t go far enough.

Here’s what Huckabee said over at RNS:

In the middle of “God & Country,” Dan Partland and Rob Reiner’s documentary about the rise of Christian nationalism, evangelical pastor and former Christian right activist Rob Schenck drops a bomb. Gerhard Kittel, the famed Lutheran theologian whose Theological Dictionary of the New Testament is still considered the standard in Christian seminaries around the world, was an avowed Nazi. And not just any Nazi: Kittel worked with Hitler himself to launder the Holocaust for German Christians. It is a genuine jump scare, shocking in delivery and chilling in implication.

It’s the sort of energy that “God & Country,” which opens in theaters Friday (Feb. 16),  could have used a lot more of. After confronting viewers with this straight line between evangelical orthodoxy and the Third Reich, the documentary does not explore any of Kittel’s actual theology. It does not show why this theology was such an easy pipeline for genocide endorsement. Nor does it attempt to investigate whether Kittel’s legacy may still be warming American Christians to fascism.

Partland’s narrative simply moves on, largely content to contrast Christian nationalism with more moderate Christian conservatism. In doing so, the movie feels like a wasted opportunity to confront conservative Christianity with the fruits of its decades-long labors.

I remembered Schenck bringing up Kittel, but I didn’t remember him drawing a “straight line between evangelical orthodoxy and the Third Reich.” I watched the film again over the weekend after reading Huckabee’s critique, and I think he overstates the claims Schenck makes. In fact, I think a fairer critique of the film on this point might be that Schenck, and the filmmakers, may be playing a guilt-by-association game (intentionally or not) in order to produce the kind of bomb Huckabee wanted more of, not that they shirk from what’s right in front of them.

Schenck noted the ubiquity of a book by a German Nazi theologian on evangelical pastors’ bookshelves. In my own research, I hadn’t come across any mention of Kittel in connection to the Religious Right, and I was curious if I had missed something. Was this perhaps akin to right-wing evangelicals who like to cite the pro-slavery theology of Robert Lewis Dabney, I wondered? But then I saw a comment from my friend Randy Blacketer that cautioned against drawing theological lines between Kittel and contemorary American evangelicals. Blacketer is a historian of the Protestant Reformation (he’s currently working on a new translation of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion). He’s also a former pastor in the Christian Reformed Church, and he has some familiarity with Kittel’s work.

Photo by Mert Kahveci on Unsplash

Since this isn’t my area of expertise, I asked Randy to elaborate further. He was kind enough to share these thoughts with me:

In a review of the documentary God & Country, Tyler Huckabee faults the documentary for failing to emphasize the porous connection between evangelicalism and Christian nationalism. Apart from the fact that the term “evangelicalism” lacks adequate definition in the piece—there is no consideration of Black evangelicals or the “Other Evangelicals” who do not associate the gospel with conservative politics—this point may be quite valid. I have yet to see the entire documentary, though I participated in a webinar with the participants last week. Whether the Christan Right and Christian nationalists differ only in degree is a legitimate and important question.

But there is a major problem in the article for which I do not fault the author, because it’s an obscure matter. Apparently, the documentary includes activist Rob Shenk dropping a bombshell revelation about Gerhard Kittel, an academic who enthusiastically supported Hitler and the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany. Kittel edited The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT). Evangelical pastors use this resource. Therefore (according to Huckabee), there is a “straight line between evangelical orthodoxy and the Third Reich.” Huckabee claims there should have been more of this in the documentary to drive home the threat of Christan Nationalism and evangelicalism itself.

Except that it’s nonsense.

Yes, Kittel and other contributors to TDNT were supporters of Hitler. Yes, evangelicals were trained to use this resource in English translation. But no, it does not have any discernable or documentable influence on the direction of the American Christian right or CN. It was a standard reference work for mainline, progressive, and even liberal Christians as well as NT scholars generally. I first used it in high school, after two years of New Testament Greek in grades 9–10, followed by a year of biblical interpretation in 11^th grade. (My high school was a paradise for nerds like me). I used it with decreasing frequency in college, seminary, and twenty years of twice-weekly preaching. I never found any traces of antisemitism in it. They are there, but one has to be trained to find them.

