Ever heard of Martin Luther? No, not the black civil rights leader. The famous medieval German preacher.
He started the protestant movement and is revered among American Evangelicals, especially Lutherans, as the founder of their splinter groups of Christianity, which split off from the Catholic Church a couple of hundred years ago.
Now Evangelicals dominate America, while the vast majority of the world’s Christians are Catholics.
You didn’t know that either, did you?
Catholics are not “different” from Christians, as American Evangelicals like to pretend. Catholics are the original Christians. They’ve been around a lot longer than Evangelicals.
Evangelicals are just a splinter group that started with a German protestant preacher called Martin Luther in the 16th Century.
Most Christians on the planet think of American Evangelicals as a malignant, violent, corrupt, misguided cult, not true followers of Christ.
JOHN OLIVER EXPOSES SHADY TELEVANGELISTS FLEECING AMERICANS FOR MILLIONS
“On his award-worthy HBO program Last Week Tonight, John Oliver revels in exposing hypocrisy, from the compromised snake oil salesman Dr. Oz to “thin-skinned” megalomaniac Donald Trump. Sunday night’s edition saw the intrepid British satirist target America’s shady fraternity of televangelists bleeding their brainwashed acolytes dry.
“This is about the churches that exploit people’s faith for monetary gain,” Oliver announced.”
-The Daily Beast
No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.
Matthew 6:24
Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.
Matthew 19:24
Hitler didn’t come up with the Holocaust. Martin Luther did.
Martin Luther was viciously anti-semitic and he promoted the idea of a Holocaust, hundreds of years before Hitler was even born.
ANTI-SEMITISM: MARTIN LUTHER – “THE JEWS & THEIR LIES”
“At the beginning of his career, Martin Luther was apparently sympathetic to Jewish resistance to the Catholic Church. However, he expected the Jews to convert to his purified Christianity; when they did not, he turned violently against them.”
-Jewish Virtual Library
MARTIN LUTHER PAVED THE WAY FOR THE HOLOCAUST
“A shocking part of Luther’s legacy seems to have slipped though the cracks of the collective memory along the way: his vicious Anti-Semitism and its horrific consequences for the Jews and for Germany itself.
At first, Luther was convinced that the Jews would accept the truth of Christianity and convert. Since they did not, he later followed in his treatise, On the Jews and Their Lies (1543), that “their synagogues or schools“ should be “set fire to … in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christian.“
He advised that the houses of Jews be “razed and destroyed,“ their “prayer books and Talmudic writings“ and “all cash and treasure of silver and gold“ be taken from them.
They should receive “no mercy or kindness,“ given “no legal protection,“ and “drafted into forced labor or expelled.“
He also claimed that Christians who “did not slay them were at fault.“
Luther thus laid part of the basic anti-Semitic groundwork for his Nazi descendants to carry out the Shoah. Indeed, Julius Streicher, editor of the anti-Semitic Nazi magazine “Der Stürmer,“ commented during the Nürnberg tribunal that Martin Luther could have been tried in his place.”
-Times of Israel
ON THE JEWS AND THEIR LIES, MARTIN LUTHER, 1543
“The book may have had an impact on creating antisemitic Germanic thought through the middle ages. During World War II, copies of the book were held up by Nazis at rallies, and the prevailing scholarly consensus is that it had a significant impact on the Holocaust.”
-Wikipedia
Luther’s attacks have been seen as paving the way for Hitler.
Christianity Today
That’s a Nazi propaganda poster featuring Martin Luther. The text says “Hitler’s fight and Luther’s teachings are the German people’s great defense”
The infamous Kristallnacht, the night when Nazis violently terrorized Jews, was a celebration of Martin Luther’s birthday.
HOW THE NAZIS USED MARTIN LUTHER’S VIRULENT ANTI-SEMITISM
“A new museum exhibition in Berlin details how the Nazis made use of the anti-Semitic words of Martin Luther, the leader of the Protestant Reformation.
“They very clearly used Luther’s writings that had all this anti-Semitism in them to support their cause,” Kurt Hendel, professor emeritus of Reformation history at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, said of the Nazis.
The Nazis were particularly enamored of Luther’s 1543 work, “On The Jews And Their Lies.” Hendel said that though Luther was not always anti-Semitic, he came to hate Jews after they refused to convert en masse to Christianity.
