Racism and German Protestant Theology: A Prelude to the Holocaust

Abstract

The success of racism in modern Europe had a great deal to do with the experience of military defeat and political collapse; France after 1870 and Germany after 1918 were similar in this respect. As a modern ideology, racism be gins in the nineteenth century but older modes of race thinking are rooted in European ethnocentrism stretching backward in time to classical antiquity and the Christian ages. Race thinking was greatly accelerated during the great age of discovery, and even the Enlightenment suffered from white ethnocentric prejudice. When the old Christian universe was replaced by modern secular ideas, racism emerged as a secular myth, the Aryan myth, that soon became a rationale for anti- Jewish feelings in Europe. The alienated European found in this myth a form of spiritual reassurance during an age that seemed disappointing and decadent. German Protestant theology during the nineteenth century was slowly colored by romantic nationalistic ideas that eventually would open the door to racism. The nation, rather than the state, became an "order of creation," and in this way racist doctrines swept into Protestant theology.

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