The Consequences of Abandoning Christ: Dominion Part 11

            For many years before lecturing on World War 1 I would tell my students: This is what happens when you abandon Christian culture and stop thanking and worshipping the true God of the Bible. We have arrived at one of those points in Dominion.

Holland entitles Chapter 19: Shadow; A.D. 1916, The Somme(One of the great battles of WW1.)

           For many the unprecedented carnage of World War I was a vindication of Christianity. (As I just stated.) But for many others it was a vindication of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche understood where civilization was headed. “God is dead…We have killed him….When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.” Nietzsche attacked the Enlightenment values that he saw clearly were derived from Christianity. He held Enlightenment philosophers in contempt for their unwillingness to follow where their hostility to Christianity logically led. Holland says, “Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had penetrated to the heart of everything that was most shocking about the Christian faith. Nietzsche celebrated pre-Christian paganism, when men took pleasure “in inflicting pain; for knowing that punishment might be festive…in the days before mankind became ashamed of its cruelty.” Nietzsche was not a happy camper.

           Holland then turns his attention to the Bolsheviks and fascists, circa 1930. Instead of a tiny little group of radicals the Communists now ruled the largest nation on earth. Regarding Christianity their policy was simple: destroy it. They established the League of Militant Atheists whose job was to rid the earth of religion once and forever. They figured it would take about five years. But Holland finds irony in the Bolshevik program. “The godlessness of the Soviet Union was less a repudiation of the church than a parody of it. ‘Bolshevik atheism was the expression of a new religious faith.’” I couldn’t agree with Holland more. When atheists comment on my videos they get angry when I call them a religion but that’s what they are.

The same was true in Italy and Germany where fascism was the new religion. It saw itself as replacing Christianity. “Fascism worked to combine the glamour and the violence of antiquity with that of the modern world. There was no place in this vision of the future for the mewling feebleness of Christianity.” Hitler’s policies, “although rooted in a sense of race…were rooted as well in the clinical formulations of evolutionary theory. The measures that would restore purity to the German people were prescribed equally by ancient chronicles and Darwinist textbooks.” By 1937 Hitler had determined—like Lenin—to rid the world of Christianity. He was angered by the church’s opposition to the liquidation of the retarded and cripples. The German people needed to come to accept the extermination of the weak. 

The last third of this chapter takes a most interesting turn. It focuses on the life and writing of J.R.R. Tolkien. “Every story, he believed, was ultimately about the fall. No less than Augustine had done, he interpreted all of history as the record of human iniquity….He aimed to write a fantasy that would also—in a sense acceptable to God—be true…Tolkien believed that the whole of history bore witness to Christ.” Tolkien was a relative rarity in the 1930s—an intellectual with great affection for the Jews. Scientists had decided that the Jews were not really a race at all. They were a “virus, a bacillus.” “Only people affected by the baneful humanism of Christianity…could think otherwise.” Tolkien was one of those Christians—and there were many across Europe—who identified with the Jews during the greatest crisis in Jewish history. The biggest objection of the Nazis was to the book of Genesis. Universal morality was a fraud perpetrated by the Jews. The Nazis argued, “Can we still tolerate our children being obliged to learn that Jews and Negroes, just like Germans or Romans, are descended from Adam and Eve, just because a Jewish myth says so?” Holland acknowledges that a number of Christians had been seduced by the social Darwinism of the Nazis. They came to be servants of Hitler’s racial ideology, claiming that in aiding the destruction of the Jews they were servants of Christ. Let me add that there are Christians in every age who abandon their faith and capitulate to the dominate spirit of the age. It’s no different today.

Shortly after the war ended Tolkien published the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The major themes were right out of Christian culture. “True strength manifested itself, not in the exercise of power, but in the willingness to give it up.”  The fall of Mordor came on March 25—the very day that according to tradition Christ entered the womb of the Virgin Mary. The book was not well received. “Most reviews, when not bewildered, were contemptuous. The books roots in the distant past, its insistence that good and evil actually existed, its relish for the supernatural: all were liable to strike sophisticated intellectuals as infantile.” Tolkien’s purpose had been to communicate the “beauties of the Christian religion; its truth.” It would end up as the most widely read book of the twentieth century. And Tolkien had invented an entirely new genre of literature.

In our next video we complete this magisterial survey of Western culture, also known as, the Dominion of Jesus Christ.

All the episodes of Dominion are found here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkHlTST983SrRLzY-1quBpEsd46bog7jA