Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining
us for another edition of The Deep Dive. We are
really thrilled to have you sitting right here
at the table with us today. Absolutely. Thanks
for being here. And, you know, if you could see
our visual setup right now, you'd notice the
digital backdrop behind my co -host has completely
transformed. Right now, it's displaying these
massive, towering rows of heavy, leather -bound
historical encyclopedias. They're resting in
these deeply shadowed, almost cavernous archives.
Very moody look today. It really is. It's very
atmospheric and it perfectly reflects the gravity
and honestly the sheer historical weight of the
deep dive we are taking today. Because our mission
is based on a single, thoroughly fascinating
body of historical research, we're exploring
a movement from the 1920s and 30s known as positive
Christianity. Right. We're going to look at exactly
how a political regime attempted to take a 2
,000 -year -old religion, hollow it out from
the inside, and entirely rewrite it. fit their
own agenda. It's really a masterclass in information
manipulation, weaponized theology, and sheer
political opportunism. And just to set the table
for you before we really get going, we are diving
into some very dark, highly charged history from
Nazi Germany today. Yes, very important point.
We aren't here to take political sides or to
endorse any of these deeply disturbing views.
We are simply acting as your impartial guides.
Our goal is to look objectively at the historical
record to see exactly how this regime tried to
manipulate belief systems. And, you know, just
to analyze this as historical case study in propaganda.
OK, let's unpack this. The core concept we are
looking at is this thing called positive Christianity.
Broadly speaking, this was a religious movement
formulated within Nazi Germany. Its entire premise
was to somehow mix racialistic Nazi ideology
with elements of traditional Christianity. They
essentially wanted to use a religious framework
to justify their obsession with racial purity.
But where did this even start? Was this something
Hitler just cooked up after he already had total
control of the government? Actually, no, it goes
back much further than that. If you look at the
historical records, the phrase first officially
pops up in the very early days of the movement.
Adolf Hitler actually used the term positive
Christianity in point 24 of the 1920 Nazi Party
platform. Wow. So way back in 1920. Exactly.
Yeah. The document explicitly claimed that the
party supported the standpoint of positive Christianity,
but, and this is key, without binding itself
to any specific Protestant or Catholic denomination.
So they wanted the label, but not the actual
church structure. Precisely. They desperately
wanted the cultural label of Christianity, but
they demanded it on their own very specific,
highly conditional terms. What's fascinating
here is the absolute political reality that drove
this decision. Because Germany wasn't exactly
a blank slate religiously, right? I mean, it
was deeply established. Oh, absolutely. You have
to really put yourself in the mindset of the
time and place. In the 1920s, Germany had been
a profoundly, deeply Christian nation for over
a thousand years. The culture, the educational
institutions, the daily rhythms of the citizens'
lives, they were entirely intertwined with the
Protestant and Catholic churches. Right. Now,
the Nazi movement, fundamentally and at its core,
was inherently hostile to those established churches.
They were building a totalitarian state. They
ultimately wanted total control over the minds
of the public, which meant they viewed any competing
moral authority. like a pope or a unified church,
as a direct threat. That makes sense. You can't
have total loyalty to the state if people are
loyal to a higher power. Exactly. But Hitler
was politically astute enough to realize he was
trapped. He knew he could not win a free election,
nor could he maintain power in the long run if
he openly alienated the vast Christian majority
of the country. He needed a bridge, or at least
the illusion of one, to keep the masses pacified
while he consolidated power. And that illusion
is where the pragmatic deception really comes
into play. Historians like Ian Kershaw and Lawrence
Rees have looked deeply into this, and they characterize
this whole endeavor as pure cynical opportunism.
Pure opportunism. Because publicly, Hitler would
actively identify as a Christian. There is a
famous documented speech from April 12th, 1922,
where he specifically stands up and claims to
be a Christian. He wanted the public to view
him as a fierce defender of their traditional
faith. But privately, he absolutely scorned what
theologians call Pauline Christianity. Right.
