There are Nazis in our midst.
Not just Nazi flag-carrying, swastika-wearing, swashbuckling Nazi-saluting members of American neo-Nazi groups, but ordinary Americans who will swear they are not Nazis.
It’s now obvious that MAGA has Nazi leanings.
Psychologist Keith Payne, in Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide, argues most Americans consider themselves “good, reasonable people.” That would include the Americans who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the Americans who engaged in vandalism in our cities, the Americans who viciously attacked and threatened an Episcopal bishop over a sermon, the Americans who call one another every name in the English language on social media, and the Americans who entertain Nazi ideas.
As the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was commemorated Jan. 27, the far right was soaring all over the world. Perhaps historical ignorance plays a role in our forgetting what must never be forgotten. Evidence: A survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found among 1,000 Americans questioned, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp.
Meanwhile, the global right-wing surge includes a neo-Nazi movement in Germany. No nation has worked harder to reckon with its history than Germany. Germans have attempted to pull out by the roots the best known version of fascism in history — the Nazis.
“If Nazism can be reborn in Germany, then obviously it has a field white unto harvest in America.”
Yet in the country where making a Nazi salute is a crime, the far-right neo-Nazi party, the Alternative for Deutschland, has become the second largest political group with 20% support among Germans. If Nazism can be reborn in Germany, then obviously it has a field white unto harvest in America.
America has reproduced 1932 Germany. Fascism is a populist, reactionary spirit poised for dominance. The immigrant crisis, the rise of white supremacists, white male reactions to a Black man being in the White House for eight years, economic uncertainty and a feeling the system is rigged against white people make fertile soil for fascism. MAGA evangelical frustration with a powerful civic morality that produced liberal rights for women, gays, lesbians, transgender people and immigrants has driven their faith group in the direction of authoritarianism. They are more concerned with preserving a white-centered tradition than protecting democracy.
The new evangelicalism was born in the 1980s out of a racist, segregationist fervor, and the current manifestation has taken on even more fascist ideas.
Two unrelated social media moments focused my attention on the possibility of Nazis in the garden of democracy.
Refusing to denounce Nazism
First, here’s a post that shows the weird reasoning behind the old saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
On X, Mike Cosper, senior director of Christianity Today Media, addresses a MAGA tweet refusing to denounce Nazis: “This is amazing. Won’t denounce Nazis because denouncement itself is left coded. No regrets on sharing the White Boy Summer video (which contains literal Third Reich propaganda and appears to celebrate famous American Neo-Nazis side-by-side with images from their churches) because there’s no reason to explain Zoomer humor and memes to out of touch Boomers. Likens not alienating Nazis in their church to not alienating Flat Earthers, which ought to win an Olympic medal for the stupidest moral equivalence in an age of many, many stupid moral equivalences. What’s wild to me is that these men would break fellowship with a professed Christian who wanted to be part of Revoice faster than you can blink. But someone who would justify the slaughter of 11 million people in service of ethnonationalist purity? All the patience and grace in the world.”
As is typical of the social media platform X, the backlash against Cosper was swift and vicious.
Elon Musk is seen on a large screen as Alice Weidel, co-leader of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, addresses an election campaign rally in Halle, eastern Germany on January 25. (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)
Elon Musk’s Nazi salute
Second, there’s Elon Musk’s Nazi salute. There was no mistaking the gesture from Musk at Donald Trump’s inaugural festivities. A ham-handed Nazi salute to warm the hearts of Neo-Nazis around the world was on full display. Speaking during the inaugural parade inside Capitol One Arena in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, Musk gave two Nazi salutes and said, “My heart goes out to you.”
We all saw it! And the excuses and rationalizations by Musk and MAGA never will change what we saw — a “Heil Hitler” salute. Musk pushes us into the darkness with a pair of Nazi salutes. Across the 88 years since 1937, there is no mistaking the gesture. Then and now it strikes fear into our hearts.
Musk, responding to criticism of his Nazi-like salute, said of his critics, “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler attack is too tired.’”
Only in Musk’s mind can this be seen as a rational explanation. What about the salute?
Bill Gates, a sane billionaire, put it exactly right: “You want to promote the right wing but say Nigel Farage is not right-wing enough. … I mean, this is insane s‑‑‑. You are for the AfD.”
“There is no room for Nazi salutes, ideas or principles in our democracy.”
