Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe

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This edited volume arose from an international workshop convened in 2006 by Matthew Feldman and Marius Turda with Tudor Georgescu, supported by Routledge, and the universities of Oxford Brookes, Northampton and CEU (Budapest). As the field of fascist studies continues to integrate more fully into pan-European studies of the twentieth century, and given the increasing importance of secular ‘political religion’ as a taxonomic tool for understanding such revolutionary movements, this collection of essays considers the intersection between institutional Christian faiths, theology and congregations on the one hand, and fascist ideology on the other. In light of recent debates concerning the intersecting secularisation of religion and (usually Christian-based) the sacralisation of politics, Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe approaches such conundrums from an alternative perspective: how, in Europe between the wars, did Christian clergy, laity and institutions respond to the rise of national fascist movements? In doing so, this volume provides case studies from fifteen European countries with analyses that are both original in content and comprehensive in scope. In dealing with the relationship of various interwar fascist movements and their respective national religious institutions, this edited collection promises to significantly contribute to relevant academic studies into the interaction of interwar Christian confessions and radical right politics. This book was previously published as a special issue of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions. Matthew Feldman is a Lecturer in Twentieth Century History at the University of Northampton and editor of the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Reli- gions. Marius Turda is RCUK Academic Fellow in Twentieth Century Central and East- ern European Bio-Medicine at Oxford Brookes University and consultant editor of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions. Tudor Georgescu is a PhD candidate at Oxford Brookes University and senior reviews editor of Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions. Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions Series Editors: (Michael Burleigh, Washington and Lee University, Virginia) and Robert Mallett, University of Birmingham. Building upon past successes, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions continues to provide a forum bringing together leading academics and younger researchers engaged in exploring the relationship between religion and politics in the widest sense. Topics range from case-studies exploring the interaction between contemporary politicised religions and democratic politics, the sacralisation of time, and especially considerations of secular and ‘totalising’ movements, such as communist, fascist, miltant Islamic, and Ba’athist movements. This especially relates to scholarship demonstrating a sophisticated awareness of the methodological issues raised by such topics. This includes mapping fruitful areas of synergy between different subject areas and specialisms, revising conventional definitions of key terms such as ‘totalitarian movement’ and ‘political religion’ and applying non-Eurocentric perspectives to key political and historical events. International Fascism, 1919–45 Edited by Gert Sorensen, University of Copenhagen and Robert Mallett, University of Birmingham Totalitarian Democracy and After International Colloquium in Memory of Jacob Talmon Edited by Yehoshua Arieli and Nathan Rotenstreich Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Third Reich Selected Essays Uriel Tal, with In Memoriam by Saul Friedländer The Seizure of Power Fascism in Italy 1919–1929 Adrian Lyttelton The French and Italian Communist Parties Comrades and Culture Cyrille Guiat, Herriott-Watt University, Edinburgh Foreword by David Bell The Lesser Evil Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices Edited by Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin Fascism as a Totalitarian Movement Edited by Roger Griffin The Italian Road to Totalitarianism Emilio Gentile Translated by Robert Mallett Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Third Reich Selected Essays Uriel Tal, with in memoriam by Saul Friedländer Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Volume I Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships Edited by Hans Maier Stalinism at the Turn of the Milennium: Russian and Western Views John Keep and Alter Litvin Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Volume II Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships Edited by Hans Maier / Michael Schäfer Translated by Jodi Bruhn Totalitarianism and Political Religions, Volume III Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships – Theory and History of Interpretation Edited by Hans Maier Translated by Jodi Bruhn Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe Edited by Matthew Feldman and Marius Turda with Tudor Georgescu The Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945 Edited by Sabrina P. Pamet ClericalFULL TITLE Fascism in Interwar Europe

Edited by Matthew Feldman and Marius Turda with Tudor Georgescu FirstIMPRINT PAGE published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

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ISBN10: 0-415-44824-7 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-44824-6 (hbk) ForTaylorFTMP_A_DED.sgm10.1080/Totalitarian1469-0764Original2008820000002008 and& Article Francis (print)/1743-9647Francis Movements Ltd and Political (online)Claire, Religions Aliki and Sabine, with love This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgements ix

‘Clerical Fascism’ in Interwar Europe: an Introduction Matthew Feldman and Marius Turda xi

1 The ‘Holy Storm’: ‘Clerical Fascism’ through the Lens of Modernism Roger Griffin 1

Orthodox/Greek-Orthodox Christianity and Fascism

2 Fascism and Religion: The Metaxas Regime in Greece and the ‘Third Hellenic Civilisation’. Some Theoretical Observations on ‘Fascism’, ‘Political Religion’ and ‘Clerical Fascism’ Aristotle A. Kallis 17

3 Between ‘Clerical Fascism’ and Political Orthodoxy: Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Interwar Serbia Maria Falina 35

4 Sacralised Politics in Action: the February 1937 Burial of the Romanian Legionary Leaders

Ion Mot¸caet]d[li and Vasile Marin Valentin Sa˘ ab[ervndulescue] 47

5 By Cross and Sword: ‘Clerical Fascism’ in Interwar Western Ukraine Anton Shekhovtsov 59

Protestant Christianity and Fascism

6 ‘On The Side of Christ’: Fascist Clerics in 1930s Britain Thomas Linehan 75

7 Completing the Lutheran Reformation: Ultra-nationalism, Christianity and the Possibility of ‘Clerical Fascism’ in Interwar Sweden Lena Berggren 91

8 The Nazis’ ‘Positive Christianity’: a Variety of ‘Clerical Fascism’? Richard Steigmann-Gall 103

Catholic Christianity and Fascism

9 Catholic Modernities in Fascist Italy: the Intellectuals of Azione Cattolica Jorge Dagnino 117

10 Catholicism and Fascism in Belgium Bruno De Wever 131

11 Political Catholicism, Crisis of Democracy and Salazar’s New State in Portugal António Costa Pinto and Maria Inácia Rezola 141 12 Enacting Encyclicals? Cultural Politics and ‘Clerical Fascism’ in Austria, 1933–1938 Robert Pyrah 157

13 Radical Catholicism and Fascism in Croatia, 1918–1945 Mark Biondich 171

14 Catholicising Fascism, Fascistising Catholicism? The Blueshirts and the Jesuits in 1930s Ireland Mike Cronin 189

15 ‘Do not Lead us into (Fascist) Temptation’: The Catholic Church in Interwar Hungary Béla Bodó 201

