Beyond Confession? ‘Political Religion’ and Ideological Incorrectness in the Study of Nazism

Abstract

Holocaust studies have seen the rise of 'political religion' as part of a 'confessional turn'. To account for the fact that Nazism experienced widespread support from the German population, 'ideology' was replaced with the broader and culturally more inclusive term 'religion'. This article examines the mechanisms behind the rise of 'political religion' as well as the factors behind its subsequent decline. It argues that 'political religion', despite its culturally inclusive label, persists in connoting dogma and indoctrination. In this respect, the concept resembles rather than differs from the abandoned term 'ideology'. Finally, the article draws from research on the Nazi principle of transgression and presents this principle as a form of 'ideological incorrectness'. The concept of 'ideological incorrectness' should be seen as a move beyond belief simply understood as confession and, thus, a move beyond the conceptual constraints of 'political religion'.

Nation, Race, and Religious Identity in the Early Nazi Movement

“…The literature on the interplay between Nazism, with its putatively modern racialized conception of the nation, and religious communities in Germany, both Protestant and Catholic, has undergone a rapid expansion in recent years (Heilbronner 1998;Steigmann-Gall 2003;Hesemann 2004;Jantzen 2008;Probst 2012;Ericksen 2012;Blaschke 2014;Faulkner Rossi 2015;Weikart 2016). An earlier interpretive trend that presented Nazism as a modern form of "political religion"-an ersatz worldview that stepped into the vacuum left by secularization to offer adherents meaning and a sense of cosmic orientation that was, ultimately, largely incompatible with traditional Christianity (Bry 1924;Voegelin 1939)-has also experienced a resurgence over the past two decades (Ley and Schoeps 1997;Bärsch 1998;Burleigh 2001;Rissmann 2001;Besier and Lübbe 2005;Gentile 2006;Maier 2007;Schreiber 2009;Wennberg 2014). A number of recent studies have also interpreted the irrational and supernatural elements of Nazi ideology as an essentially anti-Christian response to the "disenchantment" of modernity in a Weberian sense (Kurlander 2012;Kurlander 2015;Kurlander 2017) or as an attempt to elevate conceptions of race to a position of pseudo-divinity (Varshizky 2012;Koehne 2013;Koehne 2014).…”