Even if there was a tendency to give Musk a break, his additional actions made this impossible. Strike one: Musk posted a series of “jokes” using names connected with the Holocaust. Strike two: He gave a Nazi salute. Strike three: He spoke by video to the neo-Nazi party in Germany, the AfD, and told the Germans to get over their guilt.
“Something I think that is just very important is that people take pride in Germany and being German. This is very important,” Musk said. “It’s, you know, it’s OK to be proud to be German. This is a very important principle.”
Heil Hitler!
If we agree we should oppose any suggestion of Nazi ideology with the same fervor as rejecting the devil, then there is no room for Nazi salutes, ideas or principles in our democracy.
Nazi hunters
The Amazon television series Hunters portrays a group of Nazi hunters tracking down the thousands of former Nazis who infiltrated the United States after World War II. A Nazi hunter is an individual who tracks down and gathers information on alleged former Nazis, or SS members, and Nazi collaborators who were involved in the Holocaust.
I am a Nazi hunter, not in the historical sense but in the rhetorical and political sense of identifying Nazi sympathizers or appeasers. This is my purpose: Finding the evidence, presenting it in a rational fashion, and deciding if a full alarm should sound.
Kenneth Burke in 1939 urged writers “to find all available ways of making the Hitlerite distortions of religion apparent, in order that politicians of his kind in America be unable to perform a similar swindle.”
This is not a hunt for full-fledged Nazis. The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified at least 31 neo-Nazi groups in the United States. Frankly, Franklin Graham frightens me more than a group of bald swastika-sashed middle-aged white Americans on motorcycles. Most Americans are not members of any of these groups. My hunt is more of an epistemological search for Nazi sympathizers and appeasers.
What are we hunting? Fascism. Fascism is a populist political philosophy, movement or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.
Three of the major characteristics of the MAGA movement are nativism, racism and authoritarianism. At the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition or, in a word, nation. Unconditional loyalty, no dissension in the ranks, and total conformity among MAGA evangelicals and Republicans sounds so fascist.
“Evangelicals deny the existence of racism, but they haven’t stopped being racists.”
Add the fog of white superiority and you have the trappings of a new Nazi movement. Evangelicals deny the existence of racism, but they haven’t stopped being racists. They have moved the target of their racism from Blacks to brown people — immigrants.
After all, when Hitler came to power, most Germans were not members of the Nazi Party. Historians suggest between 12% and 35% of adult Germans were formally members of the Nazi Party or supporters of the Nazis.
Hitler didn’t have to persuade everyone; he only had to convince enough people to allow him to act on his hard-core beliefs. Many Germans already believed much of what Hitler said before Hitler made his first speech. Patricia Roberts-Miller, retired professor of rhetoric and author of a major work on demagoguery, says, “He wasn’t some kind of all-powerful magical rhetor who waved a word-wand and transformed good people into bad.”
We now know people should have taken the threat of Hitler more seriously than they did long before they did. Where are our Winston Churchills? Early and often Churchill blasted the warnings: “We are in the presence of a disaster of the first magnitude. …. Do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom.”
Adolf Hitler gives a Nazi salute to a crowd of soldiers at a Nazi rally. (Photo by Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
Authoritarianism the root of Nazism
Among us today, Cornel West is Churchillian in his warnings about the dogma of authoritarianism.
“This dogma is rooted in our understandable paranoia toward potential terrorists, our traditional fear of too many liberties, and our deep distrust of one another,” he has said.
It is also a reaction to the influence of liberals in making such sweeping changes to America that have caused evangelicals to believe the country has been taken away from them.
When safety trumps liberty, when security usurps compassion, we have authoritarianism rooted in paranoia. When evangelicals desert faith for Christian nationalism, they are only a step away from authoritarianism. If they insist on supporting a serial liar as their supreme leader, they are on the slippery slope toward fascism. Evangelical emotional subjectivism and populism have provided the foundation for a new fascist movement.
The attraction of authoritarianism, the genus of Nazism, arises from an extreme prejudice against liberals. MAGA evangelical hatred of liberalism, for example, blinds them to the possibility of a turn toward Nazism.
