C HAPTER 13
RELIGION
P R E SI DE N T G EORG E W. B USH H A S BE E N ON LY T H E MOS T R ECENT world leader who has used religious factions to gain support for his policies and objectives. “National Socialism was a religion,” noted Professor George Lachmann Mosse of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose wealthy Jewish family fled Germany in 1933. “The depth of the ideology, the liturgy, the element of hope, all helped to give the movement the character of a new faith. It has been shown that [Nazi propaganda minister Paul Joseph] Goebbels quite consciously used religious terminology in many of his speeches. Moreover, Nazism was a total worldview which by its very nature excluded all others. From this it followed that traditional Christianity was a rival, not a friend. But here Hitler at first went very slowly indeed, for he needed (and got) the support of the majority of the Christian churches.” Mosse concluded that “the Nazi future would have lain with the Evangelical Christians had the war been won.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler spoke condescendingly of religion, offering this rationalization for organized religion. “The great masses of people do not consist of philosophers, and it is just for them that faith is frequently the sole basis of a moral view of life.”
