Don’t blame Christians for the rise of Hitler

THE Protestant work ethic, so called, has many good features, including the creation of wealth. But its redeeming features are necessarily limited, especially when we are faced with physical or human annihilation.

Productivity is not always a gateway to health, happiness or self-fulfilment. Otherwise, sickness, sin, poverty and early death would not be in the Christian lexicon of salvation, but would have been weeded out in favour of an exclusively materialistic “reward for services rendered”.

Yet I would no more blame real Christians — whether Catholic or Protestant — for the rise of Hitler than I would blame Bavarian Catholics for the Fuhrer’s stealthy assault on their freedom and that of Germany as a whole.

For it’s very obvious to nearly everybody — though not evidently to your columnist Ryle Dwyer (December 15) — that nothing the mad Adolf Hitler did was truly representative of real Christianity, but was the personification of something very evil indeed. Something more to do with rotten nationalism, the lust for power, the scapegoating of the Jews and the subversion of the state.

And it’s not before time that we recognised that not all charismatic leadership is good. Nor all authority. Nor all claims on our allegiance, our freedom, our time or our service.

At Christmas, we must once again assert our freedom in the face of totalitarianism and idiocy. And as Christians, we must also assert the limits of our tolerance for the demands of Caesar, his state and its authority.

The crib with the child Jesus is not just an innocent portrayal of human procreation, but an adult recognition and acceptance of the ultimate good authority, Jesus of Nazareth whose authority is (for believers at least) uniquely human and divine. Some call it incarnation. Some call it virgin birth. Some call it a fairytale. But we all call it Christmas.

Richard Dowling

Patrick Street

Mountrath

Co Laois