I have come to believe that the greatest long term enormity of Nazism, Fascism, and Communism/Stalinism prior to and during WWII was the death of Christianity in Europe.
A common theme in Nazism, Fascism, and Stalinism was that religion was downplayed if not totally abandoned. The Nazis persecuted the Jews, but they also persecuted Catholics and other Christian clergy. The Soviet Union all but outlawed the Russian Orthodox Church.
People still need to believe. Religion is one of the aspects of humanity that allowed mankind to form societies. It was the basis for the first rules and codes of conduct that allowed civilizations to form.
When Christianity was taken away by these totalitarian leaders, the people focused their need to believe in the leaders themselves. We call this the “cult of personality,” but it is in fact a religion, from an anthropological and psychological perspective.
Since the end of WWII, religion in Europe and the West has decreased. In its place, a new religion has arisen. It is the Church of State. It is a believe in government. I mean belief in as religious belief.
This is the religion of the political Left. The left is overwhelmingly atheist or barely practicing in Christianity. Think about how a Catholic like Pelosi or Biden can be pro-choice when the Catholic Church is not. Their real worship is to the state.
Conservatives who are much more traditionally religious are much less likely to worship the State because they already worship a god. They don’t need the government to fill the role of a religion.
A government is just a bunch of people. Some good, some bad, most average. What the government can do, it can only do as well as the people in government can do anything.
When people who worship at the Church of State talk about government, they forget it is made up of people. They talk about government like it is an omniscient, omnipotent entity unto itself. The State is god. Individual leaders are the prophets or messiahs.
We saw this with the hagiographic portraits of Obama.
Obama was going to be the savior that healed America’s racist soul.
Hillary was supposed to be the second savior that healed America’s sexist soul.
This is why among the Left, there has been so much hand wringing and downright insanity at the election of Donald Trump. We rejected their savior.
It is why there is no rationalizing with them on these issues to come up with a compromise. They cannot tolerate our differing opinions because our opinions make us heretics. It is why everybody who didn’t vote for Hillary is a deplorable racist, sexist, homophobe, etc., because we are infidels. We are unbelievers. We are Kafir.
Liberalism is their religion, and they are preparing their Jihad.
Thankfully, they can’t ‘rationalize’ their way to Hillary… 🙂
I just pray that their “long march through the institutions” doesn’t lead them through the armed forces. They’re doing their level best to inject “right thinking politics” into our officer class, but so far that’s been mostly confined to the administrative part. God forbid they ever get the rank and file combat arms on their side.
This post is so spot on. I’ve said for years, the Leftards have replaced government with their “godvernment”. And it is so….this is their pathetic and cancerous religion.
Read “The True Believer” by Hoffer. He hits the nail on the head.
Hmmm. While I cherish the sentiment of a connection between socialism and personality cult, national socialism was neither anti-Christian nor areligious.
The nazis’ general strategy was to oppose the political positions of the two prominent churches, not the religion themselves. That was helped by the Lutheran dictum of the two kingdoms, interpreted as separation of church and state, and later on the catholic side by Pius XII’s stance on Vatican neutrality.
Hitler seems to have been well aware of the value of religion as unifying tool. That’s probably why the nazis ran a two-prong approach of offering an alternative in their take on paganism (as opposed to state-mandated atheism) as well as taking over key church positions with their loyalists (Reichsbischof Ludwig Müller as head of the protestant faction, for example).
And most people fell in line, some even happy that the Jewish competition was eliminated (let’s not forget who the main source of anti-judaism was the last 1000 years leading up to this). Exceptions were persecuted. Most people remember Dietrich Bonhöffer of the Confessing Church movement as a typical example and there were a lot more, most of them very brave people. But they were the minority and mentioning christians as similarly persecuted as jews and jehova’s witnesses is plain wrong.
Everyone has a religion. Some are just too stupid to realize it.