Tag Archives: Ethno-Nationalism

“Understanding Twenty-first Century Christian Nationalism and Its Antecedents: A Scholarly Conversation”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 3 (September 2019)

“Understanding Twenty-first Century Christian Nationalism and Its Antecedents: A Scholarly Conversation”

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (retired) and Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University (retired)

The following is a scholarly conversation concerning the interpretation of Christian nationalism at the time of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and, more recently, in the wake of U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s surprising electoral victory in 2016. The exchange of views begins with a review essay and commentary by Victoria J. Barnett, who analyzes Robert P. Ericksen’s recent article “Devotion, Protestant Voters, and Religious Prejudice: 1930s Germany and Today’s America.” This is followed by Ericksen’s response to Barnett’s review and commentary.

Review Essay and Commentary of Robert P. Ericksen. “Devotion, Protestant Voters, and Religious Prejudice: 1930s Germany and Today’s America,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 31, no. 2 (2018): 427-440.

By Victoria J. Barnett, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (retired)

Robert P. Ericksen’s 1985 book, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emanuel Hirsch (New Haven: Yale University Press), was a ground-breaking work that marked a turning point in the field of Holocaust studies. A critical examination of Luther scholar Paul Althaus, theologian and philosopher Emanuel Hirsch, and biblical scholar Gerhard Kittel, the most disturbing but significant aspect of the book is Ericksen’s well-documented argument that these theologians supported National Socialism as Christians. As Ericksen himself notes in the article under review, his book appeared at a time when the notion that Christians could embrace Nazism was still a strange and uncomfortable one. By giving a deep account of the thought and actions of these theologians, Ericksen established that this phenomenon was an important aspect of the history of Nazi Germany.

Althaus, Hirsch, and Kittel were brilliant, world-renowned theologians and biblical scholars who not only knew their stuff, but considered themselves (and were regarded as) serious and faithful Christians. Nonetheless they viewed Adolf Hitler as a leader sent by God in Germany’s hour of crisis and a statesman who would defend “Christendom” against the forces of Communism and modernity. They went on to support and cooperate with Nazi policies, including the antisemitic measures that culminated in the genocide of European Jews.

When Theologians under Hitler appeared I happened to be working on my first book, a collection of oral histories of Germans who had been members of the Confessing Church.[1] As Ericksen notes about his own work, I began my research with the naïve assumption that Christians in Nazi Germany—particularly the people I was studying—had been outspoken opponents of National Socialism, but soon realized that the historical record was more complex. Most Confessing Christians, like other German Protestants, were nationalistic and antisemitic. Their fight against the heresies of the explicitly pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen was driven by opposition to the latter’s ideologically-driven distortions of Christian doctrine as well as the idolization of the Führer and Nazi state. But even within those parameters there was a wide range of political views and a great deal of caution and cowardice. The Confessing Christians who explicitly grounded their political opposition to National Socialism in their Christian faith remained a minority within German Protestantism.

Over the decades Ericksen, I, and many of the editors of this journal have continued to explore critically the role of the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox churches during the Nazi era. This history offers troubling insights into the nature and different manifestations of “Christian nationalism.” It is worth noting that in the early twentieth century Christian nationalism was not only a German phenomenon. I helped organize a 2017 conference, “Religion and Ethno-Nationalism in the Era of the World Wars,” jointly sponsored by the University of Toronto and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, that explored the numerous Christian ethno-nationalist and fascist movements across Europe during the interwar period. During the same period there was a surge in right-wing Christian groups in the United States, as well as growing polarization between liberal Protestants and evangelical and fundamentalist Christians as the fundamentalism wars of the 1920s sharpened the political divide.

For many of us whose scholarship has focused on these issues, our present historical moment has disturbing echoes of the history we’ve studied for decades. Then and now, there are groups in Europe and North America that define themselves by “Christian nationalism.” Some of these groups are identifiably part of the Christian spectrum—that is, they emerge from recognizable Christian communities. Others, I would argue, use “Christian” more ideologically to embrace “western culture” and nativism (Hannah Strømmen at the University of Chichester in the UK has done valuable work on this). All of them, however, embrace different forms of nationalism, nativism, white supremacy and other ideologies, promoting absolutist and sometimes violent political agendas using the language of “faith.” For all the significant historical differences between the 1930s and today, there are some haunting similarities when one looks at the present landscape.

