this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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[–] LillyPip@lemmy.ca -2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (9 children)

I’m sorry, but this reads as the many, many coping ‘readings’ that try to downplay his overt Christianity.

I get it, and I’m not trying to attack you, but this is just wrong.

He did not convert in the years after this quote, as can be evidenced by his favouring of the church up to the end days, the Catholic Church supporting his efforts due to mutual reciprocity, his integration of christian teachings and outright requirements into the Nazi requirements (including requirements for medals), continued iconography, etc.

I’m sorry if it hurts, but Hitler was a Christian, and you can’t say his own words don’t matter because a quote is from a few years before he took power.

By the end of the 1930s, the Reich was pretty anti-religion.

They objectively weren’t. Can I ask where you’re getting that impression?

[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (8 children)

I’m sorry if it hurts, but Hitler was a Christian, and you can’t say his own words don’t matter because a quote is from a few years before he took power.

Do his words and actions which contradict that after he took power not matter by comparison?

Hitler was only a Christian insofar as he revered a figure called Jesus Christ to some degree. That he rejected nearly every common theological thread of Christianity, from Biblical authority, to the divinity of Christ, to the authority of any church, to questions of salvation of the soul, to pacifism, to Jesus's very existence as a Jew, should very much cast into question any characterization of Hitler as a Christian in any serious sense.

[–] LillyPip@lemmy.ca 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (7 children)

Do his words and actions which contradict that after he took power not matter by comparison?

Which words and actions? Do you have sources?

Every time I’ve heard this, nobody can give actual sources. I can, though, for everything from a sanctioned christian state to the individual regulations for official Nazi groups and the delegation of medals. For instance:

Before 1933, in fact, some bishops prohibited Catholics in their dioceses from joining the Nazi Party. This ban was dropped after Hitler's March 23, 1933, speech to the Reichstag in which he described Christianity as the “foundation” for German values. The Centre Party was dissolved as part of the signing of a 1933 Concordat between the Vatican and Nazi governmental representatives, and several of its leaders were murdered in the Röhm purge in July 1934.

Do you have sources to refute this?

E: sorry, I just saw you’re not my original interlocutor. I’m not trying to be adversarial here.

[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Which words and actions? Do you have sources?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Adolf_Hitler

296 citations there.

That Hitler used Christianity, and that Christians supported Hitler in exchange for preferential treatment and asspats, is not the same as saying that Hitler was a Christian in any realistic sense. Like Mussolini converting to Catholicism and persecuting atheists after a lifetime of personal atheism, fascists will use anything and anyone, and likewise say anything in public, to get their slimy hands on the power to brutalize more people.

I'm an enemy of Christianity on multiple levels, and Christians, both the protestant conservatives and Zentrum Catholics, were an instrumental part of enabling Hitler, and many became enthusiastic Nazis, but Hitler himself was not, realistically speaking, a Christian.

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