“It does not have to do with Jewish hatred – one can reach an agreement with serious Jews on this point – it does not have to do with blood, also not with the religious beliefs of Judaism. But it does involve the threat of a quite specific disintegrated and demoralizing urban spirituality, whose representative now is primarily the Jewish Volk.”

– Paul Althaus

“Our Protestant churches have greeted the turning point of 1933 as a gift and miracle of God.”

– Paul Althaus

This is interesting.

I’m watching this liberal professor whine about Christianity in the Third Reich. The vast majority of German Protestants were not Karl Barth or Dietrich Bonhoeffer. There were far more Protestants who supported the Third Reich than Himmler’s band of pagan LARPers. Most German Protestants interpreted Hitler’s seizure of power as a great triumph over communism.

In the wake of the Reformation, Protestantism used to be the basis of the social order in much of what is now Germany whether in the Lutheran or the Calvinist states. This state of affairs lasted for several centuries, but after the Enlightenment and the Napoleonic Wars secular ideologies like liberalism and communism began to influence the public and compete with the church and finally liberalism became the basis of the social order in the Weimar Republic.

Liberal Protestantism IS NOT synonymous with Protestantism. This was a later development particularly of the 19th century. Liberalism did not exist in Luther or Calvin’s time. National Socialism was another secular ideology and it too influenced German Protestantism. Protestantism isn’t necessarily liberal. It just happens to be so in our times because liberalism is ascendant due to how the World Wars of the 20th century played out.