Kevin Swanson, podcaster and producer of Christian nationalist homeschool curricula, devoted a recent episode of his Generations podcast to explaining why he is not a Nazi. (The short answer is that Nazism is a form of tyranny that broke many of the Ten Commandments, like murdering people.) Still, Swanson is not sure whether the “standards of morality” adopted by the winning allied powers were any better than the “standard of morality” adopted by the Nazis.
His guest, Pennsylvania pastor and “Doctrine to Dominion” podcaster Jacob Tanner, affirmed his own non-Nazi status, declaring that even though Jews who still practice Judaism are “enemies of Christianity,” he loves them the way he loves all his enemies.
Swanson, who is promoting his 1,000-page textbook on God’s providential action in American history, has lots of questions about World War II and the post-war consensus around liberal democracy:
Did World War II make the world free for democracy, or did World War II make the world free for international Marxism? Or did World War II make the world free from God’s laws and the Christian law order of the previous one thousand years? … Put another way, were the accepted standards of morality established by the winners any better than the standard of morality advocated by the Nazis and the Axis powers?
According to Swanson, Germany was already “apostasized” by the decriminalization of homosexuality, compulsory public school attendance, and socialism before the Nazis took power. The apostasy of the rest of the West, he said, came after World War II when the victors became prideful and no longer thought they needed God.
Leftist, Marxist, pro-homosexual, pro-abortion, pro-godless education, pro-everything that’s against God, came to dominate in these allied nations. They legalized abortion, homosexualized mirage, and they introduced every form of perversion into the schools. So the question is valid: did World War II make the world free for democracy? Or did World War II make the world free for international Marxism? Or did World War II make the world free from God’s laws and the Christian law order that dominated for one thousand years prior? …
Apparently, the lesson that the world was supposed to take from World War II was this—all right, this is the post-World War II consensus: Aggressive nationalism, racial politics, antisemitism, and authoritarianism cause catastrophe. Therefore, post-war society should favor liberal democracy, minority protections, international cooperation, and distrust of extreme nationalism.
But what if liberal democracy, international cooperation, and multiculturalism imposed upon nations could be just as bad as the Nazis? What about that?
…
What if the fundamental problem of Germany was 40 years of dabbling homosexuality, naturalistic evolution, or just good old-fashioned Christian apostasy, and a rejection of Jesus Christ, a national pride, and favoring of traditional civilization rooted in paganism as opposed to God’s law revealed in the Old and New Testaments?
Swanson and Tanner talked about the conundrum faced by voters over whether to choose the lesser of two evils. “When you’re left with two evils, just admit it,” Swanson said. “God has turned your nation over to judgment. The handwriting is on the wall.” Only if the church repents, he said, might God save us from annihilation.
Tanner said it is “unfortunate” that in recent years many young men have embraced neo-Nazi ideology. “You cannot be a Christian and hold to that worldview or that ideology,” Tanner said. “You need to be biblically grounded is what we’re getting at here. And so if it’s not the scripture, if it’s not the word of God that is grounding us in whatever our worldview is, then ultimately it doesn’t matter if you end up rejecting Nazism; you’re going to embrace some other evil instead.”
Tanner, who is much younger than Swanson, talked about the generational shift on “opinions regarding the Jews and regarding Israel,” adding that, “there’s a lot of different reasons for that, some of them are theological, some of them are eschatological [having to do with the end times].” The longstanding opinion of the church regarding Jews, Tanner said, was that they were enemies of the gospel, but God would eventually restore them by bringing them into the church. But, he said, in recent decades some leaders like Christian Zionist John Hagee gave Jews an “elevated position” as the chosen people and suggested they were automatically in the kingdom of God:
So then what happens is you have younger guys come along, guys within my generation and the generation before me, who go, ‘Well, that’s clearly not biblical. What does the Bible actually say?’
But it goes back to that false dichotomy we were talking about before. It’s almost as if these men believe that it’s either you love the Jews or you hate the Jews, it’s one or the other. And that’s clearly not the case. We can actually come to a position where we say, ‘Look, those who are still practicing Judaism are enemies of Christianity, and they must receive the gospel, and they must repent of their sins, and they must be saved.’
And I love them in the sense that I love all of my enemies, because I desire earnestly their salvation and their inclusion into the kingdom of God. But they can’t just come in as they are. They need to repent and they need to trust in Jesus Christ by faith alone.
Swanson and Tanner agreed that God does not need the help of secular nations like the modern state of Israel or even the U.S. to establish his kingdom. But Swanson had a warning for all nations:
In the meantime, we call the nations of the earth to kiss the son, lest he be angry and they perish from the way, whether it be a Hitler in Germany, or a Stalin in the Soviet Union, or anywhere else, or even a Trump here in the United States, we call on all of ‘em—Netanyahu out in Israel, kiss the son. Kiss the Lord Jesus Christ, lest he be angry and you perish from the way.