Does the German example offer insights here? Are there parallels between the ethno-nationalist versions of Christianity during the first half of the twentieth century and the similar movements we see today? This is the subject of Ericksen’s article, “Devotion, Protestant Voters, and Religious Prejudice,” in which he compares the religiosity of figures like Gerhard Kittel and that of conservative evangelicals who support the current U.S. administration.

Ericksen has chosen to emphasize the role of “piety” and “devotion” by exploring “the relationship between pious religious beliefs within the Protestant Christian tradition and political stances that seem to defy those beliefs.” (The essay was written for a conference on “Devotion and Memory.”) In the first section of his essay Ericksen offers a detailed overview of Kittel’s behavior and his convictions, reminding us yet again of the inconvenient truth that people like Kittel practiced their faith seriously, praying and reading daily scriptural devotions. Not only did Kittel see no contradiction between his Christian faith and National Socialism, he actually viewed Adolf Hitler as a leader who would restore Christian values that were under attack by various forces such as modernity, Enlightenment values, and, of course, “the Jews.”

I would challenge the extent to which Kittel, Althaus, and Hirsch were actually faithful to the teachings of Christianity, but there’s no doubt that they viewed themselves as such. They were joined in their views by most fellow Protestants, who voted overwhelmingly in the November 1932 elections for the Nazi Party (which received about 32 percent of the vote in those elections). The German population in 1933 was 98 percent Christian (Protestants comprising about 60 percent). Referring to electoral maps of those 1932 elections, Ericksen notes that the “brownest” areas—those regions where support for the Nazi Party was strongest—were “the most pious Protestant regions.” I’ve seen these maps, and the most striking aspect to me was that the support for National Socialism ran regionally along the lines of German religious demographics. Regions in which the population was predominantly Catholic voted overwhelmingly for the Catholic Center Party.

The question is how to interpret such a map. Do the “brown” parts of the map signify “piety” or “Protestantism,” and is there a useful distinction between the two? Catholics voted differently than Protestants for a number of historical and more immediate political reasons, but I doubt that those maps reflect a different degree of “devotion” when it came to Catholic seriousness in matters of faith. In other words, these maps may not reflect the sincerity or depth of Christian devotion or piety so much as give us a portrait of German Protestantism at the time. That, I would contend, is what the November 1932 voting maps show: the almost complete convergence of nationalism and religion in the Protestant regions of Germany. This convergence had deep historical and cultural roots in post-Reformation history.

Ericksen’s underlying assumption seems to be that the more “religious” someone is—as measured by “piety” and “devotion” (regular practices like daily bible reading, prayer, and church attendance), the more likely they are to hold extreme nationalist views. Ericksen writes for example of the relationship “between Christian beliefs, ethno-nationalism, and the democratic values of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of belief, and political equality.”

This brings me to my primary problem with Ericksen’s analysis, although I agree with many of his historical points and I also agree with his conclusion that the history of people like Kittel offers some insights for the present moment. Having read his article several times, I wish that he had focused not on difficult-to-define religious attributes like “piety” and “devotion” but on the complex intersections of religious and national identity and how these, in turn, shape political and religious attitudes. That, I suspect, is the instructive parallel between what happened across Europe in the early twentieth century and the rise of Christian nationalism today.

In the German case the “Christian beliefs” that I believe Ericksen is describing—as reflected in the 1932 election maps—reflected a centuries-in-the-making synthesis of Christianity, nationalism, antisemitism and understandings of church and state, which in turn certainly helped spawn German Protestant support for Nazism. As one foreign visitor noted in the late nineteenth century, for most German Protestant clergy their “belief in Christianity was so closely intertwined with a strong nationalism that it was difficult even for themselves to say where the one began and the other ended.” Around the same time historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote, “…we Germans are a Christian nation… Christianity is entwined with every fiber of the German character” and added that Judaism was the “national religion of a tribe which was originally alien to us.”

German Protestantism’s understanding of the relationship between church and state authority, the extent to which this understanding became both nationalized and ethnicized during the late nineteenth century, and the radicalizing effects of the period after 1918 produced a very particular kind of Christianity. Among other things it laid the foundation for the widespread assumptions that Jews—even converted Jews—could never really be “German.” One of the accounts I gave in my book on the Confessing Church was of a late nineteenth-century debate in a Protestant newspaper about whether Christian baptism could render a Jew fully “German.”

