Renowned Scholar warns against infusion of religion.

Fritz Stern Speech

Fritz Stern, who is professor emeritus at Columbia University, was recently awarded Leo Baeck medal. The medal was presented by the german foreign minister - Joschka Fischer. In his acceptance speech, linked above, Mr. Stern talks about the horrors he or his relatives had to witness and live through, and gives unsubtle warnings for our own country. As Harpers magazine put it: "Stern warned against the infusion of religion into American politics and said that it was Hitler's "pseudo-religious transformation of politics that largely ensured his success." No one certainly like to use the "H" name, as there is always someone who is quick to accuse others of making comparisons to that brutal dictator. So as a usual disclaimer I would like to note that is certainly not the case here. Simply the actions and rhetoric used by many world leaders throughout the history seem to bear an inescapable resemblance. The acceptance speech is very interesting as we can almost feel the pain and disappointment of the professor that sees some worrying signals in the country he’s come to love and respect so much:

Still, for me it is felicitous because it is an encouragement at a hard time; events of the last ten days have intensified my reasoned apprehension, my worry about the immediate future of the country that saved us and taught us and gave us so much.

... take special joy in saying this because the German-speaking refugees who came to this country in the 1930s and thereafter had similarly enthusiastic feelings about this country. Not only gratitude for saving us, giving many of us a chance for a new start, if often under harsh circumstances—I think of my own parents—but love and admiration for a country that was, when we arrived, still digging itself out from an unprecedented depression, under a leader whose motto was that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” unlike his German contemporary, who preached fear in order to exploit it. The United States was the sole functioning democracy of the 1930s—that “low, dishonest decade—and under FDR it was committed to pragmatic reform and in inimitable high spirits. No, I haven’t forgotten the unpleasant elements of those days—the injustices, the right-wing radicals, the anti-semites—but the dominant note of Franklin Roosevelt’s era was ebullient affirmation of reform and progress.

As the side bar in NYT suggests: "Fritz Stern, a refugee from Hitler's Germany and a leading scholar of European history, startled several of his listeners when he warned in a speech about the danger posed in this country by the rise of the Christian right." Fritz recalls the conditions in Germany after the Great War and this is where potential parallels start sending shivers done one's spine:

In the late 1920s a group of intellectuals known as conservative revolutionaries demanded a new volkish authoritarianism, a Third Reich. Richly financed by corporate interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture. These conservative revolutionaries were proud of being prophets of the Third Reich—at least until some of them were exiled or murdered by the Nazis when the latter came to power. Throughout, the Nazis vilified liberalism as a semi-Marxist-Jewish conspiracy and, with Germany in the midst of unprecedented depression and immiseration, they promised a national rebirth.

Here is when the indoctrination of the religion becomes extremely handy and proves very effective. The rhetoric mesmerizes the public and blinds their minds with promise of better and "clearer" future.

God had been drafted into national politics before, but Hitler’s success in fusing racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity was an immensely powerful element in his electoral campaigns. Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics, but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas.

German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they didn’t think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously. They were proven wrong. People were enthralled by the Nazis’ cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from the pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”

It has been said many times that the history repeats itself. It is always cyclical and we see events of the past coming back as a reincarnation of some kind. None of us can or wants to imagine America becoming similar to Germany of the 20s or 30s. I don’t believe it will. Although there are many things, which we would deem unimaginable sometime ago, that seem to becoming part of our lives now. First thing people remember is certainly the Holocaust and the massive massacres that took place in that period, and no one expects anything like that this time around, and no one should. However, there was lot more that was taking place at that period besides the killing. It isn't really comforting to imagine that era even without any murder or persecution. In any case one can only hope that this is not one of the examples of repeating history.