Protestants: “Ahh but that was Catholicism. And Catholicism isn’t Christian.”
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I totally get the satire in your comment but I just wanna say, the forced Christianization of indigenous Americans was definitely carried out by Protestants.
edit: I guess Protestants didn’t have widespread, overt “accept baptism or we’ll execute you on the spot” policies like some Catholic missions in the Americas, but the result of forced relocation and family separation was much the same. When they force people onto a reservation on an inhospitable plot of land half a continent away from their homes, and then withhold aid unless they accept Christ as their savior, they might as well be saying “convert or die.” Same goes for using the natives’ “heathenry” as part of the justification for wars and war crimes.
I’m basically a secular humanist, and I’ve heard the statement that Catholics aren’t Christians, in person, a few times. The two times that come to mind were from very different people (a Chinese Christian that lives in Beijing, and a Canadian Christian that lives on an apple orchard in southern Ontario). Both of whom were coworkers I spent some time with while travelling for work (different jobs, about 10 years apart).
I’ve always shut it down as a wildly offensive thing to say, and not worthy of discussing. So I’ve never gotten a real explantion for why some Christians believe it. Is it a common opinion?
Evangelicals sometimes hold to it - basically, there’s a whole ‘thing’ about nuda scriptura amongst certain protestant sects, especially those which gained prominence in the modern US in the 19th century. In the minds of these sects, by nuda scriptura - ‘bare scripture’ - there’s only one authority on theology, and that is the Bible, interpreted literally. To them, then, the entire Old World church hierarchies and traditions are some bizarre Satanist plot to lead Christians astray by NOT following ONLY the Bible and nothing but the Bible.
Catholics tend to emphasize things like Church tradition, and even reason (gasp), as means of constructing theology, while Old World-originated protestants sects, like Lutherans, tend to view the Bible as the highest but not only source of theology (sola scriptura). To New World sect evangelicals, the latter is misguided but essentially harmless; the former is (though they would never use this term, instead preferring to denigrate their enemies as not Christians at all) heresy.
I’ve heard it coming from hardcore Mormons, which I found hilariously ironic - seeing as how pretty much every other Christian Church/denomination doesn’t see them as Christians.
Mormonism rejects the Trinity and you get your own magical planet/become like God when you die. I think most Christians would find that profoundly heretical.
The church has mostly been doing a propaganda campaign to present themselves as just another denomination of Christianity, but Adam-God and the spirit wives is just gross and weird.
“Hey ladies! The best afterlife you get is pumping out babies with all of your husbands other wives for all of eternity!”
You could name any time a Christian came to a new land. Guaranteed they did their best to dismantle the local everything in order to spread Christianity because why would they be peaceful when instead they could indoctrinate people?
They’re all the same God too which adds a level of “what the fuck?”
Yep, the Jewish/Christian/Muslim feud is second to weirdness only to the feuds inside each one of those 3.
He’s never heard of it. Because he’s oblivious to history.
Oblivious to history, but still willing to flap his gums on it. Amazing how consistently that seems to be the case.
Christianity is pretty much the main religion to have practiced swordpoint conversion. Heck, even the schisms within the faith loved to burn people to death for not renouncing/embracing the Pope.
By contrast, Islam often took a carrot rather than stick approach with a two-tier society where conversion bestowed additional rights.
Both Islam and Christianity varied wildly in their approach by region. Islam certain has many ‘conversion by the sword’ incidents, some lasting centuries of brutality, and Christianity, likewise, has plenty of periods of co-existence.
One of the core issues, I think, is that we generally think of European Christianity, whose history is largely intolerant until the Protestant Reformation, and even after that often quite brutal; whereas Christianity in the East and in Africa very often included institutionalized coexistence with other faiths.
Or colonisation in Africa or South America, or in Australia and New Zealand, or basically everywhere xtians have gone. Amongst their mandates in the bible is to spread their beliefs to ‘lower’ cultures, after all. Ya know, to ‘save’ them.
Or the Holocaust – fun fact, Hitler wasn’t atheist, that’s just one more thing xtians lie about to distance themselves from it; the Nazis required prayers in school, included it in their oaths, and steeped their iconography in it.