The Christian world is not a monolithic entity, however, and the synthesis of Christianity, fascism, and nationalism provoked alarm among other Christians, particularly among Protestant ecumenists who condemned these developments as “political” or (notably) even as “secular” forms of religion. In 1933 the Swiss ecumenist Adolf Keller wrote of “the new power” of “the religion of nationalism and a new mysticism of the State”; in 1935 the American interfaith leader Everett Clinchy described these developments as “tribal lunacies.” In 1938 the Danish ecumenist Hal Koch warned that across the globe “nationalism has assumed a religious character.”

The issue of the internal battle over such issues within German Protestantism is another factor that I think deserves serious study. As Ericksen notes, in the early postwar period a hagiographical portrait emerged about Protestant opposition to the Nazis that over-emphasized the numbers involved and the courage and clarity of such opposition. For all its shortcomings, however, the Confessing Church was based upon a theological critique that repudiated the views of people like Kittel and Althaus, and I would argue that the Church Struggle was perhaps the most significant event since the Reformation itself in terms of the issues at stake. The Barmen Declaration was an explicit theological rejection of the notions that Hitler’s leadership could be understood as divine will and that the Nazi state placed claims on Christians that surpassed those of scripture and church teachings. The 1936 Confessing Church memorandum to Hitler went further, explicitly repudiating the antisemitism of the Nazis.

All religious traditions (not just Christianity) offer the capacity for revision and self-criticism, and indeed the history of such moments of religious fanaticism and extremism has often led to serious changes within a tradition. This became evident after 1945 in the emergence of post-Holocaust Christianity, in which theologians and some church bodies (the Vatican, in Nostra Aetate, for example, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in its repudiation of Martin Luther’s antisemitic texts) officially repudiated the Christian anti-Jewish teachings that had led to the widely embedded antisemitism in western culture that culminated in the Holocaust. But even before 1945 such opposing voices existed in the Confessing Church itself—particularly in figures like Elisabeth Schmitz and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who became engaged in political opposition. Outside Nazi Germany, the strongest condemnations of Nazi anti-Jewish policies and of the failures of the German Protestant churches emerged from Protestants like Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, various ecumenical leaders, and theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. All of these figures, I would note, were devout Protestants who took their faith seriously.

This brings me to Ericksen’s analysis of the ca. 80 percent of American evangelical voters who voted for Donald J. Trump. Here again, his emphasis is on the “devotion” and “piety” that finds its expression in “Christian nationalism.” As in his examination of the German history, he notes several key political issues and historical factors that have shaped the political convictions of these religious voters. Since the 1970s (when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the right to abortion in the Roe vs. Wade decision) the abortion issue has been the most decisive issue for many evangelical and Catholic voters. There is also much to suggest that the long and terrible U.S. history of racism, slavery, and white supremacy continues to shape, challenge and divide not only whites and people of color but the different sectors of U.S. Christianity. In the past two years, this has re-emerged as a bitterly divisive issue across the political and religious landscape, particularly given the open advocacy of white supremacy by some groups. Similarly to the centuries-long dynamics by which antisemitism became embedded in European culture, racism and white supremacy are embedded in U.S. culture.

Reducing all this to which group shows more signs of “devotion” misses the point, I think. The U.S. religious landscape is complex, and while certain groups may claim to be “more Christian” than others, it’s not that easy. According to the most recent surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life, 70.8 percent of the U.S. population is Christian. Of that percentage, the largest groups are evangelical Protestants (25.4 percent) and “non-affiliated” (“nones”) at 22.8 percent (Catholics are third, at 20.8 percent). Non-Christian faiths are currently around 6 percent. Another recent major survey, the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago, shows evangelical Protestants, Catholics, and “nones” as statistically tied. Pew also measures religious attitudes in terms of political affiliation, and in patterns of “devotion” as measured by questions on the importance of religion, belief in God, and frequency of church attendance and prayer, Republicans measure higher but not exclusively so on most issues (for example, 62 percent of Republicans pray daily as compared to 50 percent of Democrats). Belief in God is high across the board (84 percent of Democrats; 93 percent of Republicans; even 27 percent of “nones” say they believe in God). And other variables come into play: African-American Protestants and Roman Catholics measure highly in terms of “devotion”-related questions but vote quite differently on some issues.

Moreover, there are growing generational differences in polls among evangelicals, and there has been a strong and explicitly Protestant backlash in the United States against Christian forms of nationalism, white supremacy, and related ideologies, much of it articulated by critical evangelicals like Michael Gerson, David Gushee, Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons and others.

