“January 6 helped argue the case for fascist tendencies in Christian Nationalism,” Annika Brockschmidt recently told Religion Dispatches’ Andrew L. Seidel.
Comparisons of the current political landscape in the United States to events in Nazi Germany can be risky, but useful. Brockschmidt’s new book Amerikas Gotteskrieger: Wie die Religiöse Rechte die Demokratie gefährdet (roughly translated as “America’s Godly Warriors: How Religious Right Endangers Democracy”) -- released in mid-October in Germany – posits a relationship between Christian Nationalism in the U.S., and the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s. When asked by Religion Dispatches’ Seidel, if she thought that “analogies to 1930s Germany are overblown?,” she replied “I don’t think they’re overblown.”
Shortly after the January 6th insurrection, Tish Harrison Warren wrote for Christianity Today: “The responsibility of yesterday’s violence must be in part laid at the feet of those evangelical leaders who ushered in and applauded Trump’s presidency. It can also sadly be laid at the feet of the white American church more broadly.”
As Seidel notes, according to Brockschmidt, the word Gotteskrieger “as used in the German press, refers to Islamic fundamentalists and terrorists such as the Taliban and al Qaeda. ‘I don’t assert this name on their behalf, this is the name American Christian Nationalists, particularly the more extreme ones, give themselves.’”
“Germans have had a hard time understanding what’s going on in the US; most probably don’t know about the homegrown fascist movement, and, in a sense, how could they? We remember a United States that fought the Nazis,” said Brockschmidt, a German author, journalist, and scholar.
While Brockschmidt’s book has already had a second printing in Germany, it has not yet been published in English.
Brockschmidt notes that the call for a muscular or militant Christianity, is a call that we’ve heard repeatedly from the Religious Right over the past several decades. She listed “several signals, structures and characteristics of American Christian Nationalism that overlap in worrying ways with fascism,” including the “myth of a golden past,” which calls for a return to “how the country used to be when in fact it’s a version that never was. It’s used to divide the country into us and them.”
There is the demonization of out groups as the other, or “not real Americans.” Another marker is the veneration of “law and order, which really just means being tough on a certain portion of the population, not on crime.” Brockschmidt mentioned other “dog whistles used to stoke fear, resentment, and anger against outgroups [in order] to strengthen the feeling of togetherness of [the] ingroup.”
Anti-intellectualism is another factor as is the “creation of unreality or a separate reality.” Brockschmidt tells Seidel that because “QAnon is the 2021 version of the blood libel.”
“Blood libel refers to the false allegation that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish, usually Christian, children, for ritual purposes. The Nazis made effective use of the blood libel to demonize Jews,” according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Brockschmidt says, “This narrative is returning, being recycled.”
Although many Christian nationalists often take pains in rejecting the Christian nationalism label, returning to an idealized Christian past has been their focus for decades. Pseudo-historian David Barton’s career has been built on the notion that America was founded as a Christian nation. “Christian nationalism doesn’t exist,” Franklin Graham, the evangelical leader, told The New Yorker’s Eiza Griswold, calling it “just another name to throw at Christians.”