Conclusion

‘Clerical Fascism’: Context, Overview and Conclusion John Pollard 221

About the Contributors 235

Index 239 Preface and Acknowledgements

AsTaylorFTMP_A_232008.sgm10.1080/14690760701321122Totalitarian1469-0764Original2007820000002007MatthewFeldmanmatthew.feldman@northampton.ac.uk and& Article Francis (print)/1743-9647Francis Movements Ltd isLtd and Political (online)so Religions typical of collaborative projects like this one, achievement rests upon a number of different factors – the failure of any one of which can spell disaster. In the first place, the international conference incubating this edited volume, “’Clerical Fascism’ in Interwar Europe”, held in Oxford between 7 and 9 April 2006, was graciously funded by the Department of History, University of Northampton; the Institute of Cultural and Historical Studies, Oxford Brookes University; the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary; the History Faculty and Modern European History Research Centre, University of Oxford; and by Routledge Journals. We gratefully acknowledge their individual and collective support in making this event both a reality and a success. Yet the conversion of a successful weekend into a substantial publication was due to assiduous labour and remarkable dedication by Tudor Georgescu. Alongside the impressive reliability of our individual contributors – every one of whom has been punctual and professional – Georgescu’s personal and academic qualities made this volume possible. Also typically, the guidance of Routledge Journals’ staff continues to be invaluable. They consistently offered support and encouragement, and patience when the going got either difficult or distracted. For the particularly impressive team supporting TMPR – here Glyn Lavers, Nicola Garwood, Louise Armstrong, Rebecca Webb and Richard Delahunty are especially worthy of our thanks – capi- talised acknowledgements are, yet again, due and deserved. Additional assistance has been kindly granted by a host of other individuals who either participated in the conference itself, or subsequently helped bring about this volume: Sorin Antohi, Robert Bates, Carol Beadle, Martin Conway, Robert Evans, Roger Griffin, Paul Jackson, Robert Mallett, Harriet Notley and Sally Sokoloff. Our thanks are due to you all. Finally, this volume is dedicated to three exceptional people: to Detlef Mühlberger, a pioneer in the study of how Nazis became Nazis, a humbly exceptional scholar and gentleman, and a valued friend; to Jodie Feldman, a genuine believer, with love; and to Aliki Georgakopoulou, with love, and with thanks.

Matthew Feldman Marius Turda This page intentionally left blank ‘Clerical Fascism’ in Interwar Europe: An Introduction

MATTHEW FELDMAN and MARIUS TURDA

In 1934 Frederick L. Schuman, financed by an American Academy of Political and Social Sciences fellowship, set about conducting an ambitious fieldwork project in Germany: a study of the recent National Socialist revolution. His report concluded, strikingly: ‘For the present, the new German cult, with its parapherna- lia of symbols, rituals, hymns, sacred writings, saints, and martyrs brings genuine solace to the troubled middle-class soul’.1 This insight, which would undoubtedly have enjoyed the approval of the eminent German protestant theologian and Nazi Party member, Emanuel Hirsch, was nevertheless intended as a scholarly expla- nation of Nazism’s transformation into an ersatz, or political, religion – one aiming to link this ‘solace’ to the wider social and existential crises experienced by so many Germans in the early 1930s. The thesis that Nazism (in addition to other movements) synthesised political extremism with religious millenarianism was already explored at length by the German political philosopher Eric Voegelin’s near-contemporaneous Die Politis- chen Religionen. In the seven decades since Voegelin’s classic, an enormous body of scholarly literature has grown up around the nature of sacralised forms of secular politics, not just in respect of Nazism,2 but in terms of the general utility and relevance of the concept ‘political religion’,3 as well as this phrase’s relevance to other movements and ideologies. Moreover, an increasing diffusion of the concept ‘political religion’ during the last 10 or so years – not least in the pages of Totalitar- ian Movements and Political Religions, but also in the more recent writings of scholars such as Hans Maier, Michael Burleigh and Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch – has dramatically increased our understanding of twentieth-century totalitarian movements. This has been a major achievement, particularly regarding how, and under what conditions, secular political ideologies and their attendant political movements can assume sacral – that is, religious and/or faith-based – qualities. Especially in the last decade, studies from this perspective have been extended to Maoist China, post-Cold War North Korea and Stalinist Russia in terms of Marxism, in addition to Nazism, Italian Fascism and various abortive fascist movements in interwar Europe. However, as Emilio Gentile’s recent Politics as Religion reminds us, like Schuman and Voegelin, our contemporary understanding of ‘the sacralisation of politics’ is due to a host of contemporaneous observers, like the little-known Italian philosopher, Adriano Tilgher:

The period after the [First World] War witnessed one of the most startling outbreaks of pure numinousness ever recalled in the history of the world. We witness the birth of new deities [numines] with our own eyes. You would need to be blind and deaf to all current realities if you were unable xii M. Feldman and M. Turda

to realize that for very many of our contemporaries State, Fatherland, Nation, Race and Class are objects not just of enthusiastic veneration but also of mystical adoration […] The twentieth century promises to add a few interesting chapters to the history of religious wars.4

Academic consideration of ‘political religions’, and particularly their relationship with Christianity, has led some commentators to argue for a Christian basis to fascist movements like German National Socialism. Foremost amongst this new wave of scholarship treating religions seriously in terms of fascist ideology is Richard Steigmann-Gall’s 1999 The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity 1919–1945. Taking the Nazis’ twenty-fourth point in their February 1920 Party Programme as a point of departure for investigating their alleged ‘positive Christianity’, Steigmann- Gall, a contributor to the present volume, has helped to re-open the debate about fascism and religion.5 In a recent special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History dedicated to Steigmann-Gall’s monograph – exemplifying the revival of interest in the multi-faceted interactions between politics and religion in the modern world – both Ernst Piper and Doris Bergen point out that the Nazis need not have assumed an overtly religious guise for their own flock to have been responsive to their brand of sacralised politics. For on the eve of the Second World War, writes Bergen:

The overwhelming majority of Germans remained baptized, tax-paying members of the official Christian Churches throughout the 12 years of nazi rule. In hindsight, it may seem impossible to reconcile the vicious hatreds of nazism with Christianity’s injunction to ‘turn the other cheek’ or to square the circle of nazi antisemitism with Christianity’s obvious origins in Judaism. But the vast majority of Germans – over 95 per cent by last count in 1939 – evidently had no problem doing so. The fact alone speaks to a coexistence of Christianity and National Socialism [and Germans] voted with their feet and with their church-tax-paying pocket-books and their participation in rituals such as baptism, to remain Christian.6

Even if, as is suggested by most contributors to JCH’s 2007 Special Issue, entitled “Nazism, Christianity and Political Religion: A Debate”, virtually all Nazi functionaries were likely to agree with Martin Bormann’s rejection of any ‘presuppos[ition of] a synthesis of National Socialism and Christianity’, which he dismissed as an ‘impossibility’, this was not the way it looked to much of the laity.7 For many church-going Germans during the Third Reich, like their nation- alistic counterparts across interwar Europe, doubtless carried their party membership cards to local Sunday services. However, if Steigmann-Gall’s thesis that Nazi leaders retained certain residual Christian beliefs suggests that a larger exploration of the ‘Christian’ roots of European fascism, and especially Nazism, is called for, it also raises the inverse question: to what extent did interwar Chris- tians, especially clerics, see national fascist movements as more than revolutionary parties with secular goals, but as ‘holy’ redeemers of the nation or race; or at the very least, as spiritual enough to do business with? This returns us to Schuman’s commentary, of particular relevance to the ensuing 16 texts published here. For not only did he note, like many others did at the time, the adoption of religious symbolism by an ostensibly secular movement, Schuman also discerned a symbiosis taking place between religion and politics as well. For some Nazis, and indeed some priests, fascism and Christianity Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe xiii were neither antithetical nor even necessarily oppositional forms of faith. In fact, the prospect of fusing the secular and the sacred exerted a profound appeal to many clerics intent on solving the perceived crises of modernity. This sense was redoubled by the imperative defence of Christianity against the ‘godless’ rise of communism. As early as 1922, the Italian Catholic priest and leader of Partito Popolare Italiano, Luigi Sturzo, used the term ‘clerical fascist’ to describe those Italian clerics actively involved with Fascism. ‘Clerical fascism’ was thus, from its inception, a term already situated at the interstices between fascism and Christianity. Yet if the relationship between the various Christian confessions and right- wing movements has long been recognised as a major factor in the history of interwar Europe, it is striking how little has been done to test the conceptual feasi- bility of Sturzo’s ‘clerical fascism’. In part, this is due to a predominant focus on right-wing intellectual and political elites fascinated by religion and/or having a religious education, instead of more closely investigating those religious leaders and priests involved in radical political activism. Yet as these studies suggest, for some, typically younger, priests – and a wide swath of the churchgoing laity – shared enemies led to an active collaboration with ‘political religions’ in the form of interwar European fascism. More troublingly, it produced many instances of proactive clerical collaboration with fascist movements, which in some cases meant clerics not just conniving at, but participating in, fascist violence and even genocide (as in wartime Croatia). In short, Christianity and interwar fascism were not incommensurate worldviews in practice, at least in the minds of a surprising number of xenophobic priests across Europe. Indeed, in terms of the stance that many adopted toward fascist political religions, it seems that a composite, or syncretic, Weltanschauung was adopted by some church members – laity and clergy alike – in all the major Christian denominations, sometimes in significant numbers. There is also evidence that in the case of some interwar fascist movements, many chief ideologues and most faithful devotees displayed a reciprocal readiness to assert the compatibility of secular nationalism with traditional religion. It is precisely the degree of cross- over, or ‘hybridisation’, of these two ostensibly antagonistic faith systems – one long-established and monotheistic, the other secular and revolutionary – that “‘Clerical Fascism’ in Interwar Europe” sets out to examine. Together, these analyses examine the frequently complex, and often paradoxical, relationships that arose between Christian confessions in Europe (Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox) and 14 national permutations of fascism (whether in the form of abortive movements never taking power, or in terms of the German-Italian Axis and their continental collaborators). Most of the texts published here were originally presented at an international conference of the same name, held in April 2006 at Oxford Brookes University; several others were specially commissioned for this collection. A conceptual framework within which to locate these case studies is first offered by Roger Griffin‘s overview, ‘“The Holy Storm”, which originally opened the conference itself and which – like all the essays incorporated into this volume – has been considerably expanded upon. Following Griffin’s taxonomic and contextual considerations, the 14 chapters presented thereafter test this framework. These are book-ended by John Pollard’s concluding reflections, assessing both the conceptual difficulty and methodological pitfalls facing any exploration of ‘clerical fascism’. xiv M. Feldman and M. Turda

In attempting to alleviate this term’s inherent epistemological weaknesses to date, some conceptual points of reference were suggested to authors. These were advanced in the interest of providing a common focus for the array of highly diverse national case studies presented here. In particular, contributors were asked to consider the following questions: To what does ‘clerical fascism’ refer – the clergy, laity or both? What is the relationship between ‘clerical fascism’ and concepts like ‘generic fascism’, ‘political religions’ and ‘religious politics’? How do historical processes like modernisation and secularisation bear upon ‘clerical fascism’? What was the impact of universal confessions like Catholicism on national permutations of ‘clerical fascism’? and finally, how did antisemitism and racism influence the development of ‘clerical fascism’? Yet in approaching these broad areas of enquiry, contributors were not asked to endorse the heuristic value of the term ‘clerical fascism’. Indeed, several do not, either in terms of individual fascist priests or collective fascist movements. While a number of authors find the concept relevant to their case studies, only a few are willing to label any given church organisation ‘clerical fascist’. Yet what emerges from some of the ensuing analyses is a deeply ambivalent atti- tude to fascism by some European clerics, who frequently saw fascism as ‘the least of all evils’. Only in extreme cases would clerics go so far as to believe, echoing Romanian Legionary journalist I. P. Prudendi: ‘God is a fascist!’8 The considerable range of contributors’ responses to the issues raised by “‘Clerical Fascism’ in Interwar Europe” is due in no small measure to the fact that this is the first time the term has been given extended academic scrutiny, and the first time that a deliberate attempt has been made to apply it to as wide a geographical and confessional foundation as possible. To this end, texts include confessions as diverse as British Anglicanism and other forms of Protestantism to Croatian Catholicism and Serbian Orthodoxy in Yugoslavia. Similarly, countries surveyed range from Sweden in northern Europe to Greece in the south, and from Ukraine in the east to Ireland in the west. In addition to testing the applicability of the concept ‘clerical fascism’ to states in interwar Europe, this collection also endeavours to illuminate wider questions relating to the study of fascism: the degree of compatibility between ‘clerical fascism’ and fascism; the questionable relevance of ‘political religion’ in this context, and the ostensibly secular nature of fascist ideology itself. In order to best carry out this agenda, the editors felt that a confessional grouping would provide for the most effective analysis of ‘clerical fascism’, thus avoiding contested geographical divisions for the countries in question, as well as similar disputes over what constitutes a ‘empowered’, as opposed to an ‘abortive’ fascist movement (as exemplified by wartime Hungary). As a result, the first section surveys the relationship of Orthodox churches to fascism, including Greece, western Ukraine, Romania and Serbia. This is followed by three largely Protestant countries – Sweden, Germany and Britain – with the latter two, more markedly multi-confessional, countries presenting less straightforward instances of the comparatively ‘newer’ Protestant denominations of Christianity. The third section focuses on the oldest and most diffused confession across Europe, Cathol- icism, with chapters on Italy, Belgium, Portugal, Austria, Croatia, Hungary and Ireland. Although another volume could be devoted to the dozen or so European countries not included here, the present collection of essays can claim to have covered a significant sample of the fascist–clerical relationships that arose in the interwar period, deliberately selecting exploration of cases rarely encountered in Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe xv

