THE CHRISTIAN REVOLT AGAINST THE NAZIS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 154, 5 June 1942, Page 11

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLT AGAINST THE NAZIS

"Not Enough Emphasis In Propaganda"

of a vigorous religious revival in Great Britain, as shown by the Malvern Conference last year, the enthusiasm in many quarters over the appointment of Dr. Temple as Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Churches’ United Witness Campaign (which has a counterpart in New Zealand in the Campaign for Christian Order now being conducted by the National Council of Churches), yet according to Dr. George Glasgow, writing in the Contemporary Review, one of the oddities of the war is "the fact that British official propaganda has steadily fought shy of the Christian argument." Pleading for more official support for the Christian issue in propaganda, Dr. Glasgow says that "the prevailing blindness of British official quarters about what is happening in the world is all the more remarkable when that argument so clearly militates against the Nazi cause. Why are the British people left in ignorance of the wave of Christian feeling that is surging against the Nazi leaders from one end of Europe to the other, even in Germany? The failure to exploit it is one of the most striking examples of British lack of imagination. The whole course of history during the past 2,000 years proves that Christianity is the only impregnable thing on earth; and Hitler has invited, and is getting, the organised opposition of Christians throughout the world. Bishop von Galen, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Munster, has preached a series of sermons against the Gestapo which ought to have been blazoned abroad for the encouragement of the British people." In Mussolini’s Own Words Dr. Glasgow recalls that it was Mussolini himself who said, in the newspaper Figaro in 1934, before he had committed Italy to the anti-Christian cause: "A fight against religion is a fight against the impalpable .. . It is by this time most fully proved that the weapons at the disposal of the State, no matter how sharp they may be, are powerless to inflict any mortal blow on the Church . . . Passive resistance on the»part of the priests and of the faithful is sufficient to frustrate the most violent attacks by a State." Those words by Mussolini may well be prophetic. The call to passive resistA vie there is evidence

ance against the Gestapo by the Bishop of Munster, mentioned above, was echoed in equally impressive language by the Protestant Bishop of Wurtemburg, who spoke of the need for Christians vigorously to withstand the enemy within the Third Reich. In the Daily Herald of January 8, Hannen Swaffer told the story of Frau Staritz, a Lutheran woman minister in Breslau, who was denounced by Schwarze Korps, Himmler’s savage weekly, because she urged her parishioners in a circular letter to take care of the unhappy "NonAryan Christians" who are now compelled to wear the yellow "David Star" even in church. In a recent issue of The New Statesman and Nation, Elizabeth Castonier described the rising tide of religious opposition to the Nazis, led by ‘the clergy and "strongly supported by the German population." Niemoller Is Not Alone Despite the fact that he is officially an enemy, the heroic stand of Pastor Niemoller against the Nazis has won the admiration of democratic peoples, and he was even made the hero of a British film. But he is not the only one. Public Opinion for January 16, 1942, reviews a book entitled The Iron Ration of a Christian, by Heinrich Vogel, a wellknown member of the Confessional Church in Germany, who is now supposed to be in a concentration campwhich is not surprising when one reads such a passage as this in his book, "There is no earthly power to which we owe unreserved and unconditional obedience, for there is always a primary reservation and a primary condition-namely the law of God. A civil power which wrests for itself the attributes of divine authority, degenerates into tyranny. .. ." Even less well-known perhaps to the public than the courage and determination of pastors like Niemoller and Vogel is the fact that, in face of all difficulties, fifteen small but active groups of German Quakers are still at work within the Reich, and still publish a monthly journal Der Quaker. According to Dr. Glasgow, there are signs that Hitler is now trying to live down his past as pagan protagonist against the Christian religion-but "it is too late, for Christian people have been roused in self-defence." But why, asks Dr. Glasgow, does British official propaganda not take advantage of this fact?