alright so let's have a good, clean, scholarly debate about the connections between christianity and nazism.
proposition 1: christian support for nazism was restricted to 1)certain rather nasty individuals who had their own separate ideas about the inferiority of other groups (pious the 12); 2) the general public, immaterial of religion, who were swayed by propaganda; 3)default support because of natural opposition to atheist communism.
i imagine i'll be arguing against the following points pink sas so brilliantly charged.
Christians enacted the Holocaust
[link]
But a Nazism as a movement of Christians? Absolutely.
Besides, you cannot avoid the fact that many of the Nazi leaders embraced Christianity, and major churches of Europe embraced Nazism and racism. Try Mosse's Towards the Final Solution. True, many of the Nazi ideas adulterated Christianity with Paganistic philosophy, but the core values and stories of Christianity always remained intact.
Also, even if you manage to separate Christianity entirely from the Nazi leadership, you've got the Christian citizenry rounding people up and putting them into ovens.
The Final Solution would have never succeeded as far as it did without Christianity at its core.
my suggestion is not that the christians in germany did not have the same culpability as everyone else in the
world for not doing anything about the genocide (don't tell me no one knew about it. that's crap.), but, nazi leaders were not christian (in fact quite staunchly so) and thus the christian community as a whole cannot be blamed for this in the same way as the inquisition and the other crap.
if you don't find it on jstor or lexis nexis etc or in a peer-reviewed book (ie from a university press), i don't wanna see it. i don't care what wikipedia says or what your pastor says or what your local jcc says or what the last guy on the travel channel said.
This message has been edited by brennakimi, 12-13-2005 07:20 PM
This message has been edited by brennakimi, 12-14-2005 09:39 AM
This message has been edited by brennakimi, 12-14-2005 11:14 AM
ABE
this book sounds like an interesting read. nyu is fairly decent.
This message has been edited by brennakimi, 12-14-2005 04:37 PM
™ Version 4.2