Anglophone history (Greece, Hungary, the western Ukraine), rather than episodes more familiar in Anglophone secondary literature (Spain, Slovakia and France). The first glimpse of ‘clerical fascism’ in interwar Europe is given in the section ‘Orthodox/Greek-Orthodox Christianity and Fascism’, which opens with Aristo- tle Kallis’ discussion of Greek interwar politics in “Fascism and Religion: The Metaxas Regime in Greece and the ‘Third Hellenic Civilisation’”. As with similar Orthodox Christian countries such as Serbia and Romania, the processes of political liberalisation and social modernisation in Greece created propitious conditions for fascist ideas to emerge. However, although religion was a central facet of Ioannis Metaxas’ regenerative project for the nation, his notion of religion heavily depended on restoring and continuing the established church’s role in Greek society, rather than attempting to introduce ‘religious politics’ into the heart of his regime. As Kallis clearly demonstrates, Metaxas himself attempted to base his regime on the ‘traditional authority’ of established entities (the nation, religion and the church), alongside a novel layer of personal ‘charismatisation’ (the leader cult) and an emerging ethos of totalitarianism. In terms of Orthodoxy in central and southeast Europe, one notices that Croatia’s experience of fascism was not the only entanglement between radical politics and Christianity, not even within the federal state of Yugoslavia, for Serbia also exhibited numerous features characteristic of ultra-nationalism and fascism, as Maria Falina argues in “Between ‘Clerical Fascism’ and Political Orthodoxy: Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Interwar Serbia”. Assessing the pivotal role played by nationalism in the politicisation of religion, Falina considers ‘political Orthodoxism’ a more appropriate term for describing the relationship between Orthodoxy and fascism than ‘clerical fascism’. In a similarly sceptical vein, Valentin Sabe[vre]˘ ndulescu’s “Sacralised Politics in Action: the February 1937