There is another important difference between the immensely diverse U.S. Protestant denominational landscape and that of the German Protestant Church—one that was noted by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his important 1939 essay on “Protestantism without Reformation.” Because none of the American churches “can dare to make the claim to be the one church,” he wrote, they stake their claims and fight their battles over social, cultural, and political issues, and those battles take place in the public sphere. This echoes an observation made by Alexis de Tocqueville one hundred years previously when he wrote that “Religion in America … must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country.” To the extent that the leaders of the German Church Struggle of the 1930s addressed broader political issues, they did so internally within institutional Protestantism. In the United States, in contrast, such battles are openly political and the result is that (in Bonhoeffer’s words) “The church claims the right for itself to address almost any topic in public life and to act since only in this way the kingdom of God can be built.”

Any analysis of the parallels between the German Protestantism of the 1930s and the current manifestations of Christian nationalism on the U.S. religious landscape must take such differences into account, as well as the respective histories of cultural, political, and religious intersections in these two cases. For that reason, I think the analysis of Kittel as a case study in “devotion” is too narrow to explain contemporary Christian nationalism. The German example can shed some insight into this, but only if we avoid essentializing or reducing the role of “religion” to belief or “devotion.” To be fair, in his books Theologians under Hitler and his subsequent Complicity in the Holocaust: Churches and Universities in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), Ericksen actually does offer a broader and more nuanced discussion of these issues, putting Kittel and his colleagues in the larger context that shaped them.

Bob Ericksen and I have spent our respective careers looking at different pieces of this historical puzzle, and I suspect to some extent this explains our different approaches. (I also have a Master of Divinity degree, so I tend to look below the surface of theo-political claims and give more weight to the internal church and theological debates) So I write this critical review with deep regard for my colleague and gratitude for our long-time conversation, which I continue here.

Response to Victoria J. Barnett’s “Review Essay and Commentary”

By Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University (retired)

I deeply appreciate Victoria Barnett’s willingness to review my recent article in Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, “Devotion, Protestant Voters, and Religious Prejudice: 1930s Germany and Today’s America.” As readers of this issue of CCHQ will notice, I am an admirer of Barnett’s remarkable three-part career—as a scholar of the German Church Struggle, as an expert on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and as an important, recently retired administrator at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I also appreciate not just Barnett’s willingness to review my article, but also the questions she raises about my work.

Barnett is quite right in asserting that “piety” and “devotion” are not adequate measures or predictors of political stance among Protestant Christians, or Christians as a whole, whether in 1930s Germany or today’s America. In my defense, I originally gave this paper at a conference on “Devotion and Memory.” However, I also do think that self-assessments as well as outward markers of “piety” and “devotion” have some relevance. Not all professors of theology in 1930s Germany were as pious in their behavior as Gerhard Kittel and Paul Althaus (and possibly even Emanuel Hirsch). Though I have never lived in the American South, I believe things I have read, such as the question to newcomers: “Which church will you attend?” I also recognize the importance to some believers of offering a table prayer before eating in a public restaurant, and I do think these behaviors manifest themselves in today’s America more frequently in the Bible Belt, and perhaps especially in the South.

My starting point with this paper on devotion, of course, combined my recognition that Protestantism stands out in 1932 as a marker of votes for Hitler, along with the widely publicized 80-percent figure of self-identified evangelical voters in the United States who voted for and mostly continue to support Donald Trump. I am struck by these voting indicators, first of all, since neither Hitler nor Trump appears to have had any significant relationship to the Christian faith. Secondly, neither is known for political policies embodying any portion of the Sermon on the Mount. I fully agree when Barnett notes that devotion can be found among critics of Hitler, especially including Elisabeth Schmitz and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I also admire the public critique of Donald Trump expressed by Michael Gerson, and I am especially impressed by the critique raised by David Gushee and others. I receive at least daily emails from FaithfulAmerica.org, an organization rallying Christians who oppose Trumpism, and I have been an admirer for years of Sojourners as an expression of Christian values.

