"Hitler was not a Christian" and other thoughts

Image by Steve Johnson from Pixabay

This post is something of a mess. I want to talk about a bunch of stuff, and I’m having trouble starting one topic without the other topics butting in and getting me distracted from the thing I want to talk about. So I’ve decided that I’m going to slam out a bunch of thoughts here with the hopes that by doing so I will clear my mind enough to pick out one of the topics and talk about it individually. Could I do this on my own and then simply not post the first part? Sure, but where’s the fun in that?

The thoughts rattling around in my head, in no particular order:

1. Jesus was not American.

2. Hitler was not a Christian.

3. Words need commonly held meanings to be useful as methods of communication.

4. Conflating religion and national pride will always result in patriotism overriding religious principles resulting in horrific acts being condoned by “good” people who think they’re good because their religion has been molded to suit the whims of their country.

5. If evangelicalism in politics is ascending while church attendance is declining, does that mean that evangelicalism is becoming a political movement disconnected with a genuine faith in Christ?

6. Christianity should reflect the teachings of Christ.

7. American Christianity is proud of its purity but is becoming ashamed of the call of the gospel to help those who cannot help themselves.

8. “Woke” is a meaningless and lazy phrase used for any condition the speaker finds vaguely disagreeable.  

Let’s start with thought 2 because the fact that an anti-Christian leader was capable of coming to power in a Christian nation almost 100 years ago is weirdly topical right now. But to do that we deed to define what it means to be a Christian. Like most seemingly simple tasks, that is harder than it sounds. Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines it this way:

Christian: one who professes belief in the teachings of Jesus Christ

By that definition Hitler was a Christian. He said so (professed) numerous times. Other people have said so about him (here’s an article that I don’t agree with but that you may find interesting). Pledges of allegiance to Hitler invoked the name of God. His Third Reich government endorsed Christianity as the state’s religion. That all sounds very Christian. Was Hitler really Christian?

It may help to use an analogy. Let’s imagine a religion based on the teachings of a man named Wilbert (to pick a name at random). And, further, let’s imagine that Wilbert taught his followers that they should only whisper because loud noises are offensive to the order of creation and that they should never eat on Tuesdays because Tuesdays are the worst and being hungry acknowledges that irrefutable fact. If someone claimed to be Wilbertian but that person had massive banquets every Tuesday in which they yelled at crowds with a bullhorn, then it would be fair to doubt the sincerity of that person’s belief in the guidance of Wilbert.

A quick aside: I realize that it’s 2023 and that we’re not supposed to gatekeep anything anymore, but words need to mean something for them to be a useful way to communicate ideas (thought number three from that list above). We can’t all make up our own meanings for words because then we won’t know what anyone else means when they say things. This feels like it should be self-evident, but I’m not taking any chances here. 

Professing a belief is different than actually believing something. I can profess the ability to fly, but it does not mean that I can actually fly. So let’s update our definition a bit.

Christian: one who professes belief believes (like, actually believes and doesn’t just say they believe) in the teachings of Jesus Christ

We’ve lost a little of the professional tone in the definition, but you’re not reading this blog for its professional tone. Sadly, that definition has a problem. It doesn’t tell you how you know what the  teachings of Jesus Christ are.

Fun fact: Completely disregarding the Protestant Bible and extra-Biblical historical sources, the German Christian church under the reign of the Nazis taught that Jesus was an Aryan and completely omitted the Old Testament.  Pastors who did not teach the party line were punished. There was a schism in the church. It was a whole thing.

The Jesus that the Nazis taught about was entirely different than the Jesus that is portrayed in the Bible. Which Jesus is the real Jesus? On one hand, there is the version described in the Bible, a book that is about two thousand years old that can be backed up by multiple different historical copies from around the world. On the other hand, there is the version of Jesus in the Nazi Bible, a book that did not exist before mid-twentieth century Germany. I’m not going to tell you how to live your life, but I’m not going to choose the Nazi version of history. 

Because the teachings of Christ are recorded in the Bible, it is reasonable to base our definition of what it means to be a Christian on the words written in the book that documents Jesus’s life. Let’s update that definition again.

Christian: one who professes belief believes (like, actually believes and doesn’t just say they believe) in the teachings of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Bible (not the Nazi Bible because that’s messed up)

In order to confidently say that Hitler was or was not a Christian by the definition given above, we need to know what the teachings of Jesus are. There are a lot of them, but they are usually easy to find. Jesus’s words are so important to Christians that a lot of Bibles include his words as red text. I’m not going to list all the red text here, but I’m sure you can find it.

I will, however, sum up his teaching into two rules:

    1. Love God with everything you’ve got.

    2. Love your neighbor like you love yourself.

Jesus even went out of his way to clarify that when he says “neighbor” he’s including ethnic groups you hate. Based on those two rules and the definition of Christianity we came up with in this post, I feel comfortable saying that Hitler was not a Christian.

But why does it matter? It matters to me because we live in a time when people are using the name of Christ for political gain (see thoughts 1, 4, 5, 6, and 7 above) without doing things that in any way reflect the teachings of Christ. Actually, that’s probably an overstatement. What they’re really doing is picking the teachings of Christ that are politically convenient and choosing to ignore the inconvenient ones. We live in a time where some Christians are wondering if the teachings of Christ are too “woke,” and that’s a horrible place to be. (Thought 8 found its way in here right before the end.)

Christianity is this beautiful faith that offers love and mercy and acceptance. It also requires submission and obedience and an understanding of what authority is and how to have authority and live under authority. And it is hard. It says you need to help your neighbor and to love people who are hard to love and to help people who can’t help themselves, and it doesn’t put any geographical or political or social or economic boundaries on that requirement. 

The question, “Was Hitler a Christian?” is not a trivial question at all. If Jesus really was the Son of God, if he really died on the cross and rose again to save us from our sins, if believing in him really starts us on a path to finding our true selves – the people we were created to be – in this life and grants eternal life in paradise in the next, then it’s a very important question indeed.

And that, I think, is enough for one night.

-Tom