The Nazi Experiment Vol. 12: Positive Christianity as the "Christian Nationalism" of the Third Reich

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4.8 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2026

⏱️ 140 minutes

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Summary

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 196 Today in America, we face a confusing "Christian Nationalist" (https://newdiscourses.com/2023/04/two-wolves-of-christian-nationalism/) movement that is reaching into many legitimate complaints and anxieties of American Christians and turning them to its project. While the term can mean many things, at least some of the meanings of "Christian Nationalism" are undeniably a kind of political movement (https://newdiscourses.com/2024/12/the-hoax-that-broke-the-conservative-internet/) posing as a theological movement. In fact, the most movement-ish strains (https://newdiscourses.com/2023/08/wtf-is-christian-nationalism/) of that line of thinking are precisely that. Something like this has happened before. When Hitler and his National Socialists were establishing the Third Reich, they had a huge cultural problem to overcome: nearly all Germans were Christians, not National Socialists. Their solution was an ambiguous term called "Positive Christianity" that increasingly got used as a bridge faith to turn believing German Christians into Nazis. In this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay continues his Nazi Experiment series (https://newdiscourses.com/?s=nazi+experimentto) explore the justifications for Nazi "Positive Christianity," revealing concerning echoes from the past. Join him to hear about the Third Reich's unique "Christian Nationalism" movement in their own words. Latest from New Discourses Press! The Queering of the American Child: https://queeringbook.com/ Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2026 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #NewDiscourses #JamesLindsay #Christian

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0:00.0	Hey, everybody. It's James Lindsay. You're listening to the New Discourses podcast, and we are back into our long sprawling series called The Nazi Experiment, where we're really basically just exposing that what we're facing with the woke right propaganda, but some even from the left as well,
0:41.7	is a lot of repackaged Nazi ideology taken out of context so that the people don't, people who are
0:48.9	hearing it, mostly young men in the conservative movement, don't know that they're just
0:53.9	encountering repackaged
0:55.4	Nazi content. So what's happening, as you've heard in a lot of the episodes so far,
1:00.8	is that our young men, in particular in the conservative movement, are being fed,
1:06.0	or we're seeing all over social media at least and in podcasts,
1:10.1	arguments that were made by Adolf Hitler adapted
1:13.8	now to our current present circumstances without noticing that for all the noticing that
1:21.3	these people do that these arguments are ultimately based in Mankhamf and Nazi political theory and so on.
1:34.5	And so we've already done a bunch of episodes of this, 12 full-blown episodes, a prequel,
1:39.5	which means 13, and then a explainer plus a bonus episode.
1:44.6	So we're way up in the double digits now.
1:46.7	And in this episode, we're going to explore not in its kind of fullness, but in a particular
1:52.3	narrow angle, we're going to explore a little bit about religion in the Third Reich.
1:57.0	So how Christianity in particular was used in Nazi Germany in order to change people's
2:05.8	beliefs toward national socialism. And just kind of summarize the point of the series again,
2:12.7	in case for whatever reason, this is your first encounter with it. The Nazi experiment series wants to take a
2:18.5	step back. We all know the Nazis were horrible. We all, this is the problem. We apparently don't
2:24.7	all know this anymore. We should all know, and all of us who are old enough know and are wise enough
2:30.2	know that the Nazis were horrible. We know that they did their thing. They held power for
2:36.8	12 years and that it sparked a world war. It caused a Holocaust. It caused the mass murder outside of
	...

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