Burial of the Romanian Iron Guard leaders Ion Mocet¸]d[li a and Vasile Marin” inspects the Orthodox rituals used by the Legionary movement in Romania, as exemplified by the funeral held for two high-ranking functionaries. Even if one were to agree that this illustrated a form of ‘sacralised politics’, advocating the creation of a ‘new man’ and a ‘new country’ – one fully embraced by Romanian Legionaries – the fact that they attempted to transcend the canonical boundaries of the Orthodox 9 Church leads Sabe[vre]˘ ndulescu to refrain from defining them as ‘clerical fascists’. In contrast, it was the Greek Orthodox Church that dominated much of the evolving nationalism in interwar western Ukraine, suggests Anton Shekhovtsov. “By Cross and Sword: ‘Clerical Fascism’ in Interwar Western Ukraine” finds that the fascist ‘style’ of certain political parties, as well as the ‘fascistisation’ of the political milieu, ignited the transformation of nationalist clericalism into ‘clerical fascism’. Echoing Schuman’s remark about the ‘troubled soul’ of the nation, Shekhovtsov insists that it was the Christian churches’ inability to answer the general European crisis – experienced by millions during the interwar period – that gave rise to radical forms of Christianity. What emerges from his analysis is the sense that the perceived crisis of the modern world constituted a main factor not only in the successes of Fascism and Nazism, but also in the problematic cases of friendship and even fusion between fascism and interwar Christian confessions. This fusion of fascism with clerical ideology is also the main focus of the three studies comprising the section ‘Protestant Christianity and Fascism’, which commences with Tom Linehan’s “’On The Side of Christ’: Fascist Clerics in 1930s Britain”. It appears that, even though BUF clerics (both Catholic and Protestant) xvi M. Feldman and M. Turda did not tend to see fascism as a substitute for their own Christian beliefs, many of them hoped to reconcile Christianity with fascist praxis (an example of collusion rather than synthesis, to adopt the terminology proposed here by Roger Griffin). In similar vein, the Swedish case study next explored by Lena Berggren, entitled “Completing the Lutheran Reformation: Ultra-nationalism, Christianity and the Possibility of ‘Clerical Fascism’ in Interwar Sweden”, investigates the relationship between Protestant Christianity (in this case evangelical Lutheranism) and nationalism. Berggren focuses upon forms of fascism materialising around radical theologians within Lutheran churches that generally favoured the ascen- dancy of Nazism in Germany. Similar to Germany, many Swedish fascists perceived the evangelical Nordic Faith to be not only profoundly Christian, but the pure, true and original form of Christianity, one revealing the ‘natural teachings of God’. Furthermore, viewing Christianity and fascism as sharing common assump- tions about a desired regeneration of society and the nation is an approach able to provide fruitful insights into central Europe as well. In the case of Nazi Germany, as Richard Steigmann-Gall demonstrates, the argument for a link between the Deutsche Christen and the Nazi attempts to re-shape the German Weltanschauung has been misinterpreted by a number of scholars. In “The Nazis’ ‘Positive Christianity’: a Variety of ‘Clerical Fascism’?”, he argues that the Nazis did take an active interest in religious activities and church organisations, thus demonstrating that a ‘clerical fascist’ variety of Nazism may be a viable interpretative tool, so long as the concept is provided the kind of terminological precision it has thus far lacked. Likewise, the relationship between Catholicism and fascism has generated much controversy, as is demonstrated by the seven texts forming the final section in this volume, ‘Catholic Christianity and Fascism’. However, as Jorge Dagnino clearly demonstrates in “Catholic Modernities in Fascist Italy: The Intellectuals of Azione Cattolica”, discussion of ‘clerical fascism’ might be repositioned: if one views Fascism not simply as anti-modern, but as an alternative form of modernity, then the relationship between religion and Fascism takes on a different dimension: the new nationalist morality, family ethic and ultimately rejuvenated nation advocated by Fascism was favourably received by many Catholic clerics. That such a shared call for a better and healthier country was answered by many Catholics is convincingly shown by the case of Belgium. According to Bruno De Wever’s “Catholicism and Fascism in Belgium”, the history of Léon Degrelle and the Rexist movement suggests that much of the Catholic agenda was embraced by Belgian fascists. It was, therefore, by reaching a compromise between the revolutionary zeal of some members within the church, and fascism’s ambition to become a political religion, that a national form of ‘clerical fascism’ ultimately appeared in Belgium. It was this compromise between the Roman Catholic Church and the state that also provided the institutional framework for António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo. As António Costa Pinto argues in “Political Catholicism, Crisis of Democracy, and Salazar’s New State in Portugal”, the Catholic Church opposed the ‘fascistisation’ of the regime, while simultaneously attempting to ‘Catholicise’ it. This authoritarian Catholic social doctrine also resembled the corporatist system tested by Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria. Dollfuss’ regime is otherwise the only regime included here to have previously been described as ‘clerical fascist’.10 However, as shown in Robert Pyrah’s discussion of the theatre and its Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe xvii relationship to the question of national identity in the 1930s, “Enacting Encycli- cals? Cultural Politics and ‘Clerical Fascism’ in Austria, 1933-8”, Catholicism and religious belief were not subordinated to ethnic rituals and myths in Austria like they were in Germany or Italy. Conversely, the Austrian nation was presented as coterminous with Catholicism, thus impregnating the Austrian authoritarian regimes with a mission to safeguard the country’s Catholic heritage and national identity. A final question persists, nevertheless. Are clerical movements that developed fascist tendencies to be considered ‘clerical fascist’? Are they much different, if at all, from fascist movements that attracted Catholic support, as in the case of Italy, Slovakia, Belgium or Spain? Such questions dominate Mark Biondich’s discussion of the notorious Croatian case in his “Radical Catholicism and Fascism in Croatia, 1918–1945”, Croatia being a country usually invoked as an extreme variant of ‘clerical fascism’. Indeed, the relationship between Catholicism and fascism char- acterised much of the domestic policies pursued by the independent state of Croatia in the 1940s but, according to Biondich, the two existed in a polarised rather than amiable relationship. Another insight into the role played by fascism in the context of interwar Chris- tianity in Central Europe is given by Béla Bodó’s analysis of the relationship between the Catholic Church and right-wing, antisemitic elements within the Hungarian political elite following the establishment of the Hungarian republic in 1918. “‘Do not Lead us into (Fascist) temptation’: the Catholic Church in Interwar Hungary” not only demonstrates that militias during the White Terror incorporated religious messages, but also that they were nevertheless divided along religious lines: Catholic, Protestant and even Muslim. Furthermore, as in Croatia, the majority of fascist groups, including the Arrow Cross, were favourably disposed towards the Catholic Church. However, even though many Hungarian fascists had strong ties to organised politics, they cannot be described, for Bodó, as ‘clerical fascists’. Similar military and political conflicts existed in Ireland, where a sizeable number of the fascist supporters had been active participants in the Irish revolution of 1916–22, and the subsequent Civil War of 1922–23 which together brought into being an independent nation, the Irish Free State. As Mike Cronin shows in”’Catholicising Fascism, Fascistising Catholicism? The Blueshirts and the Jesuits in 1930s Ireland”, it was by fostering a form of ultra-nationalism that Ireland’s fascist movement, the Blueshirts, gained acceptance. Although many Irish Catholics sympathised with the Blueshirts, neither the church hierarchy, nor the various Catholic orders, publicly supported the fascist movement. Ironically, the very scepticism accompanying many of the arguments regarding ‘clerical fascism’ voiced in this volume demonstrates the rich possibilities of a more specific theoretical and methodological employment of the term. Moreover, it is symptomatic of the problems arising when the concept of ‘political religion’ is haphazardly applied to cases that do not display the particular conjuncture of religion with secularisation which Gentile and others consider so vital for its emergence. In this regard, “’Clerical Fascism’ in Interwar Europe” presents some significant challenges to those indiscriminately adopting Gentile’s ‘religions of politics’ in the study of Christianity’s multifaceted relationship with political creeds of various shades. The texts here also highlight the idiosyncracies of individual national cases, thus sounding a cautionary note toward further attempts to generalise about ‘clerical fascism’ in either the national or European dimension. xviii M. Feldman and M. Turda

That said, by contextualising ‘clerical fascism’ within an interdisciplinary and pluralistic framework, it is fervently hoped that this volume will contribute to new vistas for academic research and international collaboration in the vexed, and vexing, study of European Christianity and interwar politics.