And we should probably clarify what Pauline Christianity
means for those who aren't, you know, theology
majors. Good idea. That refers to the foundational
teachings of the Apostle Paul, which make up
a massive chunk of the New Testament. Paul's
letters focus heavily on the ideas of grace,
universal salvation, regardless of your background,
and the idea that all people are equal before
God. Which obviously completely contradicts a
racial hierarchy. Entirely. Hitler privately
despised these concepts. He had no individual
belief in the basic tenets of the church. To
put it in a more modern perspective for you,
it's kind of like a politician who moves to a
new city and suddenly claims to be the biggest,
most diehard fan of the local sports team. I
love this analogy. Right. They wear the jersey.
They sit behind the dugout. They cheer enthusiastically
when the cameras are pointing at them all just
to win over the local voters. But they don't
actually care about the team. They couldn't even
name three players on the roster. That's a great
analogy. But imagine if that politician didn't
just pretend to like the team. Imagine if once
he got elected, they actually fired the coach.
changed the team colors, and entirely rewrote
the rulebook so the game was completely unrecognizable
to the fans. Wow. Yeah, that's exactly what they
did. The regime recognized that they couldn't
just abolish Christianity overnight. The social
backlash would have been insurmountable. So instead
of destroying the institution from the outside
with a hammer, they decided to hollow it out
from the inside like a parasite. They introduced...
positive Christianity as a linguistic trick to
allay the fears of the Christian majority. It's
weaponized semantics. Precisely. By branding
their version as positive, they subconsciously
labeled traditional historical belief as negative
or passive or weak without having to make a single
coherent theological argument. It was a highly
calculated branding exercise designed to make
the Nazi movement appear not only compatible
with Christianity, but as its ultimate revitalized
champion. Here's where it gets really interesting,
because they didn't just want to change the public
perception of the church or, you know, slap a
new marketing label on it. They actually went
after the sacred texts themselves. They attempted
to literally edit the ultimate bestseller. It's
incredibly bold. Research shows the specific,
shocking ways the regime tried to alter the Bible.
They initiated this selective process of redaction,
aggressively rejecting anything they deemed as
an impurity. Extreme adherents of this movement
wanted to completely eliminate the entire Old
Testament, the Hebrew Bible, from church services
and theology entirely. Just wipe it out. Just
gone. Yeah. And they didn't stop there. In the
New Testament, they went through and systematically
removed Jewish genealogies. Which is a massive
deal, because traditional theology relies heavily
on the Davidic descent. the lineage of King David,
that Christians believe Jesus claimed. By scrubbing
that out, you sever the connection to the historical
prophecies. Exactly. They scrubbed out Jewish
names, Jewish places, and any references to Jewish
prophecies that Christians believe Jesus fulfilled.
They literally tried to redact the foundational
text of the religion to fit an Arian worldview.
And this textual purge served very specific theological
alteration. It allowed for the total rebranding
of the central figure of the religion. Traditional
Orthodox Christianity, often called Nicene Christianity,
placed a heavy emphasis on the miraculous birth
of Jesus, his suffering, his passive sacrifice
on the cross, and the concept of an otherworldly
redemption. Which they didn't like. No. The adherents
of positive Christianity argued that this was
the negative, weak aspect of the religion. They
wanted to replace this with a positive emphasis,
so they completely redefined the character of
Jesus. They stripped away the passive, sacrificial
elements and reconstructed him as an active,
militaristic preacher and a heroic fighter. A
fighter against what? Against the rabbinic Judaism
of his day, which was the foundational religious
framework of the Pharisees and Sadducees. They
claimed that opposing this was his primary driving
purpose. They even went so far as to claim he
was not Jewish at all which is just a staggering
historical geographical and theological leap
to make about a first century rabbi from Galilee.
