Via the Southern Poverty Law Center, comes this interesting little story from Spiegel online, about efforts to restore a nazi era protestant church in Berlin …

The Third Reich collapsed 61 years ago but you wouldn’t know it if you walk into the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin. The stark entrance hall is lit by a black chandelier in the shape of an iron cross. The pulpit has a wooden carving of a muscular Jesus leading a helmeted Wehrmacht soldier and surrounded by an Aryan family. The baptismal font is guarded  by a wooden statue of a stormtrooper from Adolf Hitler’s paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) unit clutching his cap.

Friezes depicting the eagle of the Reich and helmeted soldiers’ heads have been carved into a giant stone arch framing the chancel. The organ was used at the 1935 Nuremberg rally of the Nazi party and egend has it that the church was originally meant to be named after Adolf Hitler. Indeed, the only thing that might irk the Führer were he to inspect the building now is the absence of swastikas — there used to be plenty, but they have been scratched out from the walls because the Nazi symbol is illegal in Germany.

The church bells — which were also embossed in swastikas — are likewise missing. They were removed and melted down in 1942 to forge much-needed guns and ammunition.

…

In the early 1930s the Protestant church came under the influence of a racist and fascist movement called the "German Christians" — called "stormtroopers of Jesus," by the group’s leader and founder Rev. Joachim Hossenfelder.

"The people who designed this interior wanted to show that religion and the Nazi philosophy could merge into one. But it can’t," said Böhm. 

No…but that won’t mean people won’t try. Particularly when it comes to choosing between a faith that says, someday, the last shall be the first, and their own comfortable conceits.  Emphatically it won’t mean that everyday people won’t come and worship the muscular Jesus regardless of anything the actual Jesus said, about loving your neighbor as yourself, about doing unto others, about how blessed are the merciful, and pray their devotions to Christ and to the Aryan race, and return to their homes thinking themselves good Christians, good soldiers for righteousness.  How popular is Muscular Jesus now in America?  How popular the Jesus of vengeance, the Jesus of war?  Change the uniforms on the soldiers a tad, and that church could fit easily into any bible belt community in America, and quite a few outside as well.

That, I’m glad to say, is not the Christianity I grew up with.  But I’ve been close enough to it to have a certain familiarity with the mindset.  And as a gay man my very existence is pummeled daily by the disciples of the muscular Jesus.  Had I not the religious upbringing I had, I might be as hostile towards Christianity now, as are others I know. 

Why the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell became the media embodiment of Christianity, and not people like Fred Clark, and Peterson Toscano, I have absolutely no idea.   But it’s one of the great tragedies of our age.  Böhm is right…the religion of Jesus cannot be merged with the philosophy of Nazis.  The mistake is that the muscular Jesus isn’t a merging of the two philosophies, but a superseding of the one by the other.  So the Jesus that said love your neighbor vanishes in the shadow of the one who says might makes right.