Notes

1. Frederick L. Schuman, “The Political Theory of German Fascism”, The American Political Science Review, 28/2 (1934), p.232. 2. For a useful survey of recent historiography on Nazism and (political) religion, see Neil Gregor, “Nazism – A Political Religion? Rethinking the Voluntarist Turn”, in Neil Gregor, ed., Nazism, War and Genocide (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005). 3. See, for example, Hans Maier, ed., Totalitarianism and Political Religions: Concepts for the Comparison of Dictatorships, Vol. I (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005). 4. Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006). p.11. 5. See, for example, Milan Babik’s “Nazism as a Secular Religion”, History and Theory, 45/3 (2006), pp.375–96. 6. Doris L. Bergen, “Nazism and Christianity: Partners and Rivals? A Response to Richard Steig- mann-Gall, The Holy Reich. Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945”, Journal of Contemporary History, 42/1 (2007), p.29. 7. Quoted in Ernst Piper, “Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich”, in ibid., p.51. 8. I. P. Prundeni, “Dumnezeu e fascist”, Porunca vremii (20 July 1937). See also Ilie Imbrescu’s, Biserica

]sced[¸sli i Mi]sced[¸ali carea legionaravbe]r[˘ (Bucharest: Cartea Româneascã, 1940), the book written by a Legionary priest. 9. This contrasts with Roger Eatwell’s argument that only the Iron Guard deserves to be dubbed ‘clerical fascist’; see his “Reflections on Fascism and Religion”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 4/3 (2003), p.148. 10. Klaus-Jörg Siegfried, Klerikalfaschismus: Zur Entstehung und sozialen Funktion des Dollfußregimes in Österreich – Ein Beitrag zur Faschismusdiskussion (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1979). The ‘Holy Storm’: ‘Clerical Fascism’ through the Lens of Modernism 1

ROGER GRIFFIN

Revaluing a Debased Concept It is nearly 30 years since, wielding the Occham principle more like a machete than a razor, the American historian Gilbert Allardyce set himself the task, in his article “What Fascism is Not: Thoughts on the Devaluation of a Concept”,2 of rooting out the unsightly weed of ‘fascism’ as a generic term from the manicured garden of the Human Sciences. The argument he marshalled on that occasion seems curiously passé now that comparative fascist studies are thriving with a luxuriance and degree of scholarly consensus unimaginable at the time.3 Undaunted by Allardyce’s failure to place an embargo on the term’s usage, this article sets out to perform a similar operation – one that will hopefully prove to be more of a surgical intervention than a hatchet job – on a closely related political concept whose heuristic value threatens to evaporate altogether under hyperin- flationary pressures; namely, ‘clerical fascism’. Once this ‘cleaning up’ operation is complete, an attempt will be made to enhance its explanatory potential by identifying two types of phenomena covered by the term, the second of which, in particular, is best illuminated by being located within the category of ‘political modernism’. The thrust of the argument is that the use of the term ‘clerical fascism’ should be limited to the peculiar forms of politics that arise when religious clerics and professional theologians are drawn either into collusion with the secular ideology of fascism (an occurrence particularly common in interwar Europe); or, more rarely, manage to mix themselves a theologically illicit cocktail of deeply held religious beliefs with a fascist commitment to saving the nation or race from decadence or collapse.

The Hyperinflation of ‘Clerical Fascism’ ‘Clerical fascism’ seems to have begun life, appropriately enough, in Italy, at a critical point in the rise of fascism. Walter Laqueur claims to have found it first mentioned in 1922, before the March on Rome, when ‘it referred to a group of Catholic believers in Northern Italy who advocated a synthesis of Catholicism and fascism’.4 It is to be noted that it thus originally designated some sort of entente between two discrete, and – given the staunch anti-clericalism of many squadristi at the time – conflicting, ideological causes, a relationship not of synthesis (pace Laqueur) but of collusion. Even today in Italian historiography, the term 2 R. Griffin generally retains this refreshingly tidy, specific, non-generic, meaning. Thus an Italian Web Encyclopaedia defines ‘clerical fascism’ as:

a set of attitudes and movements of Catholics favourable to Fascism which started to form in the crisis [of Italy] of 1919–1922. … Their inten- tion to exert influence on Fascism from the wings through autonomous movements soon proved illusory. Initially welcomed by Mussolini, once the regime was established, the Clerical Fascists [i clericofascisti] were largely marginalised, playing no significant part in the Church except for a minor diplomatic role in the solution of the ‘Roman Question’ [i.e. in the Lateran Pacts of 1929].5

However, once ‘fascism’ came to designate, in its generic form, any variant of revolutionary nationalism seeking to save the nation from decline, it was almost inevitable that the semantic scope of ‘clerical fascism’ would also expand dramatically. Already in the 1930s and early 1940s, a certain J. J. Murphy – obviously a staunch critic of the spate of compromises between the Catholic Church and far right regimes he was witnessing – wrote brief pamphlets, not just on ‘clerical fascism’ in Italy, but in Austria as well. The slip- page had clearly begun from being an expression restricted to describing the elective affinity that could grow up between elements of the clergy and fanatics of a secular form of revolutionary nationalism. The term now extended to an entire authoritarian regime, one far less ‘totalitarian’ than Mussolini’s, which legitimated itself by invoking Christian values, in this instance Engelbert Dollfuss’s ‘Christian Social’ state. When Murphy then produced a pamphlet on ‘clerical fascism’ in Peronist Argentina – Juan Peròn himself claimed his socio- political system was the embodiment of the Christian Church’s social teaching – its analytical precision was even further degraded. It had now been press- ganged into describing any authoritarian or military regime that had the broad backing of conservative, anti-communist forces within any Christian confession, or indeed any group merely claiming to embody Christian values. For good measure, Murphy extended his pamphlet series to cover the contribution of the Catholic Church to Hitler’s rise to power, and to the ‘Japanese–Vatican Entente’.6 A surprising number of postwar historians have also lent their weight to the blunting of ‘clerical fascism’ as an analytical tool. It has regularly been used, especially on the Left, to designate not just Christian Social Austria7 and Portugal’s Estado Novo [’New State’] – created by Salazar partly under the influence of a form of political Catholicism called ‘Lusitanian Integralism’ – but also Franco’s Spain, despite the Generalissimo’s much more pragmatic approach to religion.8 Some experts have endeavoured to restrict its application to the more overtly Catholicised form of regime adopted by Franquismo once the influence of the anti- clerical Falange, fascism and Nazism had waned, and that of Opus Dei had grown.9 However, this means deviating even further from ‘clerical fascism’s’ original connotations. Another symptom of the fuzziness (or sheer confusion) now inherent in the term’s definitional contours is to be found in a 2005 article by Muriel Fraser of the UK’s National Secular Society. In it, she attacks the readiness of revisionist historians to idealise what the Catholic Church in Slovakia gained by ensuring that their country became such a compliant puppet state under the Nazis. It contains the following passage: Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe 3

