Could Hitler happen here?
We asked three American historians, each with a background in German studies, to respond to Helmut Thielicke’s comments on Nazi Germany.
Each man is a professor of history. Richard V. Pierard, the first to comment, and Robert G. Clouse, the last, teach at Indiana State University in Terre Haute; Robert D. Linder teaches at Kansas State University in Manhattan. Linder and Pierard have written a book together to be published this year by InterVarsity Press, “Twilight of the Saints: Civil Religion and Biblical Christianity in America.” Clouse is the editor of “The Meaning of the Millennium, Four Views,” published last year also by InterVarsity.
Although we may not agree with all the views they express, their analyses are thought-provoking responses to the question, Could such things happen in this country?
The German Church and Authority
RICHARD V. PIERARD
Ever since the Third Reich collapsed people have asked how and why such a demonic force could have arisen. How could people nurtured in the bosom of the evangelical church have been taken in by Hitler and his cronies? Professor Thielicke frankly and forthrightly deals with these matters, but his remarks raise troubling questions with which every thoughtful American Christian will have to wrestle.
First of all, the German Lutheran Church was by its very nature a conservative institution. Almost from the time of the Reformation it had come under the protective wing of the civil authorities in the various German states. In the early nineteenth century the connection between pietism and the German national awakening enabled patriotism to flower under the umbrella of religion, and the struggle to advance the interests of the German people came to be regarded as God’s service.
Because the church was the integrating force within society, it educated the people in the tenets of Christian morality, that is, such virtues as obedience to authority, patriotism, and a cheerful acceptance of one’s place in life. Thus, disestablishment in the post-World War I Weimar Republic came as a rude shock to churchmen. They readily identified with nationalists of all stripes in repudiating democracy, denying any moral responsibility for the war, deploring the lack of patriotic feeling, and calling for Germany’s national regeneration. Because clerics adopted an almost totally negative stance toward a new political order and most of them identified with conservative political parties in the republic, they were easily seduced by the prophets of the far right who offered a simplistic program of national renewal.
Moreover, this negativism was also directed toward contemporary society. They denounced such trends as changing sexual mores, easy divorce, declining birth rates, prison reform, modern art, materialism, and communism in terms almost identical to those used today by many evangelical critics of American life. Largely absent from their sermons and writings were statements calling for economic and social justice, approving efforts at international peace and reconciliation in the aftermath of the war, and expressing respect and appreciation for Jewish contributions to German society.
Another problem was the church’s attitude that the governmental authority was ordained by God and any resistance to the state, no matter how unjust it may be, is resistance to God. Christians were obligated to obey their rulers except when this would clearly violate demands of the Gospel.
The pious pronouncements of the Führer deceived many Christians, as Thielicke correctly points out. They enthusiastically welcomed his accession to power, because, after all, the official Nazi program (the Twenty-Five Points) took a stand for “positive Christianity,” and Hitler himself declared frequently, such as in a radio address on February 1, 1933, that his government would “seek firmly to protect Christianity as the basis of our entire morality, and the family as the nucleus of the life of our people and our community” (M. Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, Suddeutscher Verlad, 1965, I. p. 192). Even the German Baptists hailed the new era, believing that at long last they would be liberated from the oppressive hand of the state-supported church.
The German tendency to submit to authority has deep religious roots. Unlike the United States, that country lacks a revolutionary heritage, and the theology of government and the family that evolved in German Lutheranism (coupled with a grievous distortion of the two kingdoms doctrine) does much to explain this penchant for authoritarianism. A nineteenth-century thinker, Karl Haller, suggested that the state was like a family with the sovereign functioning as the father, and he utilized the catchy slogan, “one God, one king, one father.” The virtues of a subject were those of a child—obedience, reverence, faithfulness, and piety. With such an outlook Germans were ill-prepared to offer up resistance to Hitler who came to power in 1933 legally, that is, by utilizing the institutions of the Weimar Republic, the legitimate government (although stretching and distorting these beyond comprehension), instead of by an illegal coup d’etat, which he had learned during the abortive Munich Putsch of 1923 that the army and populace would not tolerate.
