The Teaching of Jesus that Inspired the Holocaust and January 6 Insurrection

Jesus stormed the Temple in Jerusalem and violently beat people with a whip for practicing religion in a way he didn’t like.

The violence of Jesus inspired Adolf Hitler to slaughter Jews in the Nazi Holocaust.

The violence of Jesus inspired Donald Trump to encourage his followers to storm the US Capitol in the January 6 insurrection.

I want to talk today about the teachings of Jesus.

“The teachings of Jesus" is a phrase that you hear often when people are discussing Christian nationalism these days. One of the things that people like to say, to try to make things nice for everybody is that Christian nationalists don't understand the teachings of Jesus, or that they reject the teachings of Jesus.

The majority of American Christians support Christian nationalism. 60% of American Christians voted for Donald Trump and Christian nationalism and fascism, and they did it in three separate elections over eight years.

People don't know what to do with this clear association between American Christianity and fascism. They don’t want to confront the problems within American Christianity, and so they say, “Trump supporters are rejecting the teachings of Jesus, and therefore they're not real Christians."

It’s an easy copout, a way to avoid taking accountability for the role of Christianity in America’s descent into fascism. It’s also factually inaccurate.

Some of the teachings of Jesus, it turns out, are quite friendly to fascism. Donald Trump has definitely not rejected those teachings of Jesus. 

Jesus has come to Jerusalem, and he notices that there are money changers in the temple and people selling sacrificial animals.

Jesus doesn't like it. So, Jesus goes and he gets himself a whip, and he storms into the temple of Jerusalem, and he starts hitting people with this whip, and he knocks over their tables.

Jesus destroys their things. They run out, bleeding, terrified. Their property is smashed or scattered and stolen, and Jesus takes over the temple in this way.

Jesus was a bully. Jesus was a terrorist, seizing power through violence.

Those money changers. Were there in the temple in order to help foreigners integrate into local society. Jesus apparently didn't like that, the idea that the temple would be a place that would welcome foreigners.

The money changers were also there to help people make change to buy sacrificial animals, to sacrifice in the temple. Jesus did not approve of that kind of religious practice, and therefore he thought that he had the right to just go in and attack people violently with a whip, with a weapon. Jesus taught that violence was the right thing, because Jesus attacked people whose religion was not the one true religion. Jesus thought that everybody should obey his way of doing things.

That attitude by Jesus has a lot of common ground with what we see with Christian nationalists under Donald Trump in the United States of America today. Through his actions in the Temple of Jerusalem, Jesus taught intolerance toward foreigners, intolerance toward disagreement demands that people obey one authority figure, that there's only one way of thinking, one way of doing things, and no diversity can be tolerated.

That is a teaching of Jesus, and it's not nice. It's not democratic at all.

This violent teaching of Jesus was something that caught the attention of Christian nationalists at another period of time, 102 years ago.

Adolf Hitler was beginning to form his Nazi party, and he gave a speech in Munich, April 12th, 1922. Here is what Hitler said in that speech about Jesus and the Nazi Party:

“My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in his might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that he had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian, I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter.”

Adolf Hitler explained that the Nazi party was founded upon the inspiration of Jesus taking up the whip against practitioners of the religion of Judaism. The Nazis followed that teaching of Jesus to an extreme, in the streets, beating people in the streets, smashing into people's homes and dragging them out, sending them to concentration camps.

This wasn't just a one time thing for Adolf Hitler. 3 years later, when the 1st edition of Mein Kampf was published, in 1925, Adolf Hitler wrote in that book:

“The Founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of His estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God; because then, as always, they used religion as a means of advancing their commercial interests.”

Adolf Hitler was inspired by the violent, judgmental, intolerant example of Jesus.

In our time, Donald Trump has been inspired by the same aspect of Jesus, which is what led him to stand there in Washington, DC, and call upon his supporters to go storm the capital.

Fascism in Nazi Germany and fascism under Donald Trump learned all too well the teachings of the violent Jesus.