Protestants For Adolf?
The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin
What do we know about the Holocaust? We know Hitler killed a lot of Jews - about 6 million. What do we know about what Christians, specifically Protestant Christians were doing during the years of the Third Reich? We are aware of the Christians that resisted Hitler, but how was the rest of the Church conducting themselves? In an essay for Theopolis, Ralph Smith writes of the painful history that reveals German Christians who supported the work of the Nazi regime and even believed that Naziism “was in conformity with Christian precepts.”
Smith gives three reasons why Christians would have thought it acceptable to support Hitler’s programs: the confessing Church was “terribly timid,” they firmly believed the Nazi propaganda that was pushed, and most grievously, they were biblically ignorant and unbelieving. They didn’t believe God and His Word the way that they should have. We know they didn’t believe God’s word because they didn’t resist Hitler and they didn’t oppose the anti-semitism as it grew - they didn’t oppose the killing of millions of people that they knew were being killed. Sound familiar?
What are we doing as Christians today to protect a class of people that are being killed, and what will we be remembered for? Smith asks this question in his essay. The majority of Christians in the United States will not be remembered for opposing the abortion industry that kills many more millions than the Nazis killed. We too are “terribly timid,” ignorant of the many arguments in the Bible that oppose abortion, and we have believed the propaganda of the progressive Left. We honestly believe that “reproductive justice” is an idea worth fighting for and we niggle over whether Scripture condemns abortion because the word ‘abortion’ isn’t in the Bible.
Nazi Germany is remembered for the murder of Jews and its Christian church is remembered for compromise in the face of a holocaust. It is my fear that the post-Roe-versus-Wade United States of America will be remembered for its slaughter of the helpless — out-Heroding Herod — and the American Christian church with complicity in that slaughter.
Ralph Smith