A tweet thread from economic historian Joachim Voth (@joachim_voth)
Joachim Voth
@joachim_voth“God is dead”, Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed in 1882. What happens to politics when societies become increasingly secularized? In a new working paper, @essobecker and I examine the case of Germany.
https://github.com/huggingbeard/papers/blob/7ab2e7bdffc9a2c7f35c90934b2752caa3d8d437/Shallow_C.pdf
5:08 AM · Oct 20, 2023Most people [Germans] stayed nominally Christian for the longest time. We first create measures of “Shallow Christianity” – indicators of a lack of deep-rooted religious belief in interwar Germany. We use three – naming patterns, superstition, and the share of notables who enter religious professions. There are big differences in how “shallow” the religiosity of Germans was. …
Strikingly, Shallow Christianity is highly correlated with Nazi voting in the 1930s. Where Christian religiosity was only skin-deep, people voted for the Nazis or joined them in droves. These two maps give a first impression:
… and binscatters show how these patterns hold for every election after 1928:
Oct 20
Why? What did the Nazis do to get so much support in areas where Christian religiosity had largely died? The Nazi party used a heady mix of religious language, imagery, and rituals to set itself up as a “substitute religion”. Here, the party’s “blood banner” from the 1923 putsch is used to “sanctify” another Nazi flag. The movement celebrated its “martyrs”. Crucially, Hitler was cast as the Führer, endowed with supernatural, superhuman powers — Germany’s “redeemer”, who would “resurrect” it from the shame and impotence of Versailles. He ended
many of his speeches with “Amen.” The Hitler Youth official song made the idea explicit.
Voth notes that their perception of Naziism as a substitute neo-religion is hardly new: intellectuals from different perspectives, such as Gramsci, Voegelin, and C.S. Lewis, said much the same thing at the time.
… Interestingly, the pattern holds even at the personal level. The more headstones in the local graveyard carried a cross or other religious symbol, the lower the share of votes for the Nazis. Similarly, the share of Christian first names is highest among theology students lower in the general population, lower still among rank-and-file Nazi party members, and lowest among Nazi party leaders. …
Walter Lacquer (1962) was right: “Choosing Hitler was not an act of political decision, not the choice of a known programme or ideology; it was simply joining a quasi-religious mass movement as an act of faith.”
This paper doesn’t present evidence for or against that declining Christian piety was similarly correlated with rising political extremism in other countries like France, Britain, Italy, or Sweden. The Nazi experience in Germany could be fairly sui generis. I don’t know.
Today, Wokeness seems like another neo-religion, like Naziism was in the 1930s, that gives post-religious people a fulfilling faith, and a refuge from skepticism in a time when the abundance of data would otherwise work to gnaw away at old pieties. The Woke are given appealingly unfalsifiable beliefs, such as that evil Systemic Racism socially constructs the reality we see with our lying eyes.
But this time, the neo-religion predicated on being the opposite of Naziism, with Wokeness’s ruling question being: What Would Hitler Not Do?
For example, if the dynamic masculine Aryan man was the hero of Hitler, then Intersectionality proves that the exhausted genderqueer black woman deserves to be the heroine of the Woke. Just as Jews were the hate figures around which Nazis could unify, the Woke Coalition of the Fringes is offered the cishet white male as their unifying bad guy.
One good thing about Wokeness as, in effect, a Nazi heresy, is that the Woke, being selected in large measure for their incompetence and ineffectuality (What Would Hitler Not Do?), are not likely to launch the 21st Century equivalent of the Blitzkrieg. They need their naps.
One place where this pattern of Wokeness being the opposite of Naziism breaks down is that the Woke tend not to be as anti-anti-Semitic as many liberal American Jews assumed they must be before the events of October 2023.
Liberal Jews tended to imagine that if “anti-Fascists” are motivated most of all by anti-Hitlerism, then they must be extremely pro-Jewish, even somewhat in regard to the increasingly rightist and admittedly annoying Jews in Israel. This, it was broadly believed by American Jews before October 7, makes the Woke vastly better for the Jews than the real menace: white guys in polo shirts with tiki torches.
And, in truth, the Woke overall tend not to be specifically all that anti-Semitic. (Some valued members of the Coalition of the Fringes, such as Palestinians, tend of course to be highly anti-Semitic.)
But to a lot of the Woke, Jews seem to be just more white people. So, they don’t see why Jews should be exempted from Wokeness’s defamation of whites in general.
And, let me note, that Woke anti-whitists seeing Jews as white people is hardly a wholly unreasonable point of view. After all, according to federal race classification guidelines going back to Censuses deep in the past, the great majority of Jewish Americans have been officially white. And, indeed, Office of Management & Budget guidelines do tend, over the decades, to socially construct how Americans think about who is in what racial group.
America has seen a huge rise in anti-white defamation in the media over the decade of the Great Awokening. Many liberal Jews have tended to imagine that wouldn’t hurt them because, well, they’re not exactly white. OK, they may look white, but everybody knows Jews, deep down, aren’t morally white. They do, don’t they?
Hopefully, the events of this month might open some Jewish Americans eyes about how toleration and encouragement of anti-whitism can rebound against themselves, that it’s in their self-interest to be more skeptical and discouraging of Wokeness.
We shall see.
