Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has repeatedly declared Hungary a Christian nation. Leaders of the Law and Justice Party have said the same thing about Poland. And in the United States, many of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021 claimed that they were striking a blow to redeem Christian America. These examples reflect the fusion of religion and nationalism in the ideological imagination of the extreme Right on both sides of the Atlantic. They also recall a longer history of Christian nationalism with roots in the interwar era. This volume, Religion, Ethnonationalism, and Antisemitism in the Era of the Two World Wars, edited by Kevin P. Spicer and Rebecca Carter-Chand, helps make sense of these historical echoes. The case studies here reflect geographic and confessional breadth, from Romania and Ukraine to the United States and including examples from Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox Christian—and in one outlier essay, Jewish—communities. As a whole, the book offers important insights into the toxic proliferation of Christian nationalisms across Europe and North America in years after World War I.
The breadth of contributions in this volume is a reminder that Christian nationalism—the idea that some form of Christianity defines the identity of an ethno-nationalist community—has always been a transnational phenomenon. In her essay, Nina Valbousquet shows that Catholic press networks were an essential vector for the rapid circulation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in many countries after 1918. The prestige that Catholic publicists gave to these ideas helped many of their readers find political allies on the fascist Right. But this was by no means a Catholic story only. In the United States, George E. Deatherage founded the American Nationalist Confederation to promote a distinctly American and Protestant version of Christian nationalism (Charles Z. Gallagher). To this end, Deatherage borrowed elements of Nazi ideology, above all an obsession with Judeo-Bolshevism, to shape a racist and antisemitic vision of Christian America that was at once home-grown and avowedly international in outlook. A similar dynamic was at work in the Finnish Lutheran Church (Paavo Ahonen and Kirsi Stjerna). Although Finland was home to only a vanishingly small number of Jews, anti-Bolshevik emigres from Russia brought their fears of Judeo-Bolshevism with them and shared them with local conservatives. Antisemitic priests also looked abroad for some of their most explosive material. The most infamous of their texts, a screed by J. W. Watainen that described Bolshevism as a Jewish plot, was a reworking of a pamphlet originally produced in Germany by members of the early Nazi party.
In many cases, European Christians succumbed to the temptation of ethnonationalism out of a sincere desire to make their faith relevant to the world around them. German theologians worked assiduously to “Germanize” the Gospel of John in order to conform to the antisemitic ideology of the Nazi regime (Susannah Heschel and Shannon Quigley). In Vukovar (Danijel Matijevic), Catholic parish priests joined the fascist Ustaša and helped to forcibly convert Orthodox Serbs into (Catholic) Croatians. Meanwhile, the Croatian church hierarchy gave their tacit approval to a genocidal regime because it was anti-communist and because it promised their Church a prominent role in the new fascist state. In Germany (Kevin Spicer), many Catholic clergy, Cardinal Michael Faulhaber foremost among them, rejected a blanket condemnation of Nazism because so many of their parishioners supported the Nazi movement.
Not everyone accommodated themselves to popular prejudice. After 1918, leaders of the early ecumenical movement deplored the marriage between Christianity and nationalism that had justified so much bloodshed (Victoria Barnett). In Germany (Spicer again), the Catholic Vicar General Philipp Jakob Mayer insisted in vain that Christian love of neighbor made Jew-hatred “unchristian and un-Catholic.” His was a minority voice, but there were others. One of the most famous was the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Metropolitan Andrej Shteptytsky, who imagined a loving and truly Christian nationalism opposed to exclusionary nationalism and who bravely helped to rescue some 150 Ukrainian Jews during the Holocaust (Kateryna Budz and Andrew Kloes). In Romania (Ionut Biliuta), the Orthodox theologian Gala Galaction denounced antisemites as ignorant people “who never read the Bible!” (309). In the village of Korntal near Stuttgart (Samuel Koehne), a tiny fundamentalist community concluded that Nazism was a form of “ethnotheism” and thus pagan.
The variety of these cases, tragically few though they were, suggest that resisting ethnonationalist racism was not a question of theology, but rather a matter of conscience. No doctrinal tradition proved a better defense than another against the scourge of antisemitism. Instead, brave men and women made ethical decisions in defiance of Church leaders and/or the prevailing views of the community. It is easy to feel inspired by their example, since it shows as Budz and Kloes argue in their essay on Metropolitan Shteptytsky that ethno-religious violence is not inevitable (294). Yet this volume also sounds a cautionary note against easy or pat conclusions. No Christian confession was more invested in freedom of conscience than Methodism and no church was more unanimously and openly supportive of the Nazi regime than the Methodist church in Germany. Not all acts of conscience expressed democratic values, as the case of Julius Evola, an Italian fascist intellectual who championed the idea of a spiritual racism, clearly shows.
Undoubtedly motivated by a desire to be inclusive, the editors included one essay (by Sara Han) that deals with Jewish life: a piece on the Berlin Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums as a space of Jewish spiritual resistance to Nazi terror. The essay is undeniably moving but raises questions about faith in the face of existential destruction that run in directions not reflected in the other contributions. Despite this inconsistency, this volume is an excellent introduction to some of the most recent research on the enduring problem of Christian nationalism in European history.