In November 1933, the Nazis marked the 450th anniversary of Luther’s birth with a nationwide “German Luther Day.” Party leaders praised Luther’s “ethno-nationalist mission,” and called their movement “the completion of the German Reformation in the Third Reich.”
-Forward
Yeah, the Nazis seriously believed terrorizing Jews was the right thing, the Christian thing, to do. They were followers of Martin Luther, and therefore were convinced that persecuting Jews and other non-Christians was their Christian duty.
They didn’t think of themselves as evil. They thought of themselves as the good guys: righteous Christians, fulfilling the word of God.
Like most Christians throughout history, the Nazis thought Jews were evil, simply because they were Jews.
CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION OF JEWS OVER THE CENTURIES
“In the years 500-1500 the Jews, as a religious and a cultural minority, were often preyed upon by the Christian majority in a familiar sociological pattern.
After a few centuries of freedom from harassment during the Carolingian period (800-1000), the Jews of western Europe began to suffer new indignities as the crusades came on. The Muslims were the “infidel” targets in the attempted recapture of the holy places in Palestine. However, the pillage and slaughter committed by Christian mobs against Jews on the way linger long in Jewish memory.”
-US Holocaust Memorial Museum
THE GERMAN CHURCHES AND THE NAZI STATE
“The population of Germany in 1933 was around 60 million. Almost all Germans were Christian, belonging either to the Roman Catholic (ca. 20 million members) or the Protestant (ca. 40 million members) churches. The Jewish community in Germany in 1933 was less than 1% of the total population of the country.
How did Christians and their churches in Germany respond to the Nazi regime and its laws, particularly to the persecution of the Jews?
The racialized anti-Jewish Nazi ideology converged with antisemitism that was historically widespread throughout Europe at the time and had deep roots in Christian history. For all too many Christians, traditional interpretations of religious scriptures seemed to support these prejudices.”
-US Holocaust Memorial Museum
The Holocaust was a Christian atrocity, just like the Crusades and the Inquisition.
German Evangelical Christians weren’t persecuted by the Nazis. Evangelical Christians were the Nazis.
Many Republicans falsely believe that the Nazis were not only socialists, but atheists or occultists or satanists or something.
The reason why you think that is because you’ve been lied to since World War 2.
War propaganda is designed to demonize and dehumanize the enemy, to make it easier to kill them.
In order to be able to pull the trigger and kill people, the soldiers on your own side have to believe that they’re the good guys, and the other side are evil monsters and demons who must be killed.
That’s how propaganda works.
During WW2, American soldiers were told that it was a war of good vs evil. They were told that American soldiers were good Christians, and Nazi Germans were evil and definitely not Christians.
And ever since then, many Americans still falsely believe that Nazis were Satan worshippers, occultists or at least atheists, but definitely not Christians.
Oh, but they were.
In fact, they were very typical Christians. The Nazis weren’t the first Christians to hate Jews.
For centuries, anti-semitism has been a big part of Christianity. Many other Christian countries massacred Jews long before the Nazis did.
Here’s one of many examples, that predates Martin Luther:
SPAIN ANNOUNCES IT WILL EXPEL ALL JEWS
“In 1478, Ferdinand and Isabella had instituted the Inquisition, an effort by Spanish clergy to rid the country of heretics. Pogroms, individual acts of violence against Jews, and anti-Semitic laws had been features of Catholic Spain for over a century before the Alhambra Order, causing deaths and conversions that greatly reduced Spain’s Jewish population. Having already forced much of Spain’s Jewish population to convert, the Church now set about rooting out those who suspected of practicing Judaism in secret, oftentimes by extremely violent methods.”
-History.com
How could Christians be so misguided, you ask?
They weren’t.
They weren’t misguided by a false interpretation of the bible. They followed the bible to the letter. The bible literally tells Christians to murder non-Christians:
And they entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and with all their soul, but that whoever would not seek the Lord, the God of Israel, should be put to death, whether young or old, man or woman.
2 Chronicles 15:12-13 ESV
But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.
Luke 19:27 ESV
American Evangelicals love to pretend that Islam is a violent, misguided religion of hate. What they fail to mention is that the bible is every bit as violent, misguided and bloodthirsty.
The Holocaust didn’t go against the bible. Christian Nazis followed the bible, and Martin Luther’s teachings.