It's completely ahistorical. They classified
him instead as a Nordic Amorite. basically claiming
an Aryan hood for him. And I really want you,
the listener, to stop and imagine this for a
second. Think about your absolute favorite, most
cherished book. Maybe it's a sacred text, or
maybe it's just a novel that fundamentally shaped
who you are as a person. Yeah, picture that book.
Now imagine someone comes into your home, takes
that book. violently tears out the entire first
half of the pages, takes a thick black marker
to redact the remaining chapters, and completely
rewrites the main character's backstory, their
motivations, and their heritage. And they do
all of this not for literary reasons, but specifically
to manipulate your worldview to align with a
political agenda. It is a breathtaking level
of ideological audacity. It truly is audacious.
And to understand how this was systematically
pushed onto the public, we have to look at the
architects of this new revelation. We're talking
about figures like Hans Kroll and Alfred Rosenberg.
The extremists. Yes, the extremists within the
regime. And they made it very clear that they
didn't just want to tweak the religion. They
ultimately wanted to replace it entirely. Hans
Kroll was appointed as the Reich Minister for
Church Affairs. By 1937, he was calling submissive
clergy into his office and telling them point
blank that positive Christianity was not dependent
upon the Apostles' Creed. He explicitly stated
it was not dependent on faith in Christ as the
Son of God. Which is wild because that is the
very bedrock upon which traditional Christianity
relies. You remove that and you don't have Christianity
anymore. Exactly. But Kroll didn't care about
Orthodox theology. He made this chilling declaration
to the clergy. He told them the Fuhrer is the
herald of a new revelation. He essentially tried
to replace divine authority with political authority.
Yes, he absolutely did. And then you have Alfred
Rosenberg, who was... essentially official Nazi
ideologist. His actual title was the Führer's
Delegate for the Entire Intellectual and Philosophical
Education and Instruction for the National Socialist
Party. That is quite the title. Very bureaucratic.
But Rosenberg wrote a massive influential book
called The Myth of the 20th Century. In it, he
argued that the Catholic and Protestant churches
had distorted Christianity over the centuries
by ignoring the heroic and Germanic aspects of
Jesus's life. Rosenberg explicitly called traditional
Protestant and Catholic doctrines negative Christianity.
But here is the crucial detail. He viewed positive
Christianity as merely a transitional faith.
It was just a stepping stone. A stepping stone
to what? To bringing Christians toward Nazi anti
-Semitism and eventually transitioning them out
of traditional Western thought altogether. Rosenberg's
ultimate vision for Germany was incredibly radical.
He drafted a plan for the future of religion
in the Reich that involved the total extermination
of what he called foreign Christian faiths. Total
extermination of the faiths. Yes. He literally
wanted to replace the Bible at the altar with
Mein Kampf as the supreme holy scripture. Furthermore,
he planned to replace the Christian cross with
a swastika or a sun cross as the universal symbol
of European Christianity inside these Nazified
churches. Hold on. So he just wanted to gut the
entire spiritual... foundation and replace it
with state worship, where does the actual theology
come in? Like, what were they actually worshiping?
That's the most bizarre part. For Rosenberg,
the theology had nothing to do with divine revelation
from old Europe or ancient texts. His theology
was entirely biologically based. For him, the
Aryan Nordic race itself was divine. God was
in the race. Exactly. He literally believed that
God was in the blood and that the physical culture
of this race was the literal kingdom of heaven
on earth. It was a complete terrifying fusion
of racial purity laws with religious devotion.
Which begs a very natural question. Did they
just invent these theological ideas out of thin
air? Did someone just wake up one day in the
1920s and decide to rewrite Jesus as a Nordic
Amorite and say God is in the blood? Not entirely,
no. While the political application and the state
enforcement were new, the underlying ideas had
actually been bubbling up in European academic
circles for a while. Historians trace the origins
back to 19th century higher criticism. OK, can
you give us an ELI five and explain it like I'm
five on what higher criticism actually was? Sure.
