Heaven on Earth

From "Writing Down Ameria,"
A work included in Shuteye Town 1999


     Gradually the conversation shifted to our perspectives on the future, for life in Ameria and for Ameria herself.  By an extraordinary coincidence, Hal was also reading Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and had brought it with him in his duffel bag.  He had been skipping around, he said, and had just finished the section called 'The Mind of Hitler.' I explained my growing conviction that the most important lessons to be drawn from the Nazi experience had to do with Hitler's understanding of how to acquire power.
     'We're so focused on Hitler the monster,' I said, 'that we fail to see the parallels between his highly aggressive conquest of institutions and our much more passive surrender of institutions.  The danger is not so much a repetition of the Nazi terror, but a longer term evolution toward an analogous system structure.'
     "I think I know what you're talking about, but I don't think I've read as far as you have in the book.'
     'Have you read the part about the persecution of the Christian Churches?'
     'Not yet.'
     This was the section I'd had Patrick read on Saturday night, and it was one of the most interesting expositions in Shirer's account.  I shared my thoughts on it with Hal.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler had forcefully declared that no purely political party could succeed in taking on the church.  Yet throughout the thirties he had apparently ignored his own advice and brutalized both the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany.  Shirer seems to regard this as one of Hitler's self-contradictions.  I don't.  For unlike the Stalinist regime in Russia, Hitler made no attempt to shut down the churches.  He knew better than to drive religion underground.  Rather, he clearly intended to keep the institutions intact while replacing their Christian, theological content with National Socialist philosophy.  In his customarily heavy-handed way, Hitler assigned a director of Protestant churches to pressure clerics into a redefinition of Christianity as National Socialism, including Nazi racial policies, while insisting that such a change involved no philosophical inconsistencies.  The vision, as spelled out in detail by Nazi 'Philosopher' Alfred Rosenberg, called for rapid evolution to a unified German 'church' in which 'Nazi Orators' would replace ministers, a sword would replace the cross, and Mein Kampf would replace the Bible on the altar.  Ultimately, Bibles, crucifixes, and other Christian symbols were to be outlawed altogether, although individual congregations were to remain in place, once purified of the stubborn fanatics who opposed the change.  The mass arrests and consignments to concentration camps of clerics were a response to resistance, not an attempt to exterminate the church.
In essence, then, Hitler was following his own advice: his intent was to prevail against Christianity by turning Nazism into a religion.  He didn't want to abolish God; he merely wanted God to be a Nazi.
     What was Hitler's reasoning for this?  It's important to remember that he was a genius in the process of accumulating totalitarian power.  He must have seen some advantage in retaining the congregation, the church building, the concept of a religious institution, however reconstituted.  Certainly it was not any kind of moral compunction that stayed his hand from locking up the churches or outlawing the practice of spiritual faith.  His actions against the synagogues are proof of that.
     I believe Hitler understood implicitly the threat to totalitarian control posed by home and family.  He did not have access to the kind of technology we have today.  He could not permeate individual homes with the same irresistible presence as Orwell's Big Brother.  He therefore did the next best thing.  He launched an offensive on domestic life in the same way he pursued his territorial ambitions—with all the weapons at his disposal.  He established the Hitler Youth, then made membership in it mandatory to ensure that his ideology would be embedded in the hearts and minds of young men.  He implemented a parallel organization for young women.  The attempt to assimilate the churches into Nazism represented another front in the assault on the home.  The enemy was Christianity and the power of a moral value system which could enable individuals to withstand the terror tactics of the Gestapo.  It is, after all, only moral values which can embolden individuals to act in opposition to physical and economic self-interest and even to patriotic sentiment.
What more expedient approach to eliminating such subversive moral values could there be than to occupy the churches with a different value set, one in which obedience to the dictates of the system takes on the appearance and habiliments of morality?  The family continues to attend church as usual, in company with friends and neighbors in familiar surroundings, and receives instruction and guidance in the practice of virtue—except that virtue has taken on a new definition that is everywhere reinforced.
