*sigh*
Sirs, Rich, do you even read what Prince has written? I don't understand the extremely defensive reactions in this conversation at all.
It is certainly possible to mention Hitler and Christianity in the same sentence. You should go back and read some of Hitler's speeches, he does it all the time. More than that, Fascism is a political philosophy whose intellectual founders were Christians. Christian Nationalism was a real movement in Christianity, to deny it is to deny gravity. As for the racial attitudes, the Southern Baptists taught that African-Americans were lesser beings than whites in their churches in the South well into the 1970's. I'm surprised you find that to be so strange. They even used a Biblical (though it was quite a stretch) reference and considered Africans to be the descendants of Ham and therefore not worthy of the share of creation that whites were entitled to.
The point being that Germany was not the only nation susceptible to such notions. That was my point entirely. What is with the hostility? I'm a Christian and I believe that UP is as well. Neither of us is "attacking Christianity." Y'all make a big deal out of "personal responsibility." Yet, owning up to one's past and one's mistakes is a part of personal responsibility. Hell, I'd even go as far as to say it is the essence of personal responsibility. As Christians and Americans, when will we own up to our mistakes? Or shall we continue to deny them? How will we learn if we do?
Here are some quick quotes I found. I do suggest reading
Mein Kampf, as I said it is interesting. How can we avoid Fascism if we don't understand it?
My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. To-day, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before in the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly it is the distress that daily grows.
- Adolf Hitler Speech in Munich 12 April 1922 (note that he references 3 Biblical passages in this text)
In the Bible we find the text, 'That which is neither hot nor cold will I spew out of my mouth.' This utterance of the great Nazarene has kept its profound validity until the present day.
- Hitler, speech in Munich 13 April 1923 (he's referencing Revelations 3:16)
There are three words which many use without a thought which for us are no catch-phrases: Love, Faith, and Hope.... We are fanatical in our love for our people....
We have faith in the rights of our people, the rights which have existed time out of mind. We protest against the view that every other nation should have rights - and we have none. We must learn to make our own this blind faith in the rights of our people, in the necessity of devoting ourselves to the service of these rights; we must make our own the faith that gradually victory must be granted us if only we are fanatical enough. And from this love and from this faith there emerges for us the idea of hope. When others doubt and hesitate for the future of Germany - we have no doubts. We have both the hope and the faith that Germany will and must once more become great and mighty.
We have faith that one day Heaven will bring the Germans back into a Reich over which there shall be no Soviet star, no Jewish star of David, but above that Reich there shall be the symbol of German labor - the Swastika. And that will mean that the first of May has truly come.
-Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich, 1 May 1923 (he's referencing 1 Corinthians 13:13)
We want honestly to earn the resurrection of our people through our industry, our perseverance, our will. We ask not of the Almighty 'Lord, make us free'!-- we want to be active, to work, to agree together as brothers, to strive in rivalry with one another to bring about the hour when we can come before Him and when we may ask of Him: 'Lord, Thou seest that we have transformed ourselves, the German people is not longer the people of dishonour, of shame, of war within itself, of faintheartedness and little faith: no, Lord, the German people has become strong again in spirit, strong in will, strong in endurance, strong to bear all sacrifices.' 'Lord, we will not let Thee go: bless now our fight for our freedom; the fight we wage for our German people and Fatherland.'
-Adolf Hitler, giving prayer in a speech on May Day 1933
Among the congregations of the Protestant confessions there has arisen in the "German Christians' a movement that is filled with the determination to do justice to the great tasks of the day and has aimed at a union of the Protestant state churches and confessions. If this question is not really on the way towards a solution, in the judgement of history no false or stupid objections will be able to dispute the fact that this service was rendered by the volkisch movement at a time when, unfortunately, just as in the Roman Church, many pastors and superintendents without reason have opposed the national uprising in the most violent, indeed, often fanatical, way.
-Adolf Hitler, in a radio address on 22 July 1933