The difficulty for me has long been how best to understand the actual correlation between Christian faith and Christian nationalism, between Christian faith and Christian rightwing, nationalistic, and occasionally brutal politics. I certainly recognize Christians I admire who acted in the manner Vicki Barnett describes. This includes some leading members of the Confessing Church, including those who composed the memorandum to Hitler in 1936, and it includes the Christian (and Jewish) leaders Barnett has been researching in the 1930s ecumenical movement. I agree with her that the German Church Struggle is very important and might even be the most important event in Protestantism since the Reformation. However, some years ago I discovered Wilhelm Niemöller’s estimate that the Confessing Church amounted to about 20 percent of the German Protestant Church. And even with that 20 percent figure, I am not sure that they all “explicitly grounded their political opposition to National Socialism in their Christian faith.” I think that members of the Confessing Church grounded their opposition to the Deutsche Christen (“German Christian Movement”) in their Christian faith, but not all opposed all aspects of National Socialism or gave up their appreciation of Hitler. These are the results of my first work on Kittel, Althaus and Hirsch, along with various projects undertaken since. As for Catholics in Germany, I do think their unwillingness to vote for Hitler in 1932 was admirable, but based very largely on the existence of the Catholic Center Party and its hold upon Catholic voters since the Bismarck era. After Center Party delegates gave the votes need to pass the Enabling Act in March 1933, Catholic loyalty to the Nazi state seems not entirely different from that found among Protestants. As Barnett notes, of course, all these matters are in need of additional interrogation.

I do acknowledge that I used a broad brush to merge Nazi voters in the 1930s with Trump voters in 2016. I tried to avoid any claim that these are the same phenomena, since I do not mean to diminish the level of horror implemented by Adolf Hitler. I only was struck by the one surprising element in each case, the willingness of a fairly large number of self-identified Christians to support politicians and politics that seem to me to violate important Christian norms.

[1] For The Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1992).

Conference Report: Religion and Ethno-Nationalism in the Era of the Two World Wars

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Conference Report: Religion and Ethno-Nationalism in the Era of the Two World Wars, University of Toronto, May 21-23, 2017

By Doris L. Bergen, University of Toronto

This symposium assembled an extraordinary group of twenty scholars from twelve different countries to discuss the roles of religious individuals, institutions, and networks in the conflicts and upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. Co-sponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies and the University of Toronto’s Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair in Holocaust Studies, the three-day event was organized by Victoria Barnett (USHMM), Doris Bergen (University of Toronto), Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College), and Rebecca Carter-Chand (University of Toronto and Clark University). The wide range of cases and issues discussed made the symposium highly stimulating (although that same quality makes it difficult to summarize). Most fundamentally the symposium showed the value of taking a global perspective, not only to compare but to connect developments in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas; and it demonstrated the power of in-person interactions. Having time to talk, in lengthy sessions, over meals, and outdoors, proved very fruitful and will, we hope, lead to a publication and future initiatives.

The symposium built on a 2015 summer research workshop on “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945,” held in Washington, DC and initiated by Barnett and Spicer. Now the goal was to expand the conversation by bringing in more people and looking beyond Europe. A call for papers yielded three times more abstracts than we could accept—an indication of the topic’s significance—and a team of experts in History, Religion, Islamic Studies, and Jewish Studies helped choose among them. Four facilitators—Devi Mays (University of Michigan), Paul Hanebrink (Rutgers University), Milena Methodieva (University of Toronto), and Christhard Hoffmann (University of Bergen)—worked with us to organize the fifteen participants into panels and identify themes. All papers were pre-circulated.

After an opening party on Sunday, we had a full day of sessions on Monday, May 22. The first panel was organized around the theme of “Transnational Religion and Diaspora Communities.” Francesco Pongiluppi (University of Rome), Burçin Çakir (Glasgow Caledonian University), John Eicher (German Historical Institute, Washington DC), and Stefan Vogt (Goethe University) presented their research on, respectively, Fascist Italians’ cultural activities in interwar Turkey; debates about the Armenian genocide in Turkey one hundred years later; Mennonites in South America and their relationships to Nazism; and the tensions and connections between Jewish religion and German nationalist discourse in Martin Buber’s thought. Devi Mays identified several issues to think across these disparate topics. She noted the centrality of different locations in articulating nationalism, including transnational sites. Homeland, she observed, has to be articulated, too. Of the many questions that arose in this discussion, two stand out because they recurred throughout the symposium: What is the role of religion in narratives of the nation under attack? How do visions of religious ethics as a unifying force subvert or reinforce the exclusive claims of nation and land?

