hezekiah jones

Peters is a Nazi, no two ways about it.

Hey Cipher Girl, want a good book?

Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement, by Michael Barkun. Enjoy!

Pyrrho

I believe you are quite mistaken in thinking that extreme right wing Christians are the same as Nazis. Nazis are a type of extreme right wing Christian. Or, to be exact in terms that you may appreciate, "Nazi" is a proper subset of "extreme right wing Christian". Thus, you find many similarities, because they are all extreme right wing Christians, not because they are all Nazis.


Here is a link that you may find interesting:

http://www.stardestroyer.net/Creatio...s/Hitler.shtml

I found it by doing a search with google for the words "hitler" and "religion".

Sabine Grant

I mentionned the masonery and communists as your OP was asking for help in locating how many atheists were victims of the Third Reich ( I use the term Holocaust only for the Shoah which concerns only jews). Only European masons and communists were threatened and emprisonned by the Nazy regime. That is why I made mention of those two groups which were in majority atheists. It would have been a good source of research for you.

Ut

To be more accurate, Nazis are just extreme right-wingers who happened to be mostly Christians, just as mainstream liberals and conservatives were (and still are) mostly Christians.

Ricomise

The main difference is that Nazism (in its literal form) is a specific set of social, political and economic beliefs. The word originally comes from the name of of Hitler's political party the NSDAP or National Socialiste Deutcher Arbeits Partei. (My apologies to German speakers for my mangled spelling.) The party had a specific platform and belief in a certain type of government. The details are unimportant, I think, for this discussion, but the term (at least originally) referred to a specific political system.

As is well known, the leaders of the Nazi party also had ideas about race and religion, and some of these ideas may coincide with those of the reactionary Christian Right. But a reactionary right Christian (for example, an adherent to Christian Identity) is not neccesarily a "nazi." I know the term has evolved somewhat into a more generalized description of intolerant behavior, but I'm not sure it's very useful in that role as it simply tends to make people defensive and the connotations seem to choke off discussion.

Beetle

To use the "Christian Identity" movement as an example of "right-wing Christians" (by which is usually meant fundy/evangelicals, baptists and whatnot) has about as much intellectual validity as a person comparing liberal, social justice unitarians to Stalinists. (they both want to redistribute wealth! evil!)

The racist "Christian Identity" is considered a cult by the evangelicals/fundys. The Christian Research Institute devoted an issue of their magazine to educating regular xians about the evils of that movement, and what they believed constitutes Christianity.

There more than enough valid criticisms of conservative, "extreme right-wing*" Christianity without throwing bogus, disingenuous charges of nazism out there.

* - ever notice how when people don't like a philosophy/world view, they have to characterize it as extreme? Ultrafundy, hyper-calvinist, extreme rightwing, ultra-orthodox, pinko lefty etc.

hezekiah jones

If Reverend Peters isn't a right-wing Christian, what is he?

I can't imagine anyone characterizing his politics as anything but "right-wing," and he's Christian: a preacher with his own church and everything.

And obviously I refer to him as a nazi in the more colloquial sense. I'm sure he doesn't wear his Reinhard Heydrich costume in the pulpit (although who knows what he does behind closed doors).

There are self-identified Nazis in America who are also self-identified Christians: Christian Nazis. There probably aren't enough of them to merit the attention they get, but they're out there.

Edited to add:
See, there's a Yahoo! group for everyone:

Christian Nazi Party

Ricomise

I used the Identity church as an example

1. because I believe it was mentioned earlier in the thread
2. It is a sect that has ideas that some would consider similar to certain ideas of Nazi party leaders.

I did not mean to suggest all "right wing Christians" hold the same ideas. (Actually I intentionally used the term "reactionary right wing Christians" as a categorization tool to describe groups that are perhaps closer to the Nazis as far as ideology is concerned.) I apologize if I was not clear. My only point is that even very reactionary conservative Christians are not neccessarily "Nazis."

As Hezekiah points out there certainly are some Christians" who are also "Nazis."

Cipher Girl

I believe you are quite mistaken in thinking that extreme right wing Christians are the same as Nazis.

But if they are saying the exact same things, what is the difference? Maybe not using Nazi symbolism and some ideas of the Nazi party differentiate between the two? I guess there is not much of a division between some (notice I did not say all) extreme christian groups and neo-nazis here in the US. I think when we start talking about extreme right wing groups, there are many different groups with silight differences. But I've noticed they all like to refer to each other's writings, whether they are neo-nazi or not.

There more than enough valid criticisms of conservative, "extreme right-wing*" Christianity without throwing bogus, disingenuous charges of nazism out there.

No one is saying that all conservative christians are nazis. Only the ones that spout neo-nazi rhetoric. I was simply wondering about the blurry line that seems to separate extreme right wing christians and neo-nazis (or nazis).

Radorth

History shows that extremists on the left or right (it makes no difference) do the same evils. They tend to be morbidly paranoid, shun any accountability, consider human life virtually worthless and, truth be known, have unfathomable psychological problems. In the case of Hitler and Stalin, they both were so severely abused by their fathers that they considered themselves worthless- and by extension any "lesser" person to be less than worthless.

Thus extremists could turn to the left or to the right, but we know they will be extremists for sure.

Rad