In the 1800s, higher criticism was an academic
school of thought that attempted to look at the
Bible purely as a historical document, rather
than an infallible divine text. Many legitimate
scholars in this movement simply wanted to separate
the historical Jesus of Nazareth, the actual
man who walked around Galilee, from the divine
Jesus of Orthodox theology. They wanted to place
him in his accurate historical and cultural context
within ancient Judaism. That sounds like standard
historical research. It was initially. But there
were some writers who hijacked that framework
and took it in a very dark direction. Writers
like Emil Louis Bernouf, Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
and Paul de La Garde began reconstructing a historical
Jesus that specifically corresponded to the rising
racialist and anti -Semitic ideologies of 19th
century Europe. Ah, I see. Because they were
rooted in that higher criticism, they felt justified
in minimizing or entirely rejecting the miraculous
aspects of the gospel narratives. They reduced
the crucifixion to just a tragic political end
to his life rather than a prefigured divine culmination
of salvation. So they essentially stripped out
the divinity to make him fit a political narrative.
Exactly. They redefined him as an Aryan hero
struggling against Judaism. Lagarde even insisted
that German Christianity needed to become national
in character. So the intellectual and pseudoscientific
framework for positive Christianity had actually
been laid decades before the Nazi party ever
existed. But the rejection of the Old Testament
goes back even further than the 19th century,
doesn't it? Did the Nazis pull from older movements
there? If we connect this to the bigger picture,
the attempt to decouple Christianity from its
Jewish roots and reject the Hebrew Bible is not
unprecedented in history. Historians point out
that the earliest form of Christianity that resembled
positive Christianity in this specific textual
way was the second century Marcionite sect. The
Marcionites. Right. The Marcionites completely
rejected the Hebrew Bible's canonicity for Christians
and associated it strictly with Judaism. Later,
in the 1200s, you had a group called the Cathars
in southern France. The Cathars actually viewed
the Old Testament God as an evil demiurge, which
is a philosophical term for a lesser, often flawed,
creator deity who built the physical world. And
they saw him as a completely separate being from
the loving New Testament God. But there is a
massive, crucial distinction here that we absolutely
need to make clear for the listener. Yes, the
historical record draws a very strict right line
here. Those ancient sects, the Marcionites and
the Cathars, rejected the Old Testament for complex
theological and Gnostic reasons. Gnostic meaning?
Gnostic essentially refers to ancient mystical
belief systems that thought the physical material
world was evil and only spiritual knowledge could
save you. It was purely philosophical. In fact,
the Cathars had very little hostility toward
the Jewish people themselves. And ironically,
the Catholic Church actually persecuted the Cathars
in part because they were seen as too friendly
towards Jews. That is a stark contrast. It is.
Positive Christianity. on the other hand, was
not driven by Gnostic theology or mystical philosophy.
It was driven entirely by a pseudoscientific,
racially based hatred of the Jews as a people.
The Nazis essentially weaponized a historical
theological quirk to justify a racial ideology.
So we have this massive, powerful regime with
all the tools of state control, a manufactured
intellectual history to back them up, and a plan
to completely rewrite reality. Did it work? Because
despite all their power and intimidation, this
plan actually hit a massive wall. It absolutely
did. The regime initiated a process they called
Gleichschaltung, which roughly translates to
coordination or forcing everything into line.
They planned to Nazify the Protestant church
by forcibly unifying 28 historically separate
state churches under a single monolithic national
church. One big state church. Right. They wanted
this new entity controlled by a fiercely pro
-Nazi faction called the German Christians. But
when push came to shove in 1933, those radical
German Christians only managed to control about
3 ,000 of Germany's 17 ,000 pastors. That is
a massive shortfall. The vast majority of the
clergy looked at this and said, absolutely not.
Right. And the regime's attempts to force it
through only made things worse. Hitler proposed
that his friend, a man named Ludwig Müller, who
was a committed Nazi and a former naval chaplain,
should serve as the new Reich bishop of this
unified church. Through aggressive intimidation
tactics and dissolving competing church organizations,
they managed to strong -arm Mueller into being
elected in September 1933. But that backfired.