The second panel explored “Religious Leadership and the Role of Clergy.” Paul Hanebrink structured the session around four questions: 1) How are enemies and threats defined? 2) How do we understand theology? Religious language can be mobilized but it also has a weight of its own. 3) How do churches’ internal debates interact with outside forces? 4) What, if anything, is distinctive about European Christianity? Francesca Silano (University of Toronto), Jonathan Huener (University of Vermont), Eliot Nidam Orvieto (Yad Vashem), and Brandon Bloch (Harvard University) shared highlights of their research on, respectively, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Tikhon and his condemnation of pogroms in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution; Vatican responses to Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church in the Warthegau; The Religious of Our Lady of Sion, a Catholic order in France that reported assaults on Jews; and Protestant theologies of law and human rights in occupied Germany. In addition to big thematic issues, the discussion revealed some intriguing details, including Anna Shternshis’s observation that Soviet anti-religious propaganda depicted Tikhon as a Jew.

The third panel, facilitated by Milena Methodieva, was titled “Mobilization of Religion for National and Political Projects.” It featured the work of Roy Marom (University of Haifa), Peter Staudenmaier (Marquette University), Kateryna Budz (Kyiv, Ukraine), and Irina Ognyanova (Institute of Balkan Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences). Their research took us from Palestine in the 1930s to the Rome-Berlin Axis, and explored Ukrainian Greek Catholics and the Holocaust, and the Roman Catholic Church and Ustasha in Croatia. Methodieva raised issues about the role of religion in projects of national mobilization. She also noted how much can be learned from examining the so-called fringe or considering inconsistencies and tensions, for example, between an individual’s ideology and conduct.

These themes anticipated Tuesday’s session on “Religion and Violence.” Ranjana Mukhopadhyaya (University of Delhi), Ionut Biliuta (Gheorghe Sincai Institute for Social Sciences and the Humanities, Romanian Academy), and Jason Tingler (Clark University) all addressed the period of the Second World War, but with a focus on Buddhism and ethno-nationalism of Japan, the Romanian Orthodox Exarchate from southern Ukraine, and genocidal violence in Chelm. Christhard Hoffmann offered six tips for making comparisons: 1) In each case we are dealing not with religion per se but religion in a social context; 2) Look at the history of ethno-religious conflict in a region; 3) Pay attention to expectations for the future; 4) Consider different forms of violence; 5) What were the roles of religious people and leaders? 6) How did ethno-religious groups react when they became targets of violence?

The value of taking a global perspective was especially evident from the intense interest in Mukhopadhyaya’s paper, the symposium’s only examination of religion in a non-western context. Yet her work had many points of contact with the other papers. The importance of prophecies was one and proselytization, also central to Biliuta’s analysis, was another. Certainly Mukhopadhyaya’s insight that any religion can become implicated in violence resonated across all the sessions.

The roundtable of facilitators provided another opportunity to make connections. Kevin Spicer led off by noting that a central question in the 2015 workshop—Christian antisemitism or Christian anti-Judaism?—had not featured in any of the presentations here. Mays raised the issue of absence: what does it mean when religion is not discussed? that it is not there or is so pervasive it goes unarticulated? She highlighted two areas that got short shrift in our deliberations: gender and lay people. Hanebrink drew attention to the question as to exactly how religious concepts are harnessed and what determines whether that project succeeds or not. He wondered about the divide between private and public religious discourses and commented that the symposium as a whole did not have much to say about Jews. For her part, Methodieva emphasized the multiple forms of each religion examined and the role of individuals, including particular personalities, in driving developments. Hoffmann returned to the thorny question of the boundaries of religion: what is religion and what is non religion? He also pointed to the importance of narratives of victimization and decline in situations of violence.

The group discussion that followed raised more big questions. Spicer asked about comparative approaches: When are comparisons helpful and when are they counterproductive and even irresponsible? Marom pointed out that we had failed to question the assumptions built into the symposium title. Hanebrink observed that the term “ethno-nationalism” is a product of the 1990s, and Mukhopadhyaya explained that ethno-nationalism can complicate a bigger nationalist project, as in India where it works against civic nationalism. Bloch urged us to think about religious language as shaping how people understand the world. Silano remarked on the importance of material support: where do the funds come from and who controls the finances? Vogt warned against essentializing religion, and Budz emphasized how religious identity substitutes for ethnic identity when there is no national state. Susannah Heschel pointed to the importance of the imperialist context and referred to John Kucich’s book, Imperial Masochism (2009), to draw attention to imperialists’ insistence on their own abjection: “Look how we suffer.” Tingler encouraged expanding the scope not only geographically but chronologically, for instance, to explore religious roots of nationalism in the Middle Ages. Carter-Chand highlighted the significance of conversion and the diversity of what being “Christian” meant, even within Central and Eastern Europe, and Biliuta added the dimension of competition between religions and religious groups.

