A Melancholy Easter Contemplating the Nazi Christians and MAGA
Trump’s Easter Message to America
Today I celebrated Easter quietly. Judy and I went and had brunch with friends, and while I did celebrate the resurrection of Jesus quietly and not in church, which I now find very unsafe and not a place of spiritual solace. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe, have faith and try my best to care for people as Jesus would regardless of their beliefs. However, in the current climate of our country where the conservative Christianity that I spent most of my life in has degenerated into a political cult of personality centered on Donald Trump I do struggle.
The Flag of the Deutsches Christians
I have studied Nazi Christianity and for the most part, very few, even members of the “Confessing Church” actively resisted while others were completely Nazified.
Hitler, much like Trump went through great lengths to gain Christians as allies to support his polices, despite his real opinion that Christianity was weak and incompatible with Naziism, and mocking Christians with his closest confidants. In a radio broadcast on 22 July 1933 he stated:
“Today Christians … stand at the head of [Germany]. I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity … We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit … We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre and in the press. In short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture, as a result of liberal excess.”
In 1934 the leaders of the “German Christians” the group which supported Hitler published this:
“the eternal God created for our nation a law that is peculiar to its own kind. It took shape in the Leader Adolf Hitler, and in the National Socialist state created by him. This law speaks to us from the history of our people. . . . It is loyalty to this law which demands of us the battle for honor and freedom . . . One Nation! One God! One Reich! One Church!“
A Nazi propaganda poster blaming Jews for the Crucifixion of Jesus with an SA Stormtrooper and his wife standing beneath a Crucifix illuminated by the Swastika rising like the sun on Easter morning.
The same can be said about the American Religious Right which is now nothing more than the religious expression of the Trump Cult. As such they either defend Trump’s crimes against humanity, his persecution of immigrants, legal and illegal violating their due process under the Constitution, while deporting many to an El Salvadoran concentration camp against the orders of an Appeals Court and the Supreme Court. They also seem to relish harming the poor and the elderly, or cutting off medical care for Americans and people overseas. Of course there are the daily offenses against citizens, people here on valid visas, and even foreign tourists coming to visit the United States, sometimes imprisoning them in ICE detention centers for weeks without charges against them. There are also the pictures and videos of ICE agents forcibly detaining people, even smashing their car windows in order to disappear them, not to mention ICE agents in full combat gear questioning every passenger on an Amtrak train in North Dakota about their citizenship. These are not actions any Christian should support, unless their “Christian faith” is a veneer they employ to hide their anti-Christian wickedness.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt
Trump’s steadfast defenders in his Regime and his propaganda enablers on Fox Fews, Newsmax, and hundreds of other sites, blogs and podcasts almost always sport crosses, the men typically on their lapels, often upon an American flag pin. While the women, like his Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wear gold cross pendants around their necks. They do this while spouting racist propaganda little different than the Nazi propaganda against the Jews and people suffering from chronic medical, physical, or mental illnesses who they deemed Life Unworthy of Life. In light of Trump, Robert F. Kennedy’s and Elon Musk’s healthcare statements and desired policies, we are not that much different.
Poster showing the cost to healthy Germans to care for the disabled
The Nazis were often backed by Christians who had adopted nationalism, antisemitism and German racial superiority above the Gospel of Jesus. Early on they formed the German Christian, or “positive Christian” movement within the Evangelical or Protestant Church. Than movement faded but its message became rather widespread and by 1938 few Christians, Protestant or Catholic raised much if any opposition to Nazi policies. Those who did ran great risk and many of them were put in prison, concentration camps, or murdered.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was killed by the Nazis at Flossenburg Concentration Camp on 9 April 1945, warned of Hitler and the Nazi Party’s Führerprinzip or Leader Principal, which is very close to the MAGA Christian understanding of Trump’s words:
“The fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, be it of a Leader or of an office, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here is infringing eternal laws and taking upon himself superhuman authority which will eventually crush him. The eternal law that the individual stands alone before God takes fearful vengeance where it is attacked and distorted. Thus the Leader points to the office, but Leader and office together point to the final authority itself, before which Reich or state are penultimate authorities. Leaders or offices which set themselves up as gods mock God and the individual who stands alone before him, and must perish.”
Members of the German Christians on parade.
Since Trump was elected in November, I always find myself thinking of the words of German Major General Henning Von Tresckow, a Christian, and an early part of the resistance against Hitler. He took his life on the Eastern Front when Operation Valkyrie, with which he was intimately involved in the planning of, failed. He wrote these words:
“I cannot understand how people can still call themselves Christians and not be furious adversaries of Hitler’s regime.”
Now I simply substitute Trump for Hitler.
This Holy Week and Easter have been a time of sadness for me and many others like me as Trump, the members of his Regime and his allegedly “Christian” supporters profane the name of Jesus as did the Nazis. I have also been grieving the unexpected loss of a dear friend in March, and the coming death of one of my platoon sergeants from my first tour as a young Army Medical Service Corps Lieutenant in Germany in the 1980s. If you pray, pray for Dorothy. She is in hospice care with her remaining life estimated to be less than a day.
I do wish readers who are Christians a Happy Easter, and I do mean that. Over the next several days I am going to be working hard on the current unit of my doctoral class, so I don’t know when I will write next. Hopefully, not long. All the best, be safe and watch your six.
I drove down to San Diego from Humboldt County for a medical appointment tomorrow. Today I was walking around Bonita Cove across the street from Mission Beach and Belmont Park observing all the families setting up for picnics, a multicultural blend. Then I saw a man walking toward me with a fishing road and bare chested, heavily tattooed. I was looking at one that was a cross on his midsection when my eyes moved up to his chest and saw the large swastika. He was grim, short hair and lean in a muscular way, probably in his forties or early fifties. Presenting himself in a very public in a place filled with Latino families and I even saw a pair of Muslim women with babies. I was struck dumb by this guy. Should I have confronted him? My maternal grandparents each lost cousins fighting the Nazis. My late father-in-law fought across Europe and my dad enlisted as an aviation cadet and later trained as a combat air crewman. I wonder if anyone else noticed or said anything.
Extremely melancholy. With the death of Pope Francis this morning, I wonder if the conservatives will return to an iron fisted interpretation of Catholicism. He had been a breath of fresh air to me. But the staunch conservative, single issue Catholics, were unimpressed with his humility and HUMANITY! I left the religion long ago, but still pray and have faith. With the ascent of Trumpism, even the faith is waning.