Centuries of Christian anti-Semitism led to the Holocaust, a landmark Church of England report concludes.
The Telegraph
ADOLF HITLER ON GOD: QUOTES EXPRESSING BELIEF AND FAITH
“If Adolf Hitler was an atheist, why did he keep saying that he believed in God, had faith in God, and was convinced that he was doing God’s work?
Adolf Hitler’s quotes indicate that he was not just certain that his attacks on Jews were divinely mandated, but that his efforts to clamp down on society by restoring traditional morality were likewise mandated by God.”
-LearnReligions.com
REFUTING THE ATHEIST-HITLER MYTH
“Hitler was a Christian. This undeniable fact couldn’t be made any clearer than by his own confessions. Yet, I will not merely present you with these testimonies, as damning as they happen to be on their own, but I also intend on furnishing you with a brief history of the inherent anti-Semitism of the Christian religion. I will do so to demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that Hitler and his Christian Nazi Party were acting in complete concordance with traditional Christian anti-Semitism.”
-Richard Dawkins
I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 Chapter 2
We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity. In fact our movement is Christian.
Adolf Hitler, Speech in Passau 27 October 1928 (Federal Archive Berlin-Zehlendorf)
HITLER’S CHRISTIANITY
“The evidence that Hitler was a staunch Christian is overwhelming. He banned secular education in Germany on the basis that Christian religious instruction is essential to moral development, repeatedly vilified atheism, and although he often clashed with Catholic bishops over his ill-treatment of Jews, Hitler did not perceive himself as being anti-Christian, but rather as bringing the Church back to what he saw as its proper, traditional role in persecuting the pestilent.
While negotiating the Reichskonkordat, Hitler said to Bishop Berning that suppressing Jews was, “doing Christianity a great service by pushing them out of schools and public functions.”
-Inference Review
DISCRIMINATION AGAINST ATHEISTS
“Heinrich Himmler was a strong promoter of the gottgläubig (believers in God) movement and didn’t allow atheists into the SS, arguing that their “refusal to acknowledge higher powers” would be a “potential source of indiscipline”.
Himmler announced to the SS: “We believe in a God Almighty who stands above us; he has created the earth, the Fatherland, and the Volk, and he has sent us the Führer. Any human being who does not believe in God should be considered arrogant, megalomaniacal, and stupid and thus not suited for the SS.”
The SS oath (Eidformel der Schutzstaffel), written by Himmler, also specifically denounced atheists, repeating the sentiments above.”
-Wikipedia
The Nazis were God-fearing Christians who followed the teachings of the same Martin Luther that you follow.
Still don’t believe me? Think about it:
American Evangelicals don’t see Jews as equals. They see Jews as useful pawns. Evangelicals believe that Jews are useful for bringing about the end of the world (Armageddon) when God kills all non-Christians. And if Jews don’t repent and convert to Christianity before they die, they will burn in hell.
Like the German Evangelical Nazis, American Evangelicals believe that Jews will burn in eternal hellfire simply for being Jews. It doesn’t really get much more antisemitic than that.
Like you, Hitler and the Nazis thought of themselves as good Christians. They were followers of Martin Luther and believed the same things you believe.
The words “Gott mit uns” (God is with us) were engraved on the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier.
That’s a typical Nazi uniform belt buckle, engraved with the words “God is with us”
Even today, there are still old church bells in Germany with Hitler’s name or a Swastika engraved on it:
GERMANY “NAZI BELL” ROW ERUPTS AGAIN
“The Evangelical Church in Central Germany surveyed its belfries last year, and confirmed that there were still six bells with Nazi inscriptions in Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt.
It told the Church newspaper Glaube+Heimat that it would not reveal their location for fear of encouraging “far-right bell tourism” – the practice of neo-Nazis visiting churches to celebrate the mementos of Hitler’s regime.”
-BBC News
If you’re a Fox News viewer, you don’t know any of this, because you’re being lied to:
“And while many atheists make the preposterous claim that Adolf Hitler was a Christian, his private diaries, first published in 1953 by Farrar, Straus and Young, reveal clearly that the Fuhrer was a rabid atheist”
-Fox News
No, Hitler was not a rabid atheist. That is a blatant lie.
Hitler was a rabid Christian, who persecuted atheists for the same reason he persecuted Jews.