Neo Nazis, Alt-Right, and White Supremacists encircle and chant at counter protestors at the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson after marching through the University of Virginia campus with torches in Charlottesville, Va., USA on Aug. 11, 2017. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
The appeal of Nazism
What is the appeal of Nazism? Hitler’s rise to power depended upon many Germans already thinking like Hitler. He convinced Germans they were the real victims. The German people had been mistreated. Miller-Roberts offers a helpful critique: “What he said was: You’re in a bad situation; it can’t be your fault. You’re a German, so it can’t be Germany’s fault. IT’S THE LIBERALS. Who are Jews. And Bolsheviks. And international financiers. ALL TRUE GERMANS AGREE. Our government sucks because it isn’t giving you the things you know you deserve, and it isn’t dominating every other country, and GOD WANTS US TO BE THE BEST, and democracy involves letting other people argue and they’re all wrong and so it’s a waste of time because the true course of action is obvious to every reasonable person and so ELECT SOMEONE WHO CARES ABOUT PEOPLE LIKE YOU. And who will insist that GERMANY IS THE BEST.”
She continues: “Politicians who say it’s complicated are just trying to line their own pockets. Democratic deliberation is a waste of time — just hand over all the power to a guy who can get things done. And that’s me.”
The Nazis made huge promises: A strong country, military strength, increased territory, greater wealth. They delivered with territorial aggression and antidemocratic measures. They disliked voting, banned other political parties and realigned the bureaucracy with the Nazi Party. People were so interested in a strong country they did not mind what shape that strength would take.
The Nazis offered unity. They promised a country not overrun by individualism, and they built it on conformity. What they did not like, they banned. Objectionable books, films, newspapers and opinions were silenced or destroyed. People who did not align were quieted or eliminated. The Nazis opposed liberty in every respect. They dissolved the boundary between public and private life.
“People were willing to put up with authoritarian rule to be rid of political and cultural differences.”
Unity required the elimination of internal enemies. People were willing to put up with authoritarian rule to be rid of political and cultural differences. But the list of internal enemies is always capable of expanding and must expand if you are attempting to sustain power with fear-based rhetoric and totalitarian measures.
The Nazis claimed to be the party of traditional values. They opposed the new and edgy culture of the Weimar Republic with its changing gender roles, modern art and imported nontraditional music. The Nazis were pronatalist and anti-abortion; they created government policies to encourage women to stay home with their families. The MAGA evangelical culture war script (Project 2025) reads like the Nazi culture war script.
In 1937, Pope Pius XI warned against the Third Reich in his papal encyclical “Mit Brennender Sorge” (“With Burning Anxiety”):
Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the state, or a particular form of state, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community — however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things — whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.
Imagine Pope Pious XI at a Turning Point USA gathering and telling the assembled Christian nationalists: “None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion, or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are ‘as a drop of a bucket.’”
Evangelicals are in no mood for advice from a pope, an Episcopal bishop or any liberal pastor. They have sold out to “We are right” and “Might makes right.”
In an authoritarian culture, the in-group has rights, but no one else does. Everyone else should be grateful they are not more oppressed than they already are. When evangelicals are provoked, they engage in outrageous criticism, but it always is the fault of the “provoker.”
British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965) giving a speech at County Hall in London. (Photo by H F Davis/Getty Images)
Where’s Churchill today?
I can’t imagine an evangelical preacher with the courage of Churchill. I can make a list of the evangelical preachers willing to play the role of Neville Chamberlain and Joseph Kennedy — famous appeasers of Hitler — Robert Jeffress and Franklin Graham among them.
Yes, I expect disbelief from MAGA evangelicals.
There will be a strong sense of disbelief of the idea of Nazis in our midst. In Our Nazi: An American Suburb’s Encounter with Evil by Michael Soffer, we have the story of Reinhold Kulle. He was discovered to be a former Nazi. And not just any Nazi, but a member of the Waffen SS’s infamous Death’s Head division.
Yet he believed he had done nothing wrong. He received support from churches and American conservatives. How long were you expected to bear responsibility for actions committed 40 years earlier? Weren’t Christians required to forgive in such cases? What was the point of spending public resources on hounding people now in their sixties out of the country?
No matter how ordinary, normal or even Christian someone appears, if there are Nazi ideas, actions and beliefs, this person is not one of us.
Our anti-Nazi battle remains clear: Any hint of Nazi ideology must be exposed, refuted and dismissed. And if a group of neo-Nazis shows up in your neighborhood brandishing swastikas, Nazi flags and giving Nazi salutes, protest peacefully and nonviolently, but above all, protest their heinous ideology.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
Related articles:
Now the US House wants to censor a preacher? | Opinion by Rodney Kennedy
What happens when church and state merge? Look to Nazi Germany for answers
Willkommen im cabaret: Young people’s thoughts on our political climate | Analysis by Mallory Challis