The close alliance of Catholicism and Fascism [sic] was not unique to Slovakia, of course. It was found in many other European countries, as well: in pre-war Austria under Dollfuss, in Salazar’s Portugal, in Romania under the Iron Guard [sic], in Pavelic’s Croatia, in Horthy’s Hungary, in Vichy France and, of course, under Generalissimo Franco, who called himself ‘Leader of Spain by the grace of God’. All of these, to varying degrees, exemplified ‘clerical fascism’, that is to say, ‘fascist regimes in which clergy played a leading role’.10

The inference must be drawn that, for Fraser, an entire fascist regime becomes ‘clerical’ if elements of the clergy supported it: alliance is equated with symbiosis. To further compound the confusion, Admiral Horthy’s regime in Hungary, in contrast to the Arrow Cross movement, was not even fascist. Nor were either dominated by the clergy, even if Ferenc Szálasi was careful to incorporate Catholicism into his vision of a ‘Hungarist’ national identity. When both ‘clerical’ and ‘fascism’ become this elastic, the binomial expression they form loses any trace of heuristic rigour. Taking such texts at their face value, there would be no reason to deny ‘clerical fascist’ status to any ultra-nationalist movement or ‘right- wing’ authoritarian regime in which significant numbers of ostensibly devout Christians – and not necessarily priests – played a conspicuous role. This would include not only the Iron Guard,11 but also the National-Christian Defence League (LANC), and the National Christian Party in interwar Romania, the Christian National Socialist Movement, the Ossewabrandwag and the post-war Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) in South Africa,12 and even the regime of Getulio Vargas, who fostered an alliance between the Brazilian government and the Catholic Church. Some contemporary commentators are prepared to go still further and use ‘clerical fascism’ outside the context of the ‘fascist epoch’ (1918–1945) for a wide spectrum of illiberal Christian politics, such as the ‘Catholic Integralism’ associated with the radical views of Archbishop Marcel Lefevre of France, or the Christian Nationalism that played such a key role in Lebanon’s Civil War of 1975–1990. Like the conceptual equivalent of elasticised sofa covers, the term can also be stretched to include various early twentieth-century right-wing movements in Europe that took their inspiration from Charles Maurras’s Action Française (even though Maurras himself was not a cleric, and possibly not even a Christian),13 as well as products of the highly fecund habitat provided for religious and pseudo-religious politics by Christian Nationalism in the USA, such as Christian Identity, the Church of the Creator14 and the Church of the Sons of YHVH.15 Even the activities of Pat Buchanan have been linked to clerical fascism.16

Deflating ‘Clerical Fascism’ One strategy for restoring to the expression ‘clerical fascism’ some much needed specificity and rigour is to restate the obvious, namely that it is formed when the concept ‘fascism’ – about which a tolerable (and, inevitably, in some quarters a vigorously contested) academic consensus has emerged over the last decade – is qualified by the ambiguous, though not intrinsically problematic, adjective ‘clerical’. If it is to be used binomially with sufficient definitional clarity to describe a generic political phenomenon (genus) of which ‘clericofascismo’ under Mussolini 4 R. Griffin was only one local variant (a species) – and Allardyce would doubtless have been reluctant to concede even this – then these two components need to be considered separately. In the present context, ‘generic fascism’, whose definition is a topic I have addressed extensively elsewhere,17 is assumed to be a secular political ideology, which – on a par with Bolshevism, though invoking overtly mythic, spiritual and irrational forces bound up with the nation and race in its self-legitimation rather than economic classes – pursues the goal of total revolution, the creation of a new type of society and a new type of human being in a new historical era. At the heart of its vision of the regenerative process lies the transformation not of capi- talism into socialism, but of a fragmented, decadent society into a national community, a project based on a syncretic world view breaking the mould of conservative social hierarchy and traditional values. The fascist project is realis- able within human time and through human agency. However, its frequent recourse to the language of redemption, sacrifice, faith and immortality, as well as the powerful charismatic forces it whipped up in the interwar period in some contexts when it operated as a political religion, encouraged the blurring of distinctions between the secular and religious realms of human experience. For its part, ‘clerical’ ultimately derives from the Greek translation of the Old Testament which, in Deuteronomy 18:2, uses kleros to describe the ‘inheritance’ of those who have nothing but their faith in the Lord. This gives rise to the late Greek klerikos, and hence the Latin clericus, subsequently mutated to clergé in French which retains to this day an exclusively religious meaning. In German, Klerus is still used as a collective noun for the ecclesiastical class of Catholics as distinct from the laity. Here, however, clericia, the Latin collective noun for scholarly priests, bequeathed the word Klerisei, appropriated into English as ‘clerisy’, meaning the (secular) literati or intelligentsia. In French, the equivalent of this term was the plural ‘les clercs’, immortalised in Julien Benda’s famous work of 1927, La trahison des clercs. It was translated into English as The Treason of the Intel- lectuals because in English ‘clerk’ did not come to denote a member of the intelligentsia. Instead, it acquired the less illustrious meaning of someone doing menial tasks for high-ranking civil servants and bureaucrats or, especially in American English, just low-grade administrative or customer service work in general, whether in an office, bank, hotel, or convenience store. I suggest that much of the ambiguity surrounding ‘clerical fascism’ can be dispelled in one fell swoop if we, in somewhat picky, pernickety fashion, define ‘clerical’ as the adjectival form of ‘cleric’ in the ecclesiastical sense it has acquired in standard English. This is consistent with the pronouncement of one of the most popular reference works of the electronic age, which defines ‘clerical’ thus:

A member of the clergy of a religion, especially one that has trained or ordained priests, preachers, or other religious professionals. Its non- culture-specific nature means it is often used to refer to the religious leadership in Islam, where ‘priest’ is not accurate and where terms such as ‘imam’ are not widely understood.18

In terms of Emilio Gentile’s seminal work on political religion,19 the creation of an extremist political ideology out of clerical thought and values represents a politicisation of religion, while those cases where fascism incorporated clerical values are symptomatic of the sacralisation of politics and its operation as a ‘political Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe 5 religion’. No matter how much they collude, merge or come to resemble each other outwardly, their initial ontological premises and metaphysical endgames remain poles apart. They can thus readily become entwined but not easily synthesised or fused – unless they are melded in a process of syncretisation and hybridisation, a comparatively rare process to which we will return. In the light of such considerations, ‘clerical fascism’ may thus be used as a Weberian ideal type for a generic concept that refers to:

The ideology and political praxis of clerics and theologians who either tactically support fascism as a movement or regime while maintaining a critical distance from its totalising, revolutionary, and basically secular objectives, or integrate elements of fascist values and policies into the way they conceptualise their mission on earth as devout believers in a divinely ordained world. As such, clerical fascism can never be a movement in its own right with a clerical leadership, independent ideology, and autonomous organisational structure, though it may operate as a discrete faction or constituency within a fascist regime with which it enters a symbiotic relationship.

