This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Last week, after Tucker Carlson platformed neo-Nazi apologist Nick Fuentes on his podcast, the Heritage Foundation’s president Kevin Roberts issued a statement defending Carlson. Roberts denounced what he termed a “venomous coalition” of conservatives who called out the interview because they oppose any “no enemies to the right” posture that includes Nazism. In the days since, some Heritage Foundation staffers have told reporters that the controversy revealed for them how many of the youngest staffers and interns actually agree with Fuentes. This comes only weeks after text messages from multiple Young Republicans groups were leaked, showing racist, antisemitic, and pro-Hitler messages.
This matter is crucial for the future of the country, but the stakes are even higher for the church. It is well past time for the church of Jesus Christ to take this seriously. And the first step to seeing how to do so is to ask, “Why do so many evangelical pastors and leaders not take it seriously now?” Already some constantly online young men who profess to be evangelicals are winking and nodding with HH references and “noticing things” memes while commending the ideologies of Nazis such as Carl Schmitt. Some older leaders don’t take it seriously because they think the numbers of these young men are so few, and some because they think the numbers are so many.
Those who think the numbers are too few will wave away concerns with phrases like “Online is not real life,” usually pointing out that very few of these social media trolls are preachers or pastors. They will note that those who are preachers are typically in front of tiny congregations and spend most of their time podcasting and posting back-and-forth arguments online all day. That is true—and is utterly beside the point.
Those who say such things do not understand how almost every fad—good, bad, and neutral—that has swept through evangelicalism has taken hold. These trends start out in small groups of people that are not large enough to be taken seriously by “successful” leaders. These small communities then cultivate the fads until a couple people with bigger platforms adopt them. And then, seemingly suddenly, they are everywhere. Power evangelism, prayer walking, seeker-sensitive services, laughing revivals, New Calvinism—all of these (and again, some of these things are good, and some are not) happened that way.
Journalist Jonathan V. Last once described how systems fail: “When the bad guys win, it’s always because they are enabled by the weakness and wishful thinking of people in a position to stop them.”
The greater problem is with the evangelicals who say nothing because they think the numbers are too great. They will pivot the discussion and say that “this is what you get” when some objectionable thing happens elsewhere—as though we were talking about kindergartners. Whatever your theology proposes about the age of accountability, I think we can all agree that a 25-year-old is well past the bar. Others will argue that, though they wouldn’t have done it this way, there’s a vibe shift in this direction that we have to recognize.
During World War II, American journalist Dorothy Thompson described this type as “Mr. B” in her famous essay “Who Goes Nazi.” She wrote, “He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.”
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The mentality which suggests that laughing at sexual abuse or using denigrating slurs for those with disabilities or wink-wink-nod-nod sending around Nazi memes is evidence of a “vibe shift” is perhaps understandable for a pagan who believes the zeitgeist is lord. But for a Christian who has read any page of the Old or New Testament, that’s incomprehensible.
Jesus said, “For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect” (Matt. 24:24, ESV throughout). The description of the Beast of Revelation is of near-universal popularity and success: “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?” (Rev. 13:4).
When the popular will becomes the standard of truth, we move from silliness in the best of times to cruelty in worse times and to the death camps in the worst of times. This is a call, as Jesus put it, for “endurance and faith” (v. 10). You can call that a “vibe shift” if you want.
The vibe-shift view is precisely what led the Confessing Church of 1934 to stand up against the German Christians, the religious party associated with Adolf Hitler. The Confessing Church’s statement said, “We reject the false doctrine that the Church could and should recognize as a source of its proclamation, beyond and besides this one Word of God, yet other events, powers, historic figures and truths as God’s revelation.” Karl Barth, the primary author of the Barmen Declaration, would write later to churches in Nazi-occupied France, who seemed to be wobbling in their commitment to resist publicly or forcefully Nazi ideology:
I cannot think that your judgment of today about the fundamental situation between Hitler and the rest of us is different from a year ago just because in the meantime Hitler has had so many good days (vividly reminding us of Job [21] and Psalms [10] and [73]) and France, together with all those other countries, so many bad days.
Barth continued,
If that were your attitude, you would have surrendered, not merely to the German arms, but to that German philosophy which in 1933 broke out like a plague among the German people themselves. In that case, Hitler would have conquered not only your country but your souls.
During the years of Nazi domination of Germany, writer Thomas Mann, an expatriate, broadcast a series of radio addresses to his fellow Germans, pleading with them to resist what was happening to their country. Among the atrocities, he included what he said had to be “the strongest and most ghastly phenomena of National Socialism [Nazism].” He described it with a word we don’t use much anymore, vitiate, which means “to debase” or “to corrupt.” Mentioning such glorious words as peace and patriotism, Mann wrote that Nazism “has vitiated all ideas which were supported by the best men in the world and has made them something in which no decent person wants to partake anymore.”
Conservatives alarmed at the steps toward the normalization of Fuentes and a Nazified young right understand this. They know this awful ideology will evacuate all the principles they wish to conserve of the meaning of words like peace and patriotism. But why do I say the stakes are even higher for the church? After all, the church does not have nuclear codes and cannot build death camps. It can only empower with its support—or its silence—those who do.
The question is whether the gospel of Jesus Christ is true. If it is, as I firmly believe, then what happens if words like evangelical or church or salvation or (I shudder to write) Jesus are filled up with the meanings of an antichrist alt-gospel? In that case, what’s on the line for generations is a matter of eternity.
We have a choice. The Bible will not sit alongside Mein Kampf. The cross will not yield to the swastika. We must ask right now: Jesus or Hitler? We cannot have both.
Russell Moore is editor at-large and columnist at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
