The phrase 'culture war' is traceable to two very different thinkers. The more recent is the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who argued that the only way to throw off the old order was to launch a 'long march' through elite cultural institutions. This was the strategy taken by the New Left insurgents of the 1960s, who in short order conquered English departments, editorial boards, movie studios, and the like. But the earlier and more relevant wellspring was Otto von Bismarck's Kulturkampf.
It is common among educated liberals to use the term 'Kulturkampf' in referring to the supposed efforts of the right to impose its values on the rest of the country by demonizing liberals. The Germanic overtones are obviously meant to evoke a Hitlerian parallel. Quite the contrary, however, the original Kulturkampf was not a right-wing crackdown on liberal dissenters or imperiled minorities but an onslaught from the
Bismarck's intentions were grounded in realpolitik and political triangulation. It was the progressive forces in the Reichstag who were the true believers. Catholicism was seen by progressive Germans as foreign, antiquated, backward, and un-German. It stood in the way of nationalism, scientism, and progress. The word 'Kulturkampf' itself was coined by the influential scientist Rudolf Virchow, a renowned liberal who hoped the Kulturkampf would liberate men from the clutches of Christian superstition and wed them to progressive principles. Behind that impulse, however, lay a desire to impose a new religion, a progressive religion of the
The first Kulturkampf laws, passed with great fanfare in 1873, were hailed as enormous progressive strides in the separation of church and state. Emil Friedberg, a liberal architect of the anti-Catholic 'May Laws,' explained the state's obligations toward the Catholic Church: 'to suppress it, to destroy it, to crush it with violence.' In a riot of neo-Jacobinism, liberals harassed and shut down Catholic schools. Mandatory civil marriages weakened the power and influence of the Church. The state claimed the right to appoint, promote, discipline, and even deport Church officials. Most of Germany's Catholic bishops were either thrown in jail, hounded from office, or chased into exile. Eventually the Kulturkampf exhausted itself; but the idea that traditional Christianity was a threat to national progress took permanent root.3
In the 1870s the acid predictably worked its way through the body politic and transformed itself into anti- Semitism. Indeed, the word 'anti-Semitism' was coined in 1879 by the atheist and radical leftist Wilhelm Marr in his tract
During his rise to power Hitler — in many respects the heir of the Bismarckian progressives — could hardly launch an all-out attack on Christianity. National Socialism, after all, was supposed to unite all Germans. It's 'not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death,' Hitler explained to his aides. 'A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science. Religion will have to make more and more concessions. Gradually the myths crumble. All that's left is to prove that in nature there is no frontier between the organic and the inorganic.'4
In 1937 the German Social Democratic Party, operating in exile in Prague, enlisted a spy to report from Germany on Nazi progress. The reporter, working in secret, offered a crucial insight into what the Nazis were really up to. The National Socialist German Workers' Party was constructing a new religion, a 'counter-church,' complete with its own priests, dogmas, holidays, rituals, and rites. The agent used a brilliant metaphor to explain the Nazi effort. The counter-church was being built like a new railway bridge. When you build a new bridge, you can't just tear down the old one willy-nilly. Traffic and commerce will be snarled. The public will protest. Instead, you need to slowly but surely replace the bridge over time. Swap out an old bolt for a new one. Quietly switch the ancient beams for fresh ones, and one day you will have a completely different structure and barely anyone will have noticed.
Like the engineers of that proverbial railway bridge, the Nazis worked relentlessly to replace the nuts and bolts of traditional Christianity with a new political religion. The shrewdest way to accomplish this was to co-opt Christianity via the
Following the Jacobin example, the Nazis replaced the traditional Christian calendar. The new year began on January 30 with the Day of the Seizure of Power.6 Each November the streets of central Munich were dedicated to a Nazi Passion play depicting Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch. The martyrdom of Horst Wessel and his 'old fighters' replaced Jesus and the apostles. Plays and official histories were rewritten to glorify pagan Aryans bravely fighting against Christianizing foreign armies. Anticipating some feminist pseudo history, witches became martyrs to the bloodthirsty oppression of Christianity.
Under the progressives, the Christian God had been transformed into the God of lower food prices. Under the Nazis, the Christian God would be transformed into an Aryan SS officer with Hitler his right hand. The so-called German Christian pastors preached that 'just as Jesus liberated mankind from sin and hell, so Hitler saves the German
When some Protestant bishops visited the Fuhrer to register complaints, Hitler's rage got the better of him. 'Christianity will disappear from Germany just as it has done in Russia...The German race has existed without Christianity for thousands of years...and will continue after Christianity has disappeared...We must get used to the teachings of blood and race.' When the bishops objected that they supported Nazism's secular aims, just not its religious innovations, Hitler exploded: 'You are traitors to the Volk. Enemies of the Vaterland and destroyers of Germany.'8
In 1935 mandatory prayer in school was abolished, and in 1938 carols and Nativity plays were banned entirely. By 1941 religious instruction for children fourteen years and up had been abolished altogether, and Jacobinism reigned supreme. A Hitler Youth song rang out from the campfires:
Meanwhile, the orphans were given new lyrics to 'Silent Night':
In like manner, the American Kulturkampf of the 1960s begins not with the hippies, the Vietnam War, or even civil rights. As befits an attempt to clear the way for a new political religion, it starts with the effort to eliminate prayer in school. As Jeremy Rabkin has argued, the school prayer decisions of the 1960s should be seen as the
