ADOLF HITLER has replaced Jesus as the most important moral figure in the Western world, Professor Alec Ryrie argues in his new book, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It. It is an assertion that the book unpacks over its 140 pages.
Professor of the History of Christianity, at Durham University, Professor Ryrie acknowledges that he is a historian of a much earlier period: his books include Protestants (Books, 28 July 2017) and Unbelievers: An emotional history of doubt (Books, 15 May 2020).
“Strictly speaking I’ve got no business straying into modern times like this,” he writes. “But this book has been eating away at me and insisting on being written, not just because I think I’m right, but because I think it matters.”
A century ago, he tells me, most people in Britain and the West — whether religiously observant or not — “would usually go out of their way to emphasise that . . . they recognise the moral authority of Jesus; he was very much seen as the reference point, whereas now, or until recently, plainly the most important moral figure in our culture has been Adolf Hitler. He’s been the lodestone from which we’ve taken our bearings. Obviously, what we’ve done is we’ve replaced a positive exemplar who shows us what good is with a negative exemplar who shows us what evil is.”
Professor Ryrie believes that this is understandable: “If you are going to choose one human being to stand as a representative of absolute evil, then I challenge you to come up with a better option [than Hitler].”
In his view, however, this raises significant problems, which he seeks to address in his book. Its title does not refer to the 1930s and ’40s but to the post-1945 period, the “long lifetime between the end of the Second World War and now”, during which “Adolf Hitler, the Nazis generally, have absolutely dominated our moral imagination. We still live in the shadow of the Second World War. We still talk about ‘the post-war world’.”
He believes that the displacement of Jesus by Hitler began before the end of the war, however; its seeds were planted during the war itself: from 1939 to 1942, the Western Allies “were scrambling around to define themselves”, he says. “In 1940, Churchill was talking about a war for Christian civilisation.”
But, “by 1942, that kind of language isn’t coming from the Allied leadership any more, and it’s much more about a war for universal rights: the Atlantic Charter talks in those sorts of terms. And then, towards the end of the war, the Allies decide to call themselves the United Nations. We forget that that phrase starts out as the name of a military alliance, before it becomes the name of an international organisation.”
While the decline of Christianity as the supreme moral reference point began during the war, it took “a while to fully crystallise”, Professor Ryrie says. Important moments included the Nuremberg trials and the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in 1948. “But when this really comes to the fore is the early 1960s, when the first post-war generation really starts to reach maturity and to be able to reflect on the world that these folks have been born and brought up into.”
A pivotal moment, he argues, is the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in 1961, when the Nazi genocide, which had been suppressed in the collective memory of the war during the 1950s, was brought to the fore again, “in a way that it hadn’t been, and in a way that it’s remained ever since”.
The Age of Hitler recounts how the Second World War has been depicted on screen. In the war movies of the 1950s, Dr Ryrie detects “a kind of innocence” in the portrayal of the war. As the years go on, however, fictional depictions “get progressively darker, and with a starker moral tale laid over them”.
It was from the late 1960s onwards, he says, that “this sense of Nazism as the absolute moral lodestone” really took hold; this happened in step with “the retreat of Christian norms as the defining ethics of our society”.
THE outworking of anti-Nazi sentiment has been the elevation of human rights in the post-war Western world. “It is explicitly in response to Nazism that we have the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950,” Professor Ryrie writes. Humanity, not God, has been “made the measure of all things. In the age of Hitler, the post-Second World War age in which we live, ‘humanity’ is our shared faith.”
Professor Alec Ryrie
Professor Ryrie has no problem with human rights, but believes that they are “a moral intuition, rather than something that’s based on any kind of reason. . . You can’t prove that human beings have rights. We have simply decided to declare that it’s so.” The basis for human rights in the 1948 Declaration is pragmatic, he says: “We have seen what happens if you ignore this; we’ve lived through the most terrible war in human history, and this is what we think is necessary to stop this from happening again.”
Until recently, the lack of proof for human rights has not generally troubled people, he says, because “it is in our bones we believe that all human beings are equal and with equal dignity.” But “the lack of rootedness” is starting to become a problem. In the culture-war debates about LGBT rights, for example, it is sometimes said, “My human rights are not up for debate.”
He says: “I mean, in some ways, of course, human rights can’t be up for debate, because, in the end, there’s nothing to talk about: they’ve just got to be asserted. On the other hand, we have to debate human rights, because otherwise we just end up shouting at each other, or accepting one person’s assertion of what they are.”
The lack of philosophical roots also plays out in how each side in the culture wars employs human-rights discourse to make its arguments, “which can happen because there isn’t a firm basis to it, but just this inarticulate moral intuition”.
The book presents challenges to both sides of the culture wars, progressive and conservative (“I expect to end up like anybody caught between two sides, being bombarded equally from both”).
Professor Ryrie wishes to hold on to the moral insights of the “Age of Hitler”, but argues that “they are not enough, and, at the moment, we are asking them to carry more weight than they can bear.”
THE way forward that he proposes is for each side of the culture wars “to find a synthesis with the other”. This is the only way in which each side “can truly secure the values which are most dear to them”.
“This synthesis does not mean abandoning our crumbling anti-Nazi values; nor does it mean trying to depend on them and them alone,” he writes. “If we are going to keep them, as I think we must, we need to rebase them on something more solid, more deeply rooted in our cultures. That means reconnecting with deeper ethical and spiritual roots: with traditions of thought and moral intuition that can access richer resources than the dense but superficial matting that has spread over the Western world in the past century.”
This does not mean that Churches and theologians should be “looking for arguments with which they can hit the culture over the head and persuade it that it’s wrong”, he says.
Indeed, in the book, he counsels readers to “never mind the doctrines”, but, rather, to: “feel the depth, the suppleness and richness of the systems of values there. They are the only reason anyone ever cared about the doctrines in the first place. Inhabit the tradition’s deeper grammar, that is, its emotional logic.”
Perhaps surprisingly, he holds up Pentecostalism as a model of how Christianity can engage fruitfully with wider society. “Here is a form of Christianity which, rather than leading with argument, or with summons to action, or with berating people in various ways, has led experientially with what can be given, with what can be offered to people. . . And it’s done it kind of under the radar.”
Professor Ryrie hopes, ultimately, that the book will “hold up a mirror to the age we live in and say ‘Do you recognise this picture? This is who we are; this is what we have been living through.’ And if we can understand how we’ve reached this point, why the cultural turmoil that we find ourselves in has the contours that it does, then I think we’ve got a better chance of finding a way through it. . . If we don’t understand who we are, then we’re going to struggle to move on and to become the next thing.”
The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It by Alec Ryrie is published by Reaktion Books at £15.95 (Church Times Bookshop £14.35); 978-1-83639-082-4.