Decades ago, I was told that George W. Bromiley, the Fuller Seminary professor who translated TDNT, scrubbed any offending passages, but I cannot confirm it, nor is the claim necessary for my argument. The early volumes (1–4) were published during the Nazi years and (I am told) have a bias against Spätjudentum, late Judaism, which antisemitic theologians characterized as a corrupt form of religion that was replaced by the superior religion of Christianity. But not only would it take a trained eye to find such bias, this is not the predominant content of the massive ten volumes of the TDNT. The bulk of it was composed after the war and after Kittel’s death, and the successive introductions reflect a coming to grips with various methodological problems in the work, and they explicitly acknowledge criticisms of antisemitism in the early volumes. But its causal influence on the increasing authoritarian tendencies of the Christian right is precisely zero.

Huckabee faults God & Country for not having enough “jump scares” like Schenk’s connection between Nazi Germany and evangelicalism. But shock value is no substitute for facts. And there are plenty of facts that will be shocking to anyone with ears to hear. This particular claim is counterproductive because it is specious. It’s a grasping at straws when there is a pile of lumber staring us in the face. I mean the many volumes of well-documented studies of the Christian Right that document real causal factors in the rise of the Christian Right, works by such scholars as Kristin Du Mez, Jemar Tisby, Andrew Whitehead, Anthea Butler, Robert P. Jones, and not least of all Katherine Stewart, on whose research God & Country was based—and who, by the way, draws no such straight line between a Nazi academic and evangelical Christians generally.

One cannot hope to win people over by demonizing them, but we do need to confront documentable factors in the history of the Religious Right, including, for example, southern slaveholder theology and its ideological descendants in the form of widespread Christian opposition to desegregation.

It is not that we should avoid all reference to the Third Reich. The Deutsche Christen as well as pastors and theologians who supported Hitler and his murderous and totalitarian regime should serve as an everlasting warning to the entire Christian church, a warning against authoritarianism, a warning against dehumanizing people who disagree with us, a warning against following a charismatic leader who claims to have your best interests at heart. But to claim that evangelicals are directly inspired by the Nazis—that itself comes close to dehumanizing them. Despite the filmmakers’ unfortunate inclusion of this historical red herring, Huckabee’s criticism of the documentary may well be valid; I will have to wait to see the entire film. But the filmmakers should have left out this particular jump scare.

I appreciate the points Blacketer makes, and his willingess to share his words here.

I agree, too, that the German Christians complicit in Nazism should serve as a warning to us all.

A couple years back, I addressed some connections between the language and politics of the two eras. Any historian can tell you that for any similarities one might draw, there are also always a host of differences, which is why we are careful to avoid simplistic comparisons of past and present—even when we aren’t talking about Nazis.

Here’s what I wrote then:

Let me go back a few years, to January 17, 2017. That’s the day my first article on what would become Jesus and John Wayne published, three days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. It presented my thesis in a nutshell:

The truth is, many evangelicals long ago replaced the suffering servant of Christ with an image that more closely resembles Donald Trump than many would care to admit. They’ve traded a faith that privileges humility and elevates the least of these for one that derides gentleness as the province of wusses. Having replaced the Jesus of the gospels with an idol of machismo, it’s no wonder many have come to think of Trump himself as the nation’s savior.

Indeed, white evangelical support for Trump can be seen as the culmination of a decades-long embrace of militant masculinity, a masculinity that has enshrined patriarchal authority, condoned a callous display of power at home and abroad, and functioned as a linchpin in the political and social worldviews of conservative white evangelicals. In the end, many evangelicals did not vote for Trump despite their beliefs, but because of them.