A Political Machine
ROBERT D. LINDER
All eight of Thielicke’s preconditions for fascism in Germany do not exist in America—at least not yet. However, an alarming number do. Certainly, most thinking people in this country today sense that something is desperately wrong and that a malaise has settled over the land. There is little evidence of any kind of political or social consensus in America today. The political landscape is marked by shifting alliances while party theoreticians search for new political definitions. President Jimmy Carter’s apparent liberal-conservative schizophrenia is nothing less than a true reflection of the mood of a nation that does not know its own political mind.
Beyond social and political fragmentation, the seeds of a fanatical nationalism were planted in many sectors of American society during the bitterly divisive years of the Vietnam War. The American intellectual community appears as fragmented as society at large and, thus far at least, seems incapable of pinpointing the cause of the current national drift. U.S. intellectuals give little evidence that they are more perceptive than their German brethren in recognizing the threat of collectivist totalitarianism, whether it be of the left or of the right. Finally, the military in America has undergone two important changes since the end of World War II. First, it has become large and respectable; and second, it has become more professional. Americans historically have been hostile to the concept of a large peacetime standing army. However, the communist threat since 1945 has led this generation to accept such an army as part of our way of life. Most important, the attitude and composition of America’s new military establishment is increasingly like that described by Thielicke as existing in Germany in Hitler’s day.
America has other serious problems as well that make this a time of great social stress. Many of them are not unlike those common to Nazism in Germany, which Thielicke mentions only in passing: an inordinate fear of communism, the search for a scapegoat for national problems, the increasing use of the media by certain powerful interests to mold and mobilize the masses, an increasing tolerance of violence as a way of life, and the presence in society of a large body of alienated, restless, bored young people looking for a cause. Moreover, twentieth-century Americans do not seem to be any more adept at organizing resistance to entrenched power than were the Germans under Hitler. Finally in this regard, recent events have revealed the presence in America of a substantial number of individuals who are willing to resort to terrorism to gain their political objectives.
But Americans have been fortunate that thus far we have not experienced the kind of debilitating economic collapse as that which occurred in Germany in the period 1929–1933. However, the unstable economic condition of America in the 1970s has disclosed disturbing trends that well could develop into ugly confrontations between various interest, ethnic, and sexual groups in the country if and when jobs become really scarce. For example, a recent Newsweek feature entitled “Is America Turning Right?” indicated that much of the growing conservatism in the U.S. today is simply a matter of “middle-class self-interest.”
There has not yet appeared on the political horizon an apocalyptic redeemer-figure of the stature of Hitler. Perhaps the American constitutional system of checks and balances and the dearth of strong leaders have helped in this regard. On the other hand, there seem to be those individuals in America who possess the demonic charisma of a Hitler. Fortunately, none of them yet has attained high national office.
Thielicke’s point that the Nazis and their sympathizers looked on people only “as a valuable element in the labor force, or as the progenitor of highly rated offspring, or as an attractive sex object” has an all too familiar ring about it to modern American ears. Immediately there comes to mind the modern American propensity to cast people on the economic and social scrap heap at age sixty-five and the growing use of impersonal retirement centers as a place to send the aged to die. Moreover, the new American success symbol of athletic prowess rather than intellectual or commercial skills speaks to the Nazi emphasis on the desirability of producing physically superior children. No longer is the Rhodes scholar or even the shrewd Yankee businessman the ideal. Rather it is the athlete who can thread a forty-yard pass through the outstretched arms of a highly-touted defensive secondary, or who can hoist home runs into the upper deck, or who can hit a tennis service at 125 miles per hour. Sports-crazed Americans appear to be willing to pay almost any price to keep their athletic heroes happy, though they haggle over every penny spent for the services of those they engage to teach their children. And need one comment in regard to the growing emphasis on women as sex objects in national life? Americans are confronted with the sexual exploitation of women on every hand: in the increasing number of pornographic magazines, in TV shows and advertising, and in most recent movies.