     But why should this matter to us?  Our own government steers a wide course around religion and reserves its expressions of piety for the virtue called 'separation of church and state.' In this case, the Nazi experience is completely irrelevant to Amerian experience.  Or is it?
     There is room at least for a disquieting hypothesis here. I recall attending a baptism a few years ago in an affluent suburban church.  It was a Lutheran congregation (interesting in the context of Hitler's Protestant offensive, which made a partially successful attempt to ride piggyback on Martin Luther's virulent antisemitism).  I, of course, heard no tirades against the Jews.  Nor did I hear anything that might be confused with the theology of the denomination' s founder.  Instead I was confronted by the incongruous prop of a giant loom placed somewhat to the right of the altar.  I was told that the loom was a symbol of the female principle of God, a kind of contemporary correction of the Bible's omissions on this subject.  The sermon concerned itself with the individual experience of tribulation.  The message was not that pain and suffering were sent by God as useful lessons, but that they arose from more mundane causes—dysfunctional families, interpersonal conflicts, and other consequences of life in modern society.  The appropriate response was not to engage in the masochism of guilt, but to seek the help that is now available from the medical and psychology professions.  Depression is dangerous, we were told, and while there may at times be some value to 'leaning into the pain,' the real imperative is to cure or mitigate the disease.
Perhaps this will strike no one else as odd.  It did me, however.  I found myself exploring the possibility that modem psychology and Christianity were not just strange bedfellows, but polar opposites.  It is Christianity which continually urges us to take individual moral responsibility for the composition of our characters, while psychology advises us to understand that we are collections of behaviors, shaped principally by evolution and the environment we are reared in.  Not surprisingly, these two different views of personhood send us in different directions when the events in our lives cause us pain.  The traditional Christian perspective holds that we should respond to adversity by reflecting on our relationship with God.  Through prayer and meditation we may be enabled to understand the divine will for our future conduct—lessons learned, atonements undertaken, illuminations received, responsibilities accepted.       Psychology sends us not inward but outward: the consequence to be avoided is 'dissociation,' i.e., separation from the community, and the goal is to overcome 'maladjustment,' i.e., the state of not fitting in with the community. In support of this goal, we are provided with a vocabulary that transforms unique experience into categories of dysfunction, each of which may be treated by a combination of chemicals and/or a regimen of therapy.  Often the preferred therapy involves placing us in the company of others who have experienced the same categorical dysfunction as ourselves.  Their mission is to pressure us into abandoning destructive behaviors.  Any tendency we may have to believe that our own experience is profoundly different or uniquely meaningful is likely to be diagnosed as delusions of grandeur, narcissism, or denial.
     What's important about all this is not whether psychology is right or wrong in its approach to therapy.  Rather, I am trying to call attention to the fact that Christian ministers in Christian denominations are commonly engaged in espousing a belief system that is—all rationalizations aside—historically contrary to the one they purport to represent.  Nominally Christian colleges and universities offer degrees in psychology.  Churches all over the country sponsor support groups of various kinds.  And ministers frequently lead their congregations into involvement with programs to help dysfunctional families or even conduct such counseling sessions themselves.  The book on the altar is decidedly not Mein Kampf.  But is it really still the Bible?
     Who or what is served by the (hypothetical, I admit) replacement of individual moral consciousness with de-individuating behavioral therapy?  And if Hitler's concern with preempting the moral opposition that might arise in the home was well founded, what consequence might ensue from the voluntary adoption of a value set that inherently prizes 'fitting in' over moral reflection?
Hal and I chewed over these ideas at some length.  We recalled the flurry of outrage about the Menendez brothers and the 'abuse excuse.' We wondered if there was some tie-in here to the odd circumstance that so many mainstream Protestant denominations assume a 'Pro-Choice' stance in the ongoing controversy about abortion.
     But these were deeper waters than we had time to get into.  It was time to head back to Delaware and get some sleep before the Pet Palace opened for business at 7:00 am.