Why Hitler Hated Christiantiy | Tom Holland

the Nazis repudiated two of the fundamental values that Christianity has always enshrined and one of them you you just touched on the the idea that um uh the survive you know the survival of the fittest that the idea that that to be strong is to be good you know it's kind of fairly fundamental idea of say for the Greeks I mean they kind of conflated uh you know the good beauty and a goodness and strength you know this it was to be to be a good person um but of course the other uh fundamental Christian ideal that the Nazis repudiate is the idea that as Paul put it there is no dual Greek um and that in turn is a kind of refinement of the the teaching of Genesis that God creates man and woman in His image and therefore if men and women are created in the image of God every human being has an inherent dignity um and this is an idea that over the course of the Middle Ages kind of feeds into the idea that human beings have rights that if you know and this is something that um that that churchmen and lawyers in in the 12th century start to extrapolate from the gospel teachings if Christ is saying to the wealthy you have a duty to to feed the hungry and to clothe those who have no clothes and to give shelter to those who are homeless then it follows that the hungry have a right to food and those without clothes have a right to clothes and those who don't have a home have a right to a home and so you start to get the idea that human beings have inherent rights and these are ideas that secularized feed into the American Revolution into the French Revolution into the United Nations it's it's a very very um a profound idea that today for lots of people who believe in human rights they tend to kind of assume that they are imminent but in the long run you know when you look at it in the kind of historical perspective to believe in human rights requires just as much a leap of faith as believing that the Lord Jesus Christ rose on the third day and ascended into heaven I mean it's these are these are theological precepts theological ideas that um have been bred specifically of Christian history and the genius of the West has been to kind of package them and Market them as they somehow they've been you know removed from the Christian context that gave them birth and I think that that one of the things that we're seeing you know we've seen over the past few decades really since the the 21st century is that as Western power and influence Retreats so more and more of the world is kind of basically saying well you know these ideas these ideals are you know these are culturally contingent these are your ideas they're not our ideas um and I think that this is unsettling for people in the west precisely because we have the kind you know the shadow of the Nazis hangs over us because the Nazis absolutely did think against Paul that Jews and Greeks were completely separate uh and and we know where that led and part of the horror of of the Holocaust the kind of the horror and the you know the most grotesque irony in the history of Christendom is that um Hitler saw Paul Saint Paul who said there is no Jew or Greek as the embodiment of a kind of pernicious Cosmopolitan a Jewish cosmopolitanism that he saw as having destroyed Greece and Rome he thought this idea that there is no Geo Greek that there is no slave or free that there is no man or woman had corrupted classical civilization and destroyed it so you're thinking behind that is Hitler thought that the Jews were subbing him and they were not human and somehow they climbed under the idea he he saw them as as the most dangerous enemy of the strong that Paul is preaching Christ crucified he's preaching this dead man on the cross he's preaching this universalism this cosmopolitanism and this destroys the Roman Empire and so he Hitler thinks that um if his Reich is going to last a thousand years and not be brought down by a creeping Jewish cosmopolitanism then he has to get rid of the Jews but there's a case for saying that he targets the Jews for genocide because he blames them for Christianity which considering the fact that that he he draws on all obviously all kinds of kind of very venerable Christian anti-semitic anti-jewish propaganda I mean it's just the kind of the most hideous irony and paradox foreign

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 9,374

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations, Hitler, Nazism, Christianity, history, The rest is history

Id: mG0VLbP_35I

Length: 5min 2sec (302 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 11 2023