During last week's Q & A debate between Cardinal George Pell and Richard Dawkins, it was interesting that both men had perspectives on Nazism that were at once opposed and yet entirely congruent.

Pell argued that Nazism and Stalinism were the "two great atheist movements of the last century." Dawkins responded that while Stalin was an atheist, Hitler was not. However, they both agreed that Hitler represented the "personification of social Darwinism" (Pell) or that certain of what he tried to achieve arose "out of Darwinian natural selection" (Dawkins).

Part of this to and fro was certainly the kind of argument that often arises in contemporary debates, often through a process one could think of as Nazification: one disputant involved in a debate on any given topic attempts to associate their opponent's views with the Nazis. It is the kind of thing that one could summarise in a sloganistic t-shirt: "I'm okay, you're a fascist" (with an arrow pointing to the far-right).

But how could there be such opposing views when it comes to Nazism and atheism? People may not generally realise it, but the divergence of opinion between Pell and Dawkins reflects deep divisions among historians themselves as to what the Nazis believed about religion.

Nazism itself was consistently a racial ideology, and Ian Kershaw noted in his definitive biography of Hitler that one of the few things we can be certain about is that from the start of his political career to the bitter end, Hitler adhered to "anti-Semitism based on race theory."

When we look to religion, however, there is little agreement. The three main schools of thought are that the Nazis adhered to neo-paganism, that their ideology itself formed a "political religion" or that they advocated a particular form of Christianity.

The argument that the Nazis were pagans derives from the fact they arose from the ultra-nationalist volkisch movement in Germany, which had a bizarre range of esoteric and mystical religious notions. Hitler was certainly aware of the ideas of one of the most influential authors, Guido von List, who sought to rediscover the lost wisdom of the "Armanen," supposedly a high-caste of the priesthood of the pagan god Wotan (or Odin). He proposed to do so principally through runes and Norse poetry like the Edda.

In fact, when the Nazis first celebrated Christmas in Munich (in 1920), they did so as a solstice celebration, and the report of the event in their own newspaper noted that the dire situation in which Germany found itself had been "prophesied in the Edda and in the teachings of the Armanen in ancient times." They were referring here to passages on the apocalyptic Ragnarok or "twilight of the gods" in the poetic Edda. (People might not have thought that Hell Boy had much basis in fact, but Ragnarok also made an appearance in the official commentary on the Nazi program.)

But did Hitler adhere to such ideas? In one of the most complete speeches we have of Hitler's from 1920, he made direct references to some of List's concepts and argued that all Aryans built "cults of light" wherever they had founded civilisations in the world. Hitler included any use of the swastika (the Nazi sun-wheel) counting pagan runes in Europe, Hindu temples in India and Buddhist temples in Japan among such "cults of light."

In the same speech he disparaged the Bible as too Jewish: "one thing is for certain, that no anti-Semite wrote it." Yet at the end of August 1920, he argued the Nazis "supported every Christian activity" and promoted Nazism as a "gospel of German revitalisation."

This latter statement and its ilk have led to the argument that Nazism itself was a "political religion," drawing people into a movement of political faith through the use of rallies and rituals that created a secular kind of liturgical experience.

Racist ideology was something that all Nazis held in common, and there were certainly ideas of forming a "new cult" in some writings and speeches from Party members, though a good deal of the argument rests on the manner in which Hitler wrote on religion and political faith in Mein Kampf.

It is well established that Hitler quickly drew away from the esoteric world of the volkisch movement, because he did not want the kind of secret society of initiates that characterised that tradition. He wanted to build a mass movement. As a result, in Mein Kampf he wrote strongly in support of the Catholic Church and its traditions of authority and dogma. This was not out of any love for the content of church doctrine, but because he believed that the Nazis could use such forms to create their own "political confession," moving from "volkisch feeling" to an absolute faith in the rectitude of Nazi racial nationalism.

Hitler argued that the lack of compromise in Catholic dogma could be used as a model for Nazi Party "dogmas," implying the establishment of a dogmatic ideological faith that would be intolerant of any other such faith. In practice, however, the Nazis played fast and loose with their "party dogmas" in order to achieve political gains.

Which brings us to the third perspective - was Hitler a Christian? Emphatically not, if we consider Christianity in its traditional or orthodox form: Jesus as the son of God, dying for the redemption of the sins of all humankind. It is a nonsense to state that Hitler (or any of the Nazis) adhered to Christianity of this form.

The idea of universal salvation through Christ dying on the cross - the core concern of the recent celebration of Easter - was complete anathema to the Nazis, who adhered to salvation by race rather than grace. However, it is equally true that there were leading Nazis who adhered to a form of Christianity that had been "aryanised."

Overall, one could argue that all the leading Nazis measured religion by a series of racial hurdles, meaning that: Jesus could not be Jewish, he had to be Aryan; a heroic fighter, not a passive sacrifice; the Old Testament had to be rejected, and the New Testament purged.

In handwritten notes, Hitler also argued for a critical review of the Bible, to discover what sections met an "Aryan" spirit. In these same notes, he took a "biogenetic" history as the main biblical emphasis, arguing that original sin was solely racial degeneration - sin against the blood.

Some Nazis believed Christianity as a whole was too "judaised" to leap the racial hurdle for a religion appropriate to the German "racial soul" and "Germanic morality." Yet Hitler did voice a great deal of support for an "Aryan" Christ, generally a figure who fitted completely with his own agenda: a violent anti-Semite named Jesus.

This can be seen in Hitler's favourite Bible passage, Jesus cleansing the Temple of the money changers (Mark 11, Matthew 21), which he saw as an early model for his own perceived battle against "materialistic" Jews. At one point he reduced the mission of Christ to this: "it is only the means that change over the course of time; what was earlier a whip is today a blackjack."

We should also remember that "Christ" is not Jesus's surname, but a title, and it is still not certain whether Hitler actually believed that Jesus was divine. He referred to Jesus as "Lord and Saviour" but simultaneously argued that the sole reason for the crucifixion was an anti-Semitic struggle "for this world" rather than the next.

That said, Hitler often did argue in favour of the notion of a creator, a deity whose work was nature and natural laws, conflating God and nature to the extent that they became one and the same thing. This again came back to race, and meant that he argued in Mein Kampf that one could not avoid the "commands" of "eternal nature" or the "Almighty Creator": "in that I defend myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord."

For this reason, some recent works have argued Hitler was a Deist. He famously argued in a major speech of 1938 that Nazism was "a volkisch-political doctrine that grew out of exclusively racist insights" and was based on the "sharpest scientific knowledge." Yet in this same speech he stated the Nazi "cult" was solely one which respected nature, and so that which was "divinely ordained."

Was Hitler an atheist? Probably not. But it remains very difficult to ascertain his personal religious beliefs, and the debate rages on. He was an astute propagandist, which makes distinguishing rhetoric from reality all the more difficult.

What historians continually confirm is that Hitler developed an absolute faith in two things: an extreme form of nationalism, and himself.

Samuel Koehne is a Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute, working on the official Nazi views on religion. His previous research includes publications on the interrelations between nationalism and religion, and he was co-editor of Terror War Tradition: Studies in European History.