BarcelonaChristmas is just around the corner. For many, despite the loss of faith, it still holds meaning. What is it? The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus For centuries they have been the most important story in Western culture. A century and a half ago, Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche began to shake the myth of the Son of God. But while the divine aspect has been waning, his figure, despite the Church's duplicitous role, has maintained its moral authority: humility and generosity, radical egalitarianism, forgiveness, courage. Even an atheist philosopher like Bertrand Russell wondered if Jesus was "the wisest of men."
Jesus has remained on the scene, but he no longer has the centrality he once did, because a negative myth has taken his place: Hitler. "The most obvious difference between our old moral reference point, Jesus, and the new one, Hitler, is that we have substituted a negative example for a positive one (...) Now we know what we hate, but we don't know what we love." Yes, we have human rights (established precisely after the Second World War) or the idea of freedom (now hijacked by a new radical right), but these are generic categories that leave us with "a rather impoverished understanding of what philosophers used to call the good"
This is the suggestive thesis of the book The Hitler EraFrom historian Alec Ryrie (London, 1971), an essay published by Raig Verd in a translation by Gustau Muñoz. The decline in Jesus's importance became definitive after the defeat of Nazism, with Hitler becoming the modern embodiment of evil. In the 1920s, with the Russian Revolution and during the Spanish Republic, and soon after with the Civil War and subsequently the world war, most Christians, faced with the threat of atheistic communism, chose, with conviction or as the lesser evil, the fascism of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. And then they fell from grace, like Saint Paul.
Then the new point of reference took shape: "Nazism is our main, and perhaps only, absolute. In a relativistic and pluralistic age [from the 1960s onward], it is our only point of reference," writes Ryrie, who adds: "Perhaps we still believe that Jesus is good, and not with the bad guy." We can mock crosses, but not swastikas. The shared sacred narrative has become the story of resistance to Nazism, which is like our Trojan War, serving not so much to remember and honor the victims as to clearly define who the villains are. The strongest insult we can hurl at someone—otherwise quite banal—is to call them "Nazi!" For centuries it was "Satan!"
But even this is beginning to crumble. Ryrie believes that this brief "Hitler era" is drawing to a close. There is the paradox of a new radical right that, on the one hand, trivializes and whitewashes Nazism, and on the other, calls for the restoration of "Christian civilization." And there's also the fact that the negative myth has run its course, even for those of us who watch with panic this deceitful game played by the supposed new authoritarians, supposedly Christian: Trump, Orbán, Putin, Meloni, Orriols... They've grasped that a negative myth doesn't get you very far—and they're right—and that's why—and that's why, rhetorically. Incidentally, they also avoid settling accounts with the colonial plunder and slavery of the West. Undoubtedly, they are light-years away from the message and practice of Jesus.
What does Ryrie propose? Overcoming the culture wars. He suggests that universal secular progressivism take the best of the Christian tradition (values, ethics, a kind of Christianity without religion) and tells ultra-populism to turn the page on criticizing Wokism and embrace the anti-Nazi legacy (human rights, democracy, respect for minorities and the vulnerable). In other words, Ryrie advocates for a return to the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated, as it appears in the Gospel of Matthew, but which is older than walking itself. A rule he also embraced. Immanuel Kant to the categorical imperative: act only according to that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