The next day, I received an email from Michael Lackey, author of The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis’ Christian Reich. He had read my article, which was filled with quotes from popular evangelical books decrying the “feminization” of the church and the nation, insisting on the need for warriors to rise up, to protect faith, family, and nation, to develop “a theology of fist fighting,” to train young boys to use firearms, and of the innate need for men to have “a battle to fight,” and the conviction that “God is Pro-War.” Lackey got right to the point: “As a Holocaust scholar, I noticed that this same shift happened at the beginning of the twentieth century, and I claim that it set the stage for the version of Christianity that Hitler and the Nazis ultimately adopted.”

When I replied to Lackey, I told him that yes, I was indeed aware of these connections. Although my primary training was in US religious history, my outside field of study in graduate school was 20th-century Germany.

As a high school student, I had spent a year as an exchange student in Germany with the Congress-Budestag program. While there, I was welcomed by two host families that included two grandfathers, both of whom had served as Nazi soldiers. One had spent years in a Russian POW camp and returned home a different man. The other, who was captured by Americans (and remembered fondly being introduced to eating corn while in their custody), was the kindest, most loving grandpa you could imagine. Over the course of my time there, I became not only deeply curious about German history and culture, but also increasingly curious about the history and culture of my own country.

While applying to graduate school four years later, I applied to programs in both American and German history. In the end, I chose the American concentration, but while at Notre Dame I also had the opportunity to work closely with Doris Bergen, author of Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. At that time, she was writing War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. I served both as her teaching assistant and research assistant, and remember well how important to her it was to situate the horrors of the Holocaust within the broader political, cultural, and military contexts. The war was an ever-present backdrop to the pursuit of genocide, and frequently its justification.

Under Bergen’s direction, I read books like Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, struggling to comprehend how “good people” could perpetrate horrific evil. With students, I read Art Spiegelman’s Maus, wrestling with how his use of animals both revealed and critiqued the dehumanization at the heart of genocide. I took courses like “The History and Historiography of Evil” and plunged into historiographical debates trying to get to the bottom of the question of whether there was something distinctive to Germans that set them on this path, or whether this was simply a reflection of the human condition, going unchecked.

All of which is to say, when I began my research on white evangelical masculinity and militarism, the similarities between the rhetoric I was reading in popular evangelical books on Christian manhood and the rhetoric of the German Christians that Lackey pointed me to were already apparent to me.

Now is probably a good time to say that Trump is not Hitler, and (the vast majority of) Trump’s supporters are not Nazis. Not even close.

But there are lessons that history offers us:

Words matter.

Dehumanizing rhetoric precedes acts of political violence.

Promoting false claims like the “stolen election” has very real consequences.

Stoking fear to promote your own power, using language of us vs. them, talking in terms of an epic battle for truth and righteousness, claiming that God is on your side against the forces of darkness—all of this has consequences.

When attempting to understand what is unfolding around us, I keep coming back to a recent survey that shows that 60% of white evangelical Protestants believe the election was stolen from Trump (far more than any other demographic), and that 26% of white evangelical Protestants (also more than any other demographic) believe that “true American patriots might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

In light of this, history offers us another lesson, one that we should all give some thought to. What allows rhetoric to devolve into violence is when too many people say nothing. When people shrug their shoulders at escalating rhetoric and threats of violence. When they respond to incidents like the January 6 attack on the Capitol with phrases like, “Well I don’t condone violence, but…” When they prefer to keep their heads down and stay quiet to avoid potential conflict. When they deny the seriousness of the situation, until it’s too late.

Over this past year, I’ve taken some heat from a few conservative white evangelical leaders. When their criticisms are substantive, I’ve engaged directly. When they are personal—snide comments, smear tactics, ad hominem, and the like, I sometimes engage but often I just brush it off. But when I see dehumanizing language weaponized against me—when I’ve been called the devil, or the child of the devil, or (frequently) a “wolf,” I’ve pushed back, privately and publicly. I call out those using this language and those liking and sharing posts that do. I’ve reminded Christian pastors and professors that words have consequences.