The final component was a public program featuring Susannah Heschel and Victoria Barnett and moderated by Doris Bergen. Titled “Religion, Ethno-Nationalism, and Violence: Probing the Intersections,” it was an opportunity to hear from two people who have shaped the field. Barnett and Heschel responded to three questions: 1) How do you understand the relationship between religion, ethno-nationalism, and violence? 2) How do you respond to the Holocaust and the violence of our own times without despairing? 3) How has your thinking changed in the decades since you began your work?

Their reflections were personal, profound, and often funny. Barnett described her childhood in West Virginia and her formative experience with liberation theology at Union Theological Seminary and the Puebla Conference in the late 1970s. She also invoked Jonathan Fox’s study of the “salience of religious issues in ethnic conflicts” to underscore that religion is not always or solely a factor, but it becomes powerful when “things fall apart.” Heschel challenged us to be more concrete and precise, and she set an example by defining “religion”: a communal system of propositional attitudes related to the superhuman. She poked fun at what she called the “ghostbusters” approach to comparative genocide studies—“Find the ten factors and you win!”—and asked what happens to religion in a democracy. Does it lose its enthusiastic quality? Both she and Barnett observed that pluralism is not enough. Do we come together as liberals of different faiths or within each faith? Both speakers, and the two of them together, made a powerful impression. David Clark, a PhD student at Wycliffe College who is writing his dissertation on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, called the event his “bibliography on stage.”

The full program of the symposium may be found at https://www.ushmm.org/research/scholarly-presentations/symposia/religion-and-ethno-nationalism-in-the-era-of-the-world-wars.

Call for Papers: Religion and Ethno-nationalism in the Era of the World Wars

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 3 (September 2016)

Call for Papers: Religion and Ethno-nationalism in the Era of the World Wars, May 21-23, 2017, University of Toronto

The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Chair of Holocaust Studies, University of Toronto invite scholars, including advanced graduate students, to submit applications for a symposium on religion and ethno-nationalism in the first half of the 20th century. The symposium will conduct a broad comparative and transnational examination of the intersections of religion, ethno-nationalism, fascism, antisemitism, and violence during this period. By analyzing the ways in which religious groups, institutions, and networks engaged political and social upheaval in and beyond Europe, we hope to identify broader patterns that can deepen our understanding of the dynamics shaping the roles of religious actors before and during the Holocaust.

Applicants should propose papers based on new research (including work-in-progress); submissions may focus on specific case studies or the broader themes suggested above. Papers will be pre-circulated to all participants. We especially invite applications from emerging scholars and from scholars across a range of disciplines whose work addresses a variety of geographic, religious, and linguistic traditions. Conference proceedings and papers will be in English. Travel costs, accommodations, and some meals will be covered for accepted participants.

Please submit a 1-2 page CV and a 1 page application including: a description of the proposed paper; a short explanation of the stage of your research (i.e., work-in-progress, new paper, previously published); and a brief statement on how your research and expertise might contribute to a broader discussion of the larger themes of the symposium.

Please submit applications as a single PDF to Dr. Rebecca Carter-Chand, Symposium Coordinator, at r.carter.chand@utoronto.ca by October 1, 2016. Accepted applicants will be notified by November 15, 2016.

The symposium chairs are Victoria Barnett, Director of the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Doris Bergen, Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies, University of Toronto; and Kevin P. Spicer, C.S.C., James J. Kenneally Professor of History, Stonehill College.

Research Report: Summer Research Workshop “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 21, Number 3 (September 2015)

Research Report: Summer Research Workshop “Religion, Fascism, Antisemitism, and Ethno-Nationalism in Europe, 1918-1945”, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, August 3-14, 2015.

By Victoria Barnett, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

The rise of fascism, ethno-nationalism, and antisemitism after 1918 was a transnational phenomenon. Across Europe, fascist and nationalist groups, many of them religiously aligned, began to appear, laying the foundation for the subsequent involvement of these groups and their sympathizers in the Holocaust. This research workshop conducted a broader comparative examination of this phenomenon among Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches from different regions in Europe, with the goal of better understanding the broader dynamics at work as well as the specific factors that motivated each group. What political, cultural, and theological factors in the different religious traditions and regions facilitated the appearance of such groups? Were they aware of and in touch with each other, and what theological or ideological features did they share? How did religious leaders, theologians, and institutions in the respective countries and churches respond to these developments? While much research has been done on groups like the German Deutsche Christen and the Romanian Iron Guard, relatively little has been done on the other smaller groups and individuals who played a role—although such movements can be found in all three of the major Christian churches, despite significant theological and ecclesiastical differences between and within Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity.

