When I visit concentration camps, along with learning about the horror, I pay attention to how the survivors, both victims and those who live nearby, deal with the evil happened in their midst.
At Flossenburg, one response was to build a memorial chapel just two years after the end of the war in 1947. The stone building of the chapel is attached to a former guard tower. The chapel honors the victims from 22 countries who were murdered in the camp. Its design stands against every form of Christian Nationalism--the arrogant and hateful belief that God picks specific nations to be His representative here on earth.
Christian Nationalism has been the justification for slaughter in the name of God since the Church melded with the government after the fall of the Roman Empire. I recently read Karl Jaspers "Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus." Jaspers makes clear that Jesus pointed to the Kingdom of God and had no program for any kind of kingdom here on earth. In the Gospels, there is nothing to support taking any kind of political power in the name of God. A vegan butcher is less of a contradiction than conquest in the name of Jesus.
The Beatitudes, or the Sermon on the Mount, one of the central documents of Christianity, says God is with the victims in this world. "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth." That is not the marching orders for "Christian" army to slaughter its neighbors.
But Christian Nationalism has fully infected the Evangelical Church in America. In 2016 nearly 80% of Evangelicals voted for the "America First" immigrant-hating candidate who expressed their beliefs. The percentage went up in 2020. Four years of lies and hate made the Christian Nationalist candidate more attractive. White supremacists like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka just made fake Christians more excited.
So in the midst of all the sadness of the remains of the Flossenburg concentration camp, I was glad to see a flat rejection of Christian Nationalism and all of the simmering hate behind it.
No one can love the whole world. Abstract love is not love at all. The commandment of God to love our neighbor whether in the Hebrew Scriptures of the New Testament can only be brought into being by loving those with us and near us.
The Holocaust, among its many horrors is a record of people who ignored, betrayed and murdered their Jewish neighbor. From the Pyrenees to the Ural mountains, the Jew next door was beaten, robbed and dragged away in the night to be murdered.
Every form of Christian Nationalism is wrong and hateful. Flag waving America First Evangelicals make the Jesus they claim to worship into a symbol of hate.