Despite my efforts, I do not believe that a single one has recanted or apologized, and the attacks continue.

This isn’t about me any more than it is about all of us, though.

Wherever we find ourselves, we have choices to make. Will we resort to “bellicose, dehumanizing, and apocalyptic language”? Will we allow others to do so, without calling them out? If and when we ourselves are targeted with such language, or God forbid with actual threats, how will we respond?

Scholars who study political violence often identify a period where resistance is possible, but too often during those periods, people perceive the risks as too great and end up going quiet when it matters most.

As Blacketer cautioned, it’s important to keep our analysis grounded in fact. There is plenty to be concerned about without stretching beyond our evidence. When we take that route, we end up distracting attention from what is right in front of us.

I happen to also agree with Huckabee that it is necessary to address the complicity of mainstream evangelicalism, and I think it’s a fair question whether the documentary “shirks its opportunity” to do so. But unless I encounter clearer evidence on this front, I’m not convinced the Kittel connection is the way to do this.

***Update: Scot McKnight sent me a note on his thoughts on Kittel, and has been kind enough to let me share it here as well. (Note: You can follow Scot on here, too.)

Here’s Scot, with a number of important insights:

I've had a decades-long habit of indulging my reading time with information about Nazi theologians, including what can be found about Gerhard Kittel, the founding and most influential editor of the widely-used Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. RP Ericksen, in his book Theologians Under Hitler, has a substantive section on Kittel. So, too, does Susannah Heschel in her book Aryan Jesus. A major contributor to Kittel was Walter Grundmann, who is examined at length by Heschel, and he too was undeniably anti Semitic. One cannot deny anti Semitism in “Kittel.” Kittel edited the first four volumes of the famous and still widely used TDNT. It cannot be denied that either Kittel or Grundmann were National Socialists. Consciously and committedly.

Numerous authors in the volumes of “Kittel” were in the grip of German anti Semitism. The Preface to vol 3 was idolatrous and the translator, G.W. Bromiley or someone else, deleted the offending lines. Dead Nazi soldiers were compared to John the Baptist as "preparers" of the way, and that way had to be the Third Reich. I have the German edition of Kittel, but I have chosen never to cite it again, a decision I made some years ago. I don’t know how much the translator edited back anti Semitic tropes in the volumes.

My take is that Kittel's TDNT is filled with anti Semitic and unhistorical tropes about Judaism and the Pharisees, and its theology of Jesus and Paul were posed over against unhistorical views of Judaism. One cannot deny the power and influence of this dictionary in the 20^th Century’s understanding of the New Testament. The absorption of Kittel, which lasted into the 80s and 90s if not beyond, shaped many in how they preached and taught.

The new perspective of Paul was generated by EP Sanders whose major contribution was a new perspective on Judaism as a non-works religion. Works religion, which was attributed constantly to Judaism, Jesus’ opponents, and to Paul’s opponents, shaped the Reformers. It also shaped the basics of Protestant theology. This inaccurate perception of Judaism, again the foil of Jesus and Paul, has so shaped Reformed and Lutheran theology that many in the newer Reformed theology group have a profoundly mistaken historical basis.

Just how it influenced Christian Nationalism remains to be seen, but I'd not dismiss it entirely. These connections deserve to be noticed: Nazism read Christian theology in racial terms; it wanted a pure blood and soil State and religion; Jesus's Jewishness was erased (Grundmann argued Jesus was gentile); Nazi/German racist theories and the American version of race-based slavery were connected (Isabel Wilkerson's Caste has important stuff on this); Euro-white supremacy is thus tied to Nazism (some of which goes back to Kant); Christian nationalism, which has plenty of white supremacy, should be explored for its connections to the Nazis. Kittel implemented that stuff into his choice of authors.

**On another topic entirely, I’m about to fly out to Sarasota, where I’ll be speaking tomorrow evening at Church of the Palms & be sticking around for a meet & greet after the event!