Again, to say this clearly once more, I'm not suggesting in this series that American evangelicals are Nazis or becoming Nazis. As I've stated, such a suggestion is morally and historically irresponsible. Let alone how complex and diverse is the evangelical movement.
But what I am suggesting in this series is that some American evangelicals are heading to a very bad place, and have already arrived there in many cases, a fact that many evangelicals themselves recognize. And if you look at the case of the German Christians you see remarkable parallels in how this situation came about: a neo-pagan drift into nationalism, conspiracy theories, and the embrace of an authoritarian leader. What's happening within American evangelicalism isn't new, we've seen this before, how a particular toxic cocktail comes to poison the church.
I'd like to conclude this series by noting three other similarities between the German Christians and trends within American evangelicalism. I could have devoted three additional posts to each of these comparisons, but that would have made this series unduly long. But mostly I felt that these three additional comparisons were just variants on the embrace of the authoritarian leader. And so, a single post devoted to three similarities between the German Christian and American evangelical embrace of authoritarian leadership.
First, both the German Christians and many within American evangelicalism espouse and promote the recovery of a lost masculinity. Among the Nazis, the ineffectualism of the Weimar Republic was attributed to its weakness, softness, and passivity. The liberalism of the Weimar state was making Germany "feminine." What was needed, therefore, was a more "masculine" Germany: powerful, forceful, dominant, and virile. The feminine "softness" of Weimar liberalism was contrasted with a National Socialist "masculine" firmness. The Nazi propaganda machine and the Nazi youth movement worked hard to portray this recovery of German manliness. And Hitler embodied the masculine ideal.
Like the German Christians, many American evangelicals are also concerned with recovering a lost or fading masculinity. Kristin Kobes Du Mez lays out the case in her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. And we've seen recent examples of this in Sen. Josh Hawley's new crusade about "the left" attacking men and traditional masculinity. As Hawley has said, “We need the kind of men who make republics possible." And, of course, Donald Trump embodies this type of man: Strong, dominant, powerful, and virile. All of that to say, the parallels between American evangelicalism and the German Christians couldn't be more obvious.
Related to the embrace of a "masculine" politics and nation is a valorization of the military. That Hitler and the Nazis valorized the military prowess of Germany goes without saying. And we see this same valorization of the military among American evangelicals. One only needs to watch a bit of a "Freedom Sunday" service at First Baptist Church in Dallas to make the point.
Which brings us to a final comparison between the German Christians and American evangelicals who supported and participated in the Capital riot: the willingness to break some glass.
To be sure, comparing something like Kristallnacht ("the Night of Broken Glass") to the January 6th insurrection will offend many evangelicals and elicit a lot of whataboutism (as in, "What about Antifa and how much glass they break?"). But my point here, again, isn't to say that the Capital rioters are Nazis. Nor do I care about who breaks more glass, Anifa or evangelicals. My point about broken glass concerns, rather, a willingness to set aside democratic norms when called upon by an authoritarian leader. That is to say, on January 6th evangelicals on Capital Hill listened to the voice of Donald Trump (the voice of an authoritarian leader touting a conspiracy theory) rather than the voice of Mike Pence (the voice of democratic norms). That's the issue: Whose voice do you obey? The issue of broken glass isn't really about the glass but about the voice evangelicals were obeying when they broke the glass. And when you attend to that voice, you see the parallels between Kristallnacht and January 6th.
