The following excerpt is from a fascinating book titled Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, by George L. Mosse (University of Wisconsin, 1978, 2020).
Mosse traces the various currents of cultural, social, and political European history that eventually culminated in the rise of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi party, and the Holocaust.
The most interesting element in Mosse’s analysis, to my mind anyway, is the fact that none of these factors had anything to do with Christian theology or the Christian church.
Yes, many self-professed “Christians” and church leaders participated in the rise of anti-Jewish racism throughout post-Enlightenment Europe, but their arguments for eliminating the Jews had nothing to do with religion.
However, that does not mean they were not racists; many continued to despise the Jews.
The medieval Christian, anti-Jewish tropes and accusations were nowhere to be found in the new brand of post-Enlightenment, secular racism that was forged in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries throughout Europe.
I have a lot more to say about this, but I am still doing my research. Maybe I will post more about this in the future.
In any case, here is the excerpt from Mosse followed by a few of my observations for today’s church. When Mosse refers to “racism” he is thinking about all forms of racial prejudice and discrimination. Antisemitism is only one possible example of such racism. (All emphasis is mine):
Racism had no founding father, and that was one of its strengths. It made alliance with all those virtues that the modern age praised so much. Racism picked out such qualities as cleanliness, honesty, moral earnestness, hard work, and family life – virtues which during the nineteenth century came to symbolize the ideals of the middle class. . . Racism was associated with these virtues rather than with any single philosopher or social theorist of importance. . . Racism was not merely one form of social Darwinism, but instead, a scavenger ideology, which annexed the virtues, morals, and respectability of the age to its stereotypes and attributed them to the inherent qualities of a superior race.
If racism annexed the virtues of the age, it also condemned as degenerate all that was opposed to such respectability. Not to exemplify the ideal-type of
“clean-cut American” or “right-living Englishman” was a sign of an inferior race. Though racism was often vague, it clearly embraced all the values of middle-class respectability and claimed to be their defender. To be sure, few people at first went along with such a claim; to the vast majority of Europeans, it sufficed to be a Christian gentleman. But even here racism so infected Christianity that, in the end, no real battle between racism and Christianity ever took place. Both supported the same middle-class virtues and saw the enemy in the same nonconformists – be they Bohemians, Freemasons, or Jews. The support racism gave to ideals which were opposed to a threatened degeneracy was in practice more important than any differences between racism and Christianity.
. . . The perimeters of racial thought are as elusive and slippery as the ideology as a whole. And yet, for all that, the myth was transformed into reality, not just during the Holocaust and the camps, but whenever ordinary people made judgments upon others based upon the implications of the racial stereotype.
The Holocaust has passed. The history of racism which we have told has helped to explain the Final Solution. But racism itself has survived. As many people as ever before think in racial categories. There is nothing provisional about the lasting world of stereotypes. That is the legacy of racism everywhere. . . Blacks on the whole remained locked into the same racial posture which never varied much from the eighteenth century to our time. Practically all blacks had been outside Hitler’s reach; consequently, there was no rude awakening from the racial dream in their regard. Moreover, nations which had fought against National Socialism continued to accept black racial inferiority for many years. . . (They) did not seem to realize that all racism, whether aimed at blacks or Jews, was cut of the same cloth. (209-211).
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The intense, perennial pressures of cultural conformity are no more “provisional” today than are the ever-present stereotypes of racial prejudice. Yep, we got 21st century racists, too. Many of them within the Christian church.
Pressures for conformity continue to press against God’s people now just as they did in Nazi Germany and medieval Europe. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Sadly, the Christian church – but especially its more conservative membership. . . can you spell MAGA? – is always inclined to endorse the cultural, social status quo, even if our preferred status quo is defined by a sub-culture.
Today’s (sub-)cultural norms are always more popular than Jesus.
For instance, studies consistently reveal that evangelical Christians share the same political priorities, endorse the same social, cultural agendas, and vote for the same political candidates as their non-Christian, non-church going neighbors – wherever they happen to live.
Is this an accident?
The evangelical wing of the Christian church fought against racial integration and condemned the civil rights movement as loudly and vociferously as did the worst racist politicians in the deep South. Men like governors Lester Maddox and George Wallace armed themselves with long, wooden ax handles while blocking the doorways to keep black students out of white, public schools.
And, yes, the southern, conservative church applauded both Maddox and Wallace and their violent racism.
Similar instincts are at play today when Christians join in the condemnation of Critical Race Theory, while not having the slightest inkling of what CRT really is.
What other sorts of violence, racism, bigotry, and close-mindedness are evangelicals, who claim the name of Jesus, following after today?
Pay attention to how closely “acceptable” church leadership conforms itself to the standard, middle-class, cultural virtues of the friendly, well-dressed, patriotic American. How much of this social conformity is the fruit of genuine Christian discipleship, following hard after Jesus, and how much of it is merely the required uniform expected of us by the world at large?
Neither the dangers of racism, in all of its various shades, nor the moral compromises on display when the Christian church surrenders itself to cultural conformity have changed all that much over time.
The pressure to conform never goes away.
The crucial question is: to whom or to what are we conforming? Middle-class values? Or Jesus of Nazareth?
The Civil War had embedded a seemingly permanent split between the northern and southern branches of American Christianity. Bridging that gap and healing those wounds, bringing the church together again as one unified, national community, was a major concern all throughout American society at the time.