Today’s biggest atheist talking point loudly claims that Christianity is responsible for most of the evil in the world. When Christians retort by mentioning a certain German movement of national, godless Socialists, called Nazism, the quick response is, “Oh yeah? Well Adolf Hitler was a Christian!”

One would think that such an absurd statement needed no reply.  Unfortunately, it is one of many lies which today’s generation is swallowing like a Ben and Jerry’s hot fudge sundae.  Ironically, Hitler himself used to say, “If you are going to tell a lie, tell a big one.” Evidently, the more audacious the untruth, the less likely it is that people will think you could have had the unmitigated gall to make it up. But I am not accusing all of my atheist friends. Indeed, many of them are sincere when they repeat this distortion of reality. But they, of all people, (since they love to claim the intellectual higher ground) should know better than to repeat something without investigation.

There is a great moral divide in America today, but, at the moment, the historical revisionists have not yet succeeded in painting the NAZI’s positively. This is evident in Hollywood, where terrorists are still NAZI’s. (Today’s directors wouldn’t dare talk about Muslim terrorists.)

In any event, since (for now) we all agree that Hitler was the epitome of evil, neither side wants to claim him and calling Hitler a Christian is a wild card which many an atheist has attempted to play while debating me.

Allow me to set the record straight in as blunt and honest a manner as possible: Adolf Hitler was not a Christian! Anybody who says Hitler was a Christian, knows nothing about Hitler, or nothing about Christianity, or nothing about either.

Now, it’s true that Hitler was born into a Catholic family.  At the risk of making an outrageous understatement, being born into a Catholic family in Europe is not an uncommon phenomenon. No, Hitler did not ever formally denounce his Catholicism, but neither was he practicing it anymore by the time he came into power.

At times, Hitler made positive comments about Christianity. After all, he did not wish to alienate the church. The Lutheran and Catholic churches (to their shame) supported Hitler in the beginning, partly because he did little to interfere with church life. In time, many Christians of Germany did rise to the occasion and resist the godless tyranny of the Nazi Party by forming the underground Confessional Church. One such pastor, Deitrich Bonhoeffer, was hung in a German prison for his beliefs.

Although supporting the church may have been politically expedient early on, Hitler was not shy about his true beliefs.  First of all, the man did not believe in God at all. He was an open admirer of Fredrick Nietzsche, famous for the “God is dead” poem.  By his own confession, the closest Hitler came to accepting the notion of a deity was through nature. I. E. He believed in Pantheism (that nature and God are one and the same). Certainly this can be called a religion, but it has nothing to do with the God of the Bible or any general concept of God as a creator, or as a thinking, feeling entity (Monologues, 11-12 July 1941).

As for Christianity itself, Hitler considered it a heavy blow to mankind (Monologues 25 1941). He denied that Jesus was a Jew, (which, at the very least, proves his complete unfamiliarity with the New Testament). He went even further, calling Jesus the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier (Monologues 21, October 1941).

CONCLUSION: If you are an atheist, I respect your skepticism. I really do. I was an atheist myself once. Just a word to the wise: Find a better argument than this one. Hitler was a Pantheist and a follower of Nietzsche. He also believed in the illegitimate birth of Christ, claimed publicly that Christianity was not good for the world, and demonstrated zero understanding of the New Testament. This is not much of a credential for Christian authority. Of course, we are dancing around the most obvious observation of all: Hitler did not live the Christian life commanded by Jesus! (And that, Sweet Virginia, is another understatement, perhaps the understatement of the century.)

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