American Protestant Journals and the Nazi Religious Assault

Abstract

American Protestantism has been unique in its relationship to state and society, and in its ideas on the matter. Yet these ideas have now been challenged, right down to their presuppositions, by the emergence in recent decades of powerful anti-Christian social movements in western civilization. One of these challengers, Nazism, made a significant impact upon American thought in the transition period of the mid-thirties, for it was regarded as a great religious upsurge of an unbaptized nationalism in the heartland of traditional Christendom. Thus in their reaction to Hitler's movement religious spokesmen revealed the basic social attitudes of their groups and provided answers to the question: “How did American Protestants of twenty years ago conceive the role of Christianity in contemporary society?”