Completely. Mueller was an absolute disaster
for them politically. His heretical views on
St. Paul and his public arguments against the
Semitic origins of Jesus and the Bible quickly
alienated huge, moderate sections of the Protestant
church. He failed entirely to unite Protestantism
under the swastika. And that's when the resistance
actually began to organize in a serious way.
Pastor Martin Niemöller responded to all of this
state overreach by founding the Pastors' Emergency
League. This league was quickly supported by
nearly 40 % of evangelical pastors. Their entire
stated goal was to boldly reaffirm the traditional
Bible against these Nazi edits. A direct challenge.
Yes, and this movement eventually grew into what
became known as the Confessing Church. By 1934,
the Confessing Church officially declared itself
the legitimate Protestant Church of Germany,
standing in direct, dangerous defiance of Miller's
state -sponsored Reich Church. And it wasn't
just the Protestants pushing back. The Catholic
Church also resisted the ideological takeover.
Right. The papal encyclical. Exactly. In 1937,
Pope Pius XI issued a papal encyclical titled
Mit Brennender Sorge, which translates to With
Burning Concern. In it, the Catholic Church explicitly
denounced the Nazi ideology, stating to the world
that it contained the idolatry of race, people
and the state. Now, the regime obviously retaliated
against this resistance. They didn't just. let
it happen. In 1935 alone, the Nazis arrested
700 confessing pastors, throwing many into concentration
camps. The pressure was immense, and Reich Bishop
Mueller was eventually forced to resign in total
failure. But what is truly telling about this
whole saga is the ultimate collapse of the entire
positive Christianity initiative. It just fizzled
out. Yeah. Historian Mary Fulbrook noted in her
research that as the years went on, the Nazis
eventually just gave up their attempt to co -opt
Christianity. It wasn't working. They made little
pretense at concealing their contempt for Christian
beliefs and ethics as the war dragged on. I read
that the situation became so strained that some
members of the SS actually came to view the pro
-Nazi German Christians as almost more of a threat
than the resisting confessing church. Which is
wild, but true. The SS leadership simply couldn't
comprehend that anyone would genuinely try to
combine a commitment to traditional Christianity
and Nazism. To the SS, you were either loyal
to the state or you were loyal to a foreign god.
By the time the regime fell in 1945, positive
Christianity had failed to replace traditional
belief and it fell entirely into obscurity as
a historical movement. So, what does this all
mean? Why did we take you on this deep dive into
a failed religious movement from the 1930s today?
Because this isn't just a history lesson about
a theological dispute. It is a stark, heavily
documented case study in how a powerful entity
can attempt to hijack, hollow out, and completely
reprogram a society's foundational beliefs. To
change the labels. Exactly. They didn't try to
ban the religion outright at first. They tried
to change the labels. They took a concept people
trusted, called it positive to mask an incredibly
destructive agenda, and tried to use the comfort
and familiarity of established traditions. to
quietly smuggle in a radical exclusionary ideology.
This raises an important question, and it's something
I want you to think about long after you finish
listening today. We've spent this time talking
about a dictatorship forcing this top down through
intimidation and arrests. Right. But consider
the world we live in now, the digital age. If
a unified digital algorithm slowly started filtering
out parts of a historical text or suppressing
specific philosophical arguments across all search
engines and social feeds over a generation, Would
we even notice the text was being rewritten?
Or would we just happily scroll along with our
own modern, algorithmically curated version of
a positive truth, completely unaware of what
had been quietly deleted from our history? That
is exactly right. The mechanics of manipulation
change, but the vulnerabilities remain the same.
It is a powerful reminder to always look past
the label, no matter how positive someone claims
it is, and examine what is actually written on
the pages. Thank you so much for joining us at
the table for this deep dive. We hope it gave
you something new to think about. Remember to
always check your sources, look at the deep history
behind the headlines, and keep asking the hard
questions. We'll catch you on the next one.