Why Being Anti-nazi Isn’t Enough For Ethics

While our family was out eating dinner, my 11-year-old sister, Katie, was eager to share what she’d learned at school that day. Taking her napkin, she began to draw a few crisscrossed lines. Suddenly, the whole family was staring at a swastika. Immediately, my mother took the napkin, crumpled it, and placed it on the far side of the booth.

But Katie wasn’t finished. She looked into my eyes as she unfolded the napkin and declared, “This is the most evil symbol in the world, Glenn. You should never draw it.” That left an impression on me as a 7-year-old. It was perhaps the most morally serious moment that has ever taken place at a TGI Fridays.

According to Alec Ryrie, professor of the history of Christianity at Durham University and author of The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It, Katie was the voice of her culture: We in the West have built our entire moral system on one foundation—that Nazism represents pure evil. From Tolkien’s heroic tales to recent American foreign policy and commitment to human rights, these fruits have grown from the anti-Nazi tree. The secular West detests Hitler with religious certainty. “Perhaps we still believe Jesus is good,” Ryrie writes, “but not with the same fervor and conviction that we believe Nazism is evil” (50).

But this age is ending, Ryrie argues, as rising hatred shows on both political extremes. He believes a new moral foundation is coming—a blend of progressive and conservative ideas that has yet to appear. While Ryrie excels at tracing how defeating the Nazis became the West’s favorite story about itself, his solution is the widespread adoption of Protestant liberalism, which seems unlikely to solve the problems he describes.

Evaluating ‘Anti-Nazism’

Much of what Ryrie calls “anti-Nazism”—the Western world’s commitment to human rights, gender and race equality, and individual autonomy—actually has a longer history. One hundred and fourteen years before Hitler’s birth, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal” and that “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” While Ryrie mentions this document, he’s reluctant to name anti-Nazism’s real ancestor: Enlightenment liberalism.

Yes, the post–World War II world expanded liberalism’s basic ideas into new areas of race, gender, and sexuality. But these pioneers didn’t appeal to anti-Nazi rhetoric. Martin Luther King Jr. drew on Christian and Enlightenment language to argue that African Americans are equal individuals under the law. Second-wave feminists argued that since women are equal individuals, they deserve the same public rights as men. These movements were logical extensions of liberalism, not reactions to Nazism.

Taking this into the present day, our moment isn’t best understood as Hitler leaving the stage but rather the weakening of liberalism—battered by a society that’s violently splitting over basic questions of morality and culture. James Davison Hunter makes this argument in his excellent book Democracy and Solidarity, but Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the polarized response to it is a case in point. We’re not treating each other as equals with rights to life, liberty, and happiness. The problem runs deeper than Ryrie suggests.

Resuscitating Protestant Liberalism

Ryrie’s prescription for dying political liberalism is to adopt a more theologically liberal Christianity. He believes the West may turn toward a religion that’s “not about doctrines and creeds” but “more about belonging and behaving than believing,” flexible enough to bend on “issues like sexual ethics, gender identity and abortion” (138).

Our moment isn’t best understood as Hitler leaving the stage but rather a weakened liberalism.

He hopes a union between the progressive moral consensus and Christianity will save civilization. “Unlikely as [such a synthesis] may seem,” he speculates, “I am confident both that it should and will be” the solution to our cultural woes (138). It would indeed be unlikely, as this form of Christianity is dying in America, nearly dead in the broader West, and disconnected from the forms of Christian faith growing worldwide.

In fairness, Ryrie’s book isn’t about Christianity’s future but about his desire to save a version of liberal Western culture. His final chapters offer something like couples counseling for progressive secularists and conservative traditionalists, with Protestant liberalism positioned as the magical compromise. But this solution is like telling a couple fighting over vacation plans to skip both the big city and the national park for a nearby suburb. What looks like a happy medium is actually a dead end.

The core problem with Protestant liberalism is that it’s built on liberalism’s lie: the notion that we can all get along once we set aside our particular religious convictions. The curtain hanging over this lie—the broadly shared cultural and moral consensus of the American elite throughout most of the 20th century—has been lifted. And bad news: Emperor liberalism has no clothes.

Return to Orthodoxy

What can Christianity offer to a dying liberalism and decaying culture? More than a century ago, Herman Bavinck observed that any social order built only on individual choice will eventually collapse under relativism and fragmentation. We need a reason—or, better, a doctrine—that grounds individual rights, beyond the United Nations’s blind faith. Theologically orthodox Christianity offers exactly that: Every human being bears God’s image.

The core problem with Protestant liberalism is that it’s built on liberalism’s lie: the notion that we can all get along once we set aside our particular religious convictions.

More than that, a robust orthodox Protestantism provides a transcendent authority. Picking and choosing doctrines sounds refreshing until you realize that, functionally, people will choose to dispatch all the most politically inconvenient ones. Religion then loses its power to restrain selfishness and cruelty, to push stiff-necked humans toward forgiveness, sacrifice, and love of neighbor—the civic virtues most necessary for a healthy body politic.

Ryrie’s diagnosis is sharper than his prescription. He correctly identifies our fragmenting anti-Nazi moral consensus, but his solution—a watered-down Christianity mixed with progressive politics—doesn’t meet the moment. The future belongs not to those crafting the most agreeable religious compromise but to communities providing meaning, purpose, and transcendent authority in an age of drift.

The Age of Hitler serves as a useful mirror, showing how our moral moment took shape. But society would be better served by looking toward a historically orthodox, doctrinally robust Christianity to chart where we need to go.