It’s insane how many widespread genocides have their roots in this toxic mythology.
e: there are some extreme recent examples, too, like the guy who tried bringing Jesus to the North Sentinelese, with tragically predictable results. But he believed in the mission, just like the rest of the brainwashed. Unfortunately they’re going to kill us instead of themselves.
The Hitler thing is complicated. He was in broad terms a Christian early on (though a sect that denied Jesus as divine, and recast him as an aryan), but there is little evidence Hitler believed in anything in his whole life except for Nazism, his mother, and the Opera. This then was largely as a power play - he ultimately saw organised religion as a locus of control and later an existential threat to the authority of the Third Reich. When his proposed Reich Church failed to materialise, he lost interest in the religious angle, and by 1937 was foretelling the ultimate struggle between Nazism and Christianity, ending with the latter’s destruction. 2,700 members of the clergy were imprisoned in a special barracks at Dachau.
It’s really not complicated. Christians have just tried to make it so for a long time.
There’s overwhelming evidence that Hitler was a staunch Christian: the man himself said:
We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity. Our movement is Christian.
I get annoyed when people denigrate reading or owning Mein Kampf – everyone should read it. The myths of Hitler have overshadowed the truths, and we need to learn from the truths.
His movement was one of a religious zealot taking those beliefs to extremes, which involved the decimation of another in the Abrahamic triad, as happens with alarming regularity.
That quote comes from a speech in 1928, which is indeed the period in which he was trying to use religion to bring about a rise to power. Relatively soon after this, however, he realised his consolidation of religion wasn’t going to happen, and moved on to other things. By the end of the 1930s, the Reich was pretty anti-religion.
I’m sorry, but this reads as the many, many coping ‘readings’ that try to downplay his overt Christianity.
I get it, and I’m not trying to attack you, but this is just wrong.
He did not convert in the years after this quote, as can be evidenced by his favouring of the church up to the end days, the Catholic Church supporting his efforts due to mutual reciprocity, his integration of christian teachings and outright requirements into the Nazi requirements (including requirements for medals), continued iconography, etc.
I’m sorry if it hurts, but Hitler was a Christian, and you can’t say his own words don’t matter because a quote is from a few years before he took power.
By the end of the 1930s, the Reich was pretty anti-religion.
They objectively weren’t. Can I ask where you’re getting that impression?
I’m sorry if it hurts, but Hitler was a Christian, and you can’t say his own words don’t matter because a quote is from a few years before he took power.
Do his words and actions which contradict that after he took power not matter by comparison?
Hitler was only a Christian insofar as he revered a figure called Jesus Christ to some degree. That he rejected nearly every common theological thread of Christianity, from Biblical authority, to the divinity of Christ, to the authority of any church, to questions of salvation of the soul, to pacifism, to Jesus’s very existence as a Jew, should very much cast into question any characterization of Hitler as a Christian in any serious sense.
Do his words and actions which contradict that after he took power not matter by comparison?
Which words and actions? Do you have sources?
Every time I’ve heard this, nobody can give actual sources. I can, though, for everything from a sanctioned christian state to the individual regulations for official Nazi groups and the delegation of medals. For instance:
Before 1933, in fact, some bishops prohibited Catholics in their dioceses from joining the Nazi Party. This ban was dropped after Hitler’s March 23, 1933, speech to the Reichstag in which he described Christianity as the “foundation” for German values. The Centre Party was dissolved as part of the signing of a 1933 Concordat between the Vatican and Nazi governmental representatives, and several of its leaders were murdered in the Röhm purge in July 1934.
Do you have sources to refute this?
E: sorry, I just saw you’re not my original interlocutor. I’m not trying to be adversarial here.
Which words and actions? Do you have sources?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Adolf_Hitler
296 citations there.
That Hitler used Christianity, and that Christians supported Hitler in exchange for preferential treatment and asspats, is not the same as saying that Hitler was a Christian in any realistic sense. Like Mussolini converting to Catholicism and persecuting atheists after a lifetime of personal atheism, fascists will use anything and anyone, and likewise say anything in public, to get their slimy hands on the power to brutalize more people.
I’m an enemy of Christianity on multiple levels, and Christians, both the protestant conservatives and Zentrum Catholics, were an instrumental part of enabling Hitler, and many became enthusiastic Nazis, but Hitler himself was not, realistically speaking, a Christian.
