Positive Christianity
Hitler consistently self-identified as a Christian in public, and even on occasion as a Catholic, specifically throughout his entire political career, despite criticising biblical figures.
[9] In the 1937 papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge, the Catholic Church also denounced that the ideology contained idolatry of race, people, and the state.
Although Hitler publicly affirmed such doctrines and did not deny them in Mein Kampf, his inner circle party intellectuals such as Alfred Rosenberg (who himself taught in his book that Christ followed an early form of Second Temple Judaism) wanted to replace this doctrine of such emphasis on biblical traditionalism instead with a "positive" emphasis on Christ as an active preacher, organiser, and fighter who opposed the Rabbinic Judaism of his day embodied by the Pharisees and Sadducees.
In the writings of such antisemites as Emile Burnouf, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Paul de Lagarde, Jesus was redefined as an Aryan hero who struggled against Jews and Judaism.
Consistent with their origins in higher criticism, such writers often either rejected or minimised the miraculous aspects of Gospel narratives, reducing the crucifixion to a tragic coda to Jesus's life rather than its prefigured culmination.
Leading Nazis like Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg, Martin Bormann, and Joseph Goebbels, backed by Hitler, were hostile to Christianity and ultimately planned to de-Christianise Germany.
In the words of Paul Berben, positive Christianity therefore came to be advocated as a "term that could be overlaid with any interpretation required, depending on the circumstances" and the party declared itself for religious freedom provided this liberty did not "endanger the State or clash with the views of the 'Germanic Race'".
[20] In Mein Kampf, Hitler reassured his readers that both Christian denominations (Catholicism and Protestantism) were valid bases for the German people, provided the churches did not intervene in state affairs.
In private it is documented that Hitler scorned Pauline Christianity to his friends such as Bormann and played himself off as a type of Jesusist to him, but when out campaigning for power in Germany, he publicly made statements in favour of the religion.
Despite these radical divergences from preexisting doctrines, the party was careful to also stress the point that positive Christianity was not intended to be a third confession, nor was it supposed to contradict the traditional theologies of the established churches.
Alfred Rosenberg, editor of Völkischer Beobachter, wrote The Myth of the Twentieth Century, in which he argued that the Catholic and Protestant churches had distorted Christianity in such a way that the "heroic" and "Germanic" aspects of Jesus's life had been ignored.
For Rosenberg, positive Christianity was a transitional ideology that would pave the way to build a new fully racialist faith from the Hitlerian Reich Church.
Hitler's official brand of state-sanctioned Positive Christianity incorporated Protestant and Catholic variant denominations into the Reich Church.
[25] Müller's heretical views of St Paul and his arguments against the Semitic origins of Christ and the Bible quickly alienated sections of the Protestant church.
[24] The German Faith Movement which was founded by Jakob Wilhelm Hauer adopted a more thoroughly Aryanised form of the ideology, to support its claim that it represented the essence of the "Protestant" spirit, it mixed aspects of Christianity with ideas which were derived from "Aryan" religions such as Vedicism and "Aryo"-Persian religiosity (Manicheanism, etc.).
It attempted to separate Nazi officials from church affiliations, banning nativity plays, and calling for an end to daily prayers in schools.
[citation needed] We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race.
