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In order to understand National Socialism one must recognize its religious nature. Many Germans were attracted to the party by its pledge to re-establish a true community of the people, a goal that was celebrated as “holy”.
     Not only did Hitler promise to solve political, social, and economic problems, he also responded to a widely felt need for salvation. The prospect of salvation elevated politics into the realm of religion and lent meaning to the lives of those who embraced it.
      In this work Klaus Vondung explores the various forms in which the elevation of politics into the sphere of religion was expressed in the Third Reich: in the faith of committed National Socialists, in the party’s cult events which celebrated the “community  of the people” as a “community of faith” and the Fuhrer as “savior”, and in the persecution of the Jews that was ‘justified’ in religious terms by demonizing Jews as the “evil enemies of humanity” responsible for the world’s ills. This apocalyptic worldview was the extreme manifestation of the religious nature of National Socialism and, in the final analysis, the only plausible explanation for the intention of exterminating the Jews that led to the holocaust.

A comparison of the faith and politics of former Confederate chaplains with intriguing insights about the evolution of their postwar beliefs and the Lost Cause

Pulpits of the Lost Cause: The Faith and Politics of Former Confederate Chaplains during Reconstruction is the first in-depth study of former chaplains that juxtaposes their religion and politics, thereby revealing important insights about the Lost Cause movement. Steve Longenecker demonstrates that while some former chaplains vigorously defended the Lost Cause and were predictably conservative in the pulpit, embracing orthodoxy and resisting religious innovation, others were unexpectedly progressive and advocated on behalf of evolution, theological liberalism, and modern biblical criticism.

Former Confederate chaplains embodied both the distinctive white, Southern, regional identity and the variation within it. Most were theologically conservative and Lost Cause racists. But as with the larger South, variation abounded. The Lost Cause, which Longenecker interprets as a broad popular movement with numerous versions, meant different things to different chaplains. It ranged from diehard-ism to tempered sectional forgiveness to full reconciliation to a harmless once-a-year Decoration Day ritual.

This volume probes the careers of ten former chaplains, including their childhoods, wartime experiences, Lost Cause personas, and theologies, making use of manuscripts and published sermons as well as newspapers, diaries, memoirs, denominational periodicals, letters, and the books they themselves produced. In theology, many former chaplains were predictably conservative, while others were unexpectedly broad-minded and advocated evolution, theological liberalism, and modern Biblical criticism. One former chaplain became a social-climbing Harvard progressive. Another wrote innovative, liberal theology read by European scholars. Yet another espoused racial equality, at least in theory if not full practice. Additionally, former chaplains often exhibited the fundamental human trait of compartmentalization, most notably by extolling the past as they celebrated the Lost Cause while simultaneously looking to the future as religious progressives or New South boosters. The stereotypical preacher of the Lost Cause—a gray-clad Bible thumper—existed sufficiently to create the image but hardly enough to be universally accurate.