The word Nazi became part of America’s  political and cultural discourse. If one group can convince the culture that it’s opponent’s position are nothing more than a new manifestation Nazi platform intent on human suffering, it will essential win its argument. No one wants to side with Hitler, war, and the mass extermination of minorities.

Of late, the defenders of LGBTQ+ movement have begun to claim that conservative Christians are nothing more than modern day Nazis. Just like the Nazi’s, the evangelical church demonizes and abuses all whole mass of people as sinners condemned to hell. Not only do such claim make rhetorical sense, they also have some historical backing. As many a history book rightfully notes, Hitler did at times appeal to the sanctity of the German Church to justify his abuse and murder of the Jews.

So are those trying to redefine marriage and sexuality correct? Are conservative, Bible believing Christians nothing more than modern day Nazis? Let’s take a look.

Hitler, The Bible and Church

A noted above, Hitler did make use of the church. Unlike the American church, the German protestant church of the 1930s was funded by German tax dollars and was an government agency. Being a pragmatic man, Hitler used all government agencies including the German church to advance Nazism.

But historical, evangelical Christianity’s focus on forgiveness and the promise that God would once against extend mercy to the Jews proved incompatible with Nazism. To make the church useful, Hitler had to divorce it from its adherence to Scripture so that its end would not be the glory of God but the glory of the German Volk.

Viewing the Bible to be overtly Jewish and an excessively feminine work, Hitler created false version of Christian that contained little Scripture. As one Nazi theologians noted,

The Devil values the printed page and stretches it out to demand signatures, while God reaches out his hand. Whereas the Jews were the first to write out their faith, Jesus never did so.

Driven by nationalistic furor, the Nazis began chopping apart the Bible. Nazi’s lead their congregations to chant, “Down with Paul and the Old Testament” (Evidently, Jesus was Jew hating Aryan.). They removed all references to sin, the supernatural, and Judaism. Such things were deemed to be Jewish perversions and unloving doctrines weakness. Hitler and his followers wanted a nationalistic Christianity free from the dogma and the doctrine of the biblical text.

At the end of the day, Hitler vehemently opposed biblical, conservative Christianity.  As early as 1933, the Nazi party began prohibiting soldiers and statesmen from being involved in church life. By 1939, the superintendent of military chaplains boasted that, “no one understood” confessional Christianity “anymore.” Historic Christianity opposed Hitler’s murderous policies of Nazi superiority. And despite his early propaganda speeches, the dictator knew it.  He wanted to rid Germany of the faith. Historian Doris L. Bergen noted that, “hard-core Nazi leaders…as well as Adolf Hitler himself, considered Nazism and Christianity irreconcilable antagonists.” Nazis were not yesterday’s fundamentalist.

The Conservative Christian View

Unlike the Nazis, conservative Christians champion the Bible’s teachings. Breaking with western culture which views the Bible as intolerant, conservative Christians view the Bible to be the living word of God. They cling to passages such as 2 Timothy 3:16 which states:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

Today’s fundamentalist believe that the Bible directly conveys God’s message to humanity.  They are driven by the conviction that Scripture is God’s word and must be obeyed.

Conservative Christians condemn homosexuality not because they hate “brown” people and minorities as the Nazi did. They condemn homosexuality and all sex outside of biblical marriage because such actions as pastor Sam Allberry writes, “Contradict sound doctrine and the gospel.”  Unlike the Nazis, conservative Christians stand with the printed page of God’s word. Though unpopular, they cling to the Jesus of the Bible.  As the Apostle Peter says in John 6:38, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Who Has Abandoned the Gospel?

In the modern world, it is not conservative evangelical Christians but the LGBTQ+ theologians that have abandoned the gospel. As Timothy Johnson notes:

I think it important to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us. By doing so, we explicitly reject as well the premises of the scriptural statements condemning homosexuality

Just like the Nazi church and countless theological liberals before them, today’s liberals have once again rejected the Scripture. They look to the human experience for meaning and truth. And, they have no other choice. Commenting on the above quote, David Platt wrote:

If someone wants to advocate for homosexual activity, he or she must maintain that the Bible is irrelevant to modern humanity, inconsistent with our experience, and thus insufficient as a source of truth and guidance for our lives.

To arrive at a positive, sexualized Christianity free from the dogma, one must reject the Scriptures.

Are We Nazis?

The answer is “No.” Conservative, evangelical Christianity has always affirmed scripture and has been at odds with Nazism. Take a closer look at the likes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the other members of the Confessing Church and the contrast will become even clearer.

I also do not believe that homosexual theologians are Nazis. They are not advocating for the death of millions of Jews. The homosexual agenda is not the Nazi agenda. In short, we can safely conclude that neither conservative Christians nor homosexuals represent the rebirth of Nazism.

But homosexual theologians do share an intellectual pragmatism with the Nazi party. Both groups attempted to escape the authority of the written text of scripture. As Dr. Albert Mohler wrote a few months ago:

Once biblical inerrancy is abandoned, there is no brake on theological and moral revisionism. The Bible’s authority becomes relative, and there is no anchor to hold the church to the words of Scripture and 2,000 years of Christian witness. 

The results of the Nazi and the homosexual theological experiments have been very different. One encouraged a culture to embrace Aryanism and the Holocaust. The other is leading the west to redefine sex. But, they share a methodology. They both believe the Christian faith can and should be unanchored from the Bible and made into something new.

Final Thoughts

The quotes are true. Hitler did embrace a form of Christianity. But the similarities between the Christianity of Hitler and the Christianity of modern day conservative, evangelicals begins and ends with the word, “Christian.” Hitler championed a Christianity divorced from scripture, while conservatives champion the written word. So the answer to the question at the beginning of this blog is a resounding, “No, we are not Nazis.”