At the time of the depression, the nation moved to the political left to solve its problems. But that was before the advent of the Soviet Union as a superpower and before the national mood turned rightward in the mid-1970s. Industrial America now faces the energy crisis. How will the average American react to a genuine gasoline shortage? Will present-day America sell its birthright for a pint of gas? Will Americans be able to adjust to a lower standard of living in an age of rising expectations? Nor have Americans yet been tested by a major charismatic leader in a crisis similar to the one faced by the German people in the 1930s.
I think that American political institutions are sound. They only need nurture and fulfillment. The evangelical Christian community in this nation, however, is a question mark. How would the allegedly forty million American evangelicals react to an attempted fascist take-over? The evangelical record of political involvement (or lack of it) in the twentieth century is not encouraging.
Furthermore, how deeply has materialism affected the average Christian in America? How close to the apostolic ideal do evangelicals in this country live? Could they do without their affluence? What about the evangelical Christian habit of venerating celebrities? How would they respond to an apocalyptic redeemer-figure who in an hour of crisis appeared as an angel of light—especially if he made free use of Christian vocabulary?
But most important of all, what are the shared values of evangelicals in America today? Are they truly biblical values? Or are they the values of materialism? Do they share Luther’s concept of “alien dignity” or what nineteenth-century American evangelicals held as the doctrine of the free individual in a free society? Or do present-day evangelicals in reality embrace a pragmatic view of people: important only as long as they are economically productive, valued only so far as they can achieve material success—preferably on the athletic field—acceptable only if they can be exploited because of their sex or beauty?
The Press for Conformity
ROBERT G. CLOUSE
Thielicke mentions the problem of German hatred toward the Jews. He cautiously suggests that German anti-Semitism might be paralled by American racism. Much care must be exercised in such comparisons but some dangerous similarities can be seen. America lost a war in Southeast Asia just as the Germans lost World War I. Our current energy crisis has caused serious economic dislocation, although nothing compared to what the Germans experienced in the 1920s. As the ecological and energy cost factors limit growth so that workers’ demands for an improved standard of living cannot be met, race relations may become more bitter. The racial tension that resulted from attempts to achieve school integration through busing is a forerunner of what could happen. One wonders how much evangelicals are doing to combat racism in America.
Another dangerous tendency of American life to which Thielicke calls attention is the desire to conform “to certain rigid conventions of society.” Examples of conformity range all the way from clothing styles to the similarity of the fast food chains. Yet beneath these forms there is a great deal of impetus for change in our national life, among which is the drive for equal rights for women. A sample of the paranoia so common among certain anti-ERA forces is found in a recent pamphlet entitled “Beware the I.W.Y.” In the course of condemning the International Woman’s Year, the brochure accuses feminists of being aggressively immoral, lesbians, against the family, advocates of abortion, hostile to patriotic church-going Americans, and opposed to the traditional role of women as homemakers. The tract assures readers that if the “anti-God, anti-Family, anti-America” Equal Rights Amendment becomes the law of the land our nation will fade into obscurity. Evangelical Christians are among the prime targets of that sort of propaganda.
Thielicke also cautions us about a rigid adherence to the law. He mentions that even sincere Christians in America seem reluctant to face the problem of obeying laws that are contrary to a person’s biblical conscience. There is a special word of warning in his remarks to those of us who are evangelical. We tend to feel that the only acceptable reason for disobeying a law is when it limits the right to preach the Gospel. However, when it comes to civil disobedience on matters of social justice, we are content to rest on a superficial social ethic that reserves such matters for the day of judgment or the millennium. The stand of an individual like Martin Luther King, Jr., who was ready to pay the price of imprisonment for his challenges to the establishment, is foreign to most of us.
Presently it does not seem that the neo-Nazi movement, which caused so much trouble with its attempt to hold a rally in Skokie, Illinois, last summer, represents any great danger. Memories of World War II are too fresh in the minds of most people to allow the swastika to become a popular symbol in the United States.
Although the Nazis, like the Ku Klux Klan, will continue to exist on the fringes of American society, a more frightening problem is the sort of ideology based upon religion, the family, and brand of patriotism that resists needed social change. In a less noticeable but more devastating way, the forces of nationalism, racism, placing the law above one’s conscience, and political splintering can move America toward homegrown fascism.
