Abstract
The relationship between religion and radical politics in modern European history has attracted historians for several decades now. This observation applies in particular to probably the most ambiguous form of the interaction between Christianity and nationalism, namely that seen during the reign of National Socialism. The debate initially focused on the incompatibility of Christian universalism and humanism with racist particularism and exclusivism. That German Catholics tried to find a modus vivendi with Hitler's regime, and even more so that the movement of so-called ‘German Christians’ tried to adapt Protestantism to Nazi ideology, was interpreted as a ‘great apostasy’ (Walter Künneth). The symbols of Christianity and Nazism, the cross and the swastika, were irreconcilably opposed in this understanding.
This scholarly consensus only began to break down from the 1990s onwards, on both sides of the Atlantic. While the question of ‘“hybrid” religiosity in the face of the “innovation” of National Socialism’ recently came to the fore in German historiography (Olaf Blaschke and Thomas Großbölting, Was Glaubten die Deutschen zwischen 1933 und 1945? Religion und Politik im Nationalsozialismus [2020], 15), recent research in English-speaking countries has placed the interaction between Christianity or Christian churches and ‘ethnonationalism’ in the foreground: Mary M. Solberg conveys the difficult-to-translate German word völkisch with the terms ‘ethno-national’ or ‘ethnic’, which ‘also carried race-related, exclusionary freight’ (Mary M. Solberg, A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement [2015], 34, fn 52). The notion of ethnonationalism was also central to the design of a 2015 workshop at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and a 2017 symposium at the University of Toronto, which attempted to apply this approach to the history of other European countries and regions in the ‘era of two world wars’ and which resulted in the proceedings reviewed here.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part, ‘Theorizing Religion, Ethnonationalism, and Antisemitism’, contains studies on theorists and transnational intellectual networks who proclaimed the need for ethnicization or directly ethnicized religion by projecting a Manichean dualism of völkisch Christianity and demonic Judaism. Specifically, Charles R. Gallagher demonstrates how the American Protestant activist George E. Deatherage radicalized on the periphery of the Western world, in India, to later attempt to transplant the ‘religion of blood’ of the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg into the milieu of the American Protestant Right. Nina Valbousquet reconstructs the transnational network of Catholic reactionaries that emerged in the Vatican milieu in the 1920s and contributed substantially to the dissemination of the antisemitic pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Peter Staudenmeier analyses the work of the guru of the extreme right, the Italian Julius Evola, whose ‘idealistic’ racism defined itself against Christianity and found inspiration in ‘racial spirituality’.
The second part, ‘Supporting Ethnonationalist Efforts’, is devoted to the spiritual and political collaboration of the clergy and partly also of the laity with Nazism and other fascisms before and after the seizure of power in various national contexts, with transnational moments also at the forefront here. Kevin P. Spicer, in a case study from the Rhineland, shows the development of the contradictory attitudes of the Catholic laity, clergy and episcopate towards the Nazi movement in the last years of the Weimar Republic. Susannah Heschel und Shannon Quigley analyse the ethnicization of the Gospel of John among the ‘German Christians’, while Rebecca Carter-Chand uncovers the transnational processes of instrumentalizing the agenda of smaller Protestant churches and communities in favour of propaganda in Nazi Germany and the US in the 1930s. Paavo Ahonen and Kirsi Stjerna explore the theological transfers of anti-Judaism and antisemitism in the Finnish Lutheran Church. Finally, Danijel Matijević examines in a case study the involvement of the Catholic clergy in the service of the Ustasha regime in the Independent State of Croatia, especially in the context of forced conversions of the Serbian population, which were an instrument of genocide.
The third part, ‘Critiquing Ethnonationalism and Antisemitism’, opens with Sara Han's chapter on the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Nazi Germany, which is the only study here to reconstruct the context from the perspective of the victims. Kateryna Budz and Andrew Kloes' overview chapter traces the stages of Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky of the Greek Catholic Church in Western Ukraine and his theologically motivated critique of radical nationalism and the Holocaust. Ionuţ Biliuţă then relativizes the notions of the mass fascistization of the Romanian Orthodox clergy by pointing to the criticism of antisemitism by some of its members. In a regional study from southern Germany, Samuel Koehne shows that criticism of Nazism and racist antisemitism as an expression of ‘neo-paganism’ was not limited to the milieu of liberal Protestantism, but also emanated from ultra-conservative pietist circles as well. Victoria J. Barnett concludes by examining reactions to Nazism and antisemitism within the early ecumenical movement.
Doris L. Berger points out some common tendencies of the chapters in her afterword, noting, for example, the gender imbalance of the objects of their analyses. However, she draws particular attention to the important fact that Religion never exists on its own but is always tangled up in other institutions and ideologies, lending strength to those partners and rivals and drawing energy from them. Such relationships can be opportunistic, parasitical, mutually reinforcing, legitimizing and undermining, sometimes all at the same time. (382)
This observation is especially true of the relationship between Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant) and radical nationalism, which in the period under study held out the promise for many clerics and laymen of an effective struggle against Bolshevism as the common enemy of both religious conservatives and fascists. These expectations also enabled many critical Christians to hold what Spicer calls a ‘dualistic view of antisemitism’ (188, fn 38), that is, to come to terms with the aporias arising from rejecting ‘pagan’ racist antisemitism while simultaneously demonizing ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ and proclaiming the need for a ‘solution to the Jewish question’. This tension, which weaves through many chapters of the monograph reviewed here, deserves special emphasis and examination, for it is a phenomenon that is typical not only of modern Catholic antisemitism: its consideration would certainly allow for a more critical look at, for example, the personality and work of Ukrainian Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky (see Andriy Mykhaleyko, Metropolitan Andrey Graf Sheptytskyj und das NS-Regime. Zwischen christlichem Ideal und politischer Realität [2020]). Moreover, such an approach could help create a better understanding of the dynamics of the ethnicization of religion, which took different forms and conditions for radicalization in different national contexts. It is to be hoped that future research will take these issues into account. One will find more than enough stimulus in the monograph reviewed here.