Three central themes emerged from the workshop discussions: 1) the challenges of understanding the role of “religion” in these developments; 2) the diverse forms of ethno-nationalism and fascism that appear in this period; and 3) the significance of antisemitism as a bridge between these radical groups. Discussions about religion addressed the complexity of the theological understandings and institutional realities of the three traditions, as well as the often-overlooked role of transnational movements and ecumenical organizations. Even within a single tradition like Catholicism, for example, there were very different levels of action, ranging from the role of Vatican officials, to regional bishops’ conferences responding to events in places like Poland, Slovakia, and Germany, to radical individuals like the pro-fascist Monsignor Umberto Benigni in Rome and Charles Maurras, who become a leading voice in the right-wing French Aktion Française. Daniela Kalkandjieva’s presentation on the Russian Orthodox churches identified the very distinct traditions and groups that fell under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate, with one group in particular, the Karlovci Synod, emerging as an antisemitic movement that had a transnational following. Other points of discussion included Samuel Koehne’s analysis of Nazi racialized ideology as a kind of “ethnotheism” that resonated among pro-fascist groups but alarmed other bodies, such as the Protestant ecumenical movement and interfaith movements which were driven by an explicit anti-nationalism and anti-racism, particularly in the United States.

The acknowledgment of the complexity of these religious dynamics shaped the workshop approach to the history of fascism and ethno-nationalism, particularly in terms of the different religious “players” that surfaced in these radical movements: religious institutions and organizations, religiously aligned political parties, individual clergy, theologians, and public intellectuals. The differences and similarities between such figures as the Slovakian priest and political leader Josef Tiso, German Reich Bishop Ludwig Mueller, the Romanian theologian Fr. Liviu Stan, and French Mgr. Ernest Jouin, co-publisher of the radically antisemitic Revue Internationale des Sociétés Secrètes, were explored.

While none of these figures can be understood independently of the political circumstances that brought them to prominence, it became clear that the primary “bridge” issue among them was the hatred of Jews. While the roots of such antisemitic discourse rested deep in early Christian theology, more modern forms of racialized, socio-economic, and nationalist antisemitism gained steam in many parts of Europe between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s. In some of the groups studied antisemitism was the dominant theme; in others it converged with ethnic divisions, anti-Communism, and localized political factors.

In many ways this workshop served as a preliminary exploration of a number of important issues for further study. Even these preliminary research findings, however, illustrate that an understanding of the role of “religion” or the churches during the Holocaust cannot be gained purely from the study of specific cases such as the German churches, and that there is much to learn from a comparative look at the entire religious landscape of that era.

The participants in this workshop and their topics are listed here:

Pantelis Anastasakis (independent scholar, New York): “The Church of Greece and the Holocaust: The Limits of the Ethnarchic Tradition”
Victoria Barnett (USHMM): “International Protestant Ecumenical Interpretations of the Rise of Nazism, Fascism, and Antisemitism during the 1920s and 1930s”
Ionut Biliuta (currently at the Simon Wiesenthal Institute for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Vienna, Austria): “When ‘God Was a Fascist’: The Antisemitic Radicalization of the Orthodox Theology under the Impact of Fascism in Interwar Romania”
Giuliana Chamedes (University of Wisconsin-Madison), “The Vatican, Catholic Internationalism, and Nation-Building”
James Felak (University of Washington): “Catholicism, Anti-Semitism, and the Radical Right in Interwar Slovakia and Beyond”
Daniela Kalkandjieva (Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria): “Russian Orthodoxy, Fascism and Nationalism”
Samuel Koehne (Deakin University, Victoria, Australia): “Racist, Brutal, Revolutionary: A Conservative Christian View of Nazism by 1933”
Kevin Spicer (Stonehill College): “Antisemitism, Catholicism, and Judaism in Germany 1918-1945”
Nina Valbousquet (D. Candidate at the Sciences Po Paris, France): “An Anti-Semitic International? Catholic and Far-Right Connections in Monsignor Benigni’s Roman Network (1918-1930s)”