Identification with Christianity
Most fascist movements portrayed themselves as defenders of Christianity and the traditional Christian family against atheists and amoral humanists. This was true of Catholic fascist movements in Poland, Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. In Romania, Codreanu said he wanted to model his life after the crucified Christ of the Orthodox church, and his Legion of the Archangel Michael, a forerunner of the Iron Guard, officially called for “faith in God” and “love for each other.”
In France, Valois, Taittinger, Renaud, Bucard, and La Rocque were all Catholics, and Doriot, previously an atheist, appealed to Catholic sentiments after he became a fascist. Although Maurras was an agnostic, he defended the Catholic church as a pillar of social order, and there were many Catholics among his followers. The fascist intellectual Robert Brasillach described the Spanish Civil War as a conflict between Catholic fascism and atheistic Marxism. Drieu La Rochelle rejected liberal Catholicism but praised the “virile, male Catholicism” of the Middle Ages and the “warrior Christianity of the Crusades.”
Although fascists in Germany and Italy also posed as protectors of the church, their ideologies contained many elements that conflicted with traditional Christian beliefs, and their policies were sometimes opposed by church leaders. The Nazis criticized the Christian ideals of meekness and guilt on the grounds that they repressed the violent instincts necessary to prevent inferior races from dominating Aryans. Martin Bormann, the second most powerful official in the Nazi Party after 1941, argued that Nazi and Christian beliefs were “incompatible,” primarily because the essential elements of Christianity were “taken over from Judaism.” Bormann’s views were shared by Hitler, who ultimately wished to replace Christianity with a racist form of warrior paganism. Although Hitler was cautious about dangerously alienating Christians during World War II, he sometimes permitted Nazi officials to put pressure on Protestant and Catholic parents to remove their children from religious classes and to register them for ideological instruction instead. In the Nazi schools charged with training Germany’s future elite, Christian prayers were replaced with Teutonic rituals and sun-worship ceremonies.
Despite the many anti-Christian elements in Nazism, the vast majority of Nazis considered themselves to be religious, and most German anti-Semites supported Christianity purged of its “Jewish” elements. The pro-Nazi German Christians, who were part of the Lutheran church in Germany, held that Christ had been a blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan, and male members called themselves “SS men for Christ.” In many German families children began their prayers before meals with the phrase, “Führer, my Führer, bequeathed to me by the Lord.”
In Italy, Mussolini signed a concordat with the papacy, the Lateran Treaty (1929), which, among other things, made Roman Catholicism the state religion of Italy and mandated the teaching of Catholic doctrine in all public primary and secondary schools. Later, many practicing Catholics joined the conservative wing of the Fascist Party. In 1931, however, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical, Non abbiamo bisogno, that denounced fascism’s “pagan worship of the State” and its “revolution which snatches the young from the Church and from Jesus Christ, and which inculcates in its own young people hatred, violence and irreverence.” Although many Italian fascists remained Catholic, the regime’s mystique contained pagan elements that glorified the spirit of ancient Rome and the military virtues of its soldiers.