What ‘Clerical Fascism’ is Not If the ideal type of ‘clerical fascism’ we have now constructed is applied to modern politics, numerous phenomena associated with it in the past fail the membership test for what has now become a much more exclusive club. One such group is made up of non-revolutionary ultra-nationalist movements with proactive clerical support, such as the bulk of the Irish Blueshirts, the Romanian LANC and regimes in Portugal, Spain, Austria, Greece, Hungary, Poland and Vichy France. None of these had any scruples about imitating elements of fascism’s revolutionary rhetoric and style, but they remained at bottom modernising forms of conser- vatism – what I have elsewhere termed ‘parafascism’20 – a force that sought to reassert the hegemony of a traditional world view in a modern idiom. In the case of several Catholic countries where authoritarianism encouraged or accommo- dated widespread collusion by the clergy, the result might possibly be called ‘clerical parafascism’, though this would still only apply to the support for the local variant of ultranationalist politics among the clergy, not the whole regime. Other excluded categories consist of fascist movements transforming particular denominations of Christianity into indicators of national identity, or using Christianity to rationalise racial hatred or anti-socialism, thereby subtly ‘nation- alising’ Christian theology, such as the Spanish Falange, the Legion of the Archangel Michael (Iron Guard) and the AWB; movements in which völkisch21 thought or occultist religiosity22 predominate; or ‘New Religions’ of the sort that played a role in some ideological subcurrents within both Nazism as a movement and under the Third Reich. All these should be rigorously dissociated from established Christianity and its clerics on ideological and theological grounds. In the case of the German Faith Movement, for example, only someone seduced by Nazism would fail to recognise it as a defiantly anti-Christian form of racism23 when one of its ‘hymns’ announced triumphantly: ‘The time of the Cross has gone now,/The Sun-wheel shall arise,/And so, with God, we shall be free at last/And give our people their honour back’.24 However, here again, any genuine seminary-trained priests who became caught up in perpetuating such overtly 6 R. Griffin pagan travesties of Christianity as devout Nazis would de facto constitute individual examples of clerical fascists.

The Preconditions for ‘Clerical Fascism’ So far our conceptual spring-cleaning has resulted in several boxes of superflu- ous concepts and phenomena being carted away from the overflowing lumber room of comparative studies in this area. As a result, ‘clerical fascism’ emerges as a leaner, less ubiquitous, but still important, phenomenon. Every country in which the Church was a dominant force in national life and that hosted an indig- enous fascist movement or became incorporated into the Nazis’ New European Order between 1918 and 1945 created an environment in which ‘clerical fascism’ could play a role in determining events, and in some cases (for example, Croatia, Slovakia, Vichy France, Romania, Hungary, and Belgium) made a significant contribution to furthering Nazi ends, including the implementation of the Final Solution. In practice, the socio-political space available for ‘clerical fascism’ to play a role in any movement or regime before the war was conditioned by the stance adopted towards organised religion by the national permutation of fascism in question. This could assume two basic forms, only the second of which created a hospitable habitat for it to thrive. The first and most unpropitious habitat for fostering the active collaboration of a section of the clergy was created by variants of fascism like the British Union of Fascists, which pursued a scientistic, overtly modernising and techno- cratically advanced vision of the reborn nation. To take another example, even after the Concordat between fascism and the Vatican, Giovanni Gentile continued to promote a neo-Hegelian theory of the ethical state as an alternative to Christian society, much to the chagrin of the Catholic Church. No less antagonistic to ‘clerical fascism’ were the völkisch variants of Nazism. In these cases the ultra-nationalism or racism that fascism posited as the foundation of the new order tended to assume the guise of a secular, historicising political religion, even if the rituals it inspired were saturated with the topoi of Christian religious symbolism and ritual or enacted an elaborate pagan travesty of it. Emilio Gentile has analysed the lengths to which fascism went to sacralise the state under Mussolini,25 while Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch has shown how extensively the Nazis’ ideology and ritual were structured by the Christian world view, but still remained a political religion rather than a form of religious nationalism or politicised religion.26 Certainly Oswald Mosley’s BUF would have aspired to emulate Nazism’s power as a political religion if it had ever ruled Britain. However, it would have done so with much less Christian baggage than either fascism or Nazism, since Anglicanism remained extremely marginalised as an active ingre- dient of mainstream BUF ideology. Such a highly secularised form of fascism can only mobilise the support of ‘clerics’ who, in contrast with the majority of their fellow clergy, go out of their way to adapt their religious beliefs in order to legitimise their support of fascism, producing convoluted arguments for Christianity’s compatibility with fascism with endorsement neither from the Church hierarchy nor from the fascist leadership.27 Nevertheless, as the histories of both fascism and Nazism show, fascism could be tolerated by the bulk of the Church-going public, a connivance actively wooed and manipulated by Mussolini and Hitler. However, the passive support for fascism by practising believers is not the same as the active collaboration of Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe 7 clerics that is the hallmark of ‘clerical fascism’. Nor does the fact that a fascist movement or regime seeks Church approval – or at least the acquiescence of professed Christians – mean that it has a ‘clerical fascist’ core itself. The second relationship that can occur between fascism and the clergy has already been touched on earlier. It arises when a form of fascism, or a significant faction or constituency within it, deliberately incorporates selected elements of the theology of an established religion, such as Catholicism, Protestantism, or the Orthodox Church, thereby surreptitiously historicising and politicising it.28 Such a conjunction of theoretically incompatible world-views fosters pockets of active collusion between both fascists and clerics in insidiously ‘temporalising’ the traditional religious narrative, and in the interwar period induced some Church clerics to doctor its ‘soteriological’ content and function so that by implication Christ’s sacrifice could not guarantee redemption and immortality without being under- pinned by fervent nationalism. A valuable case study in this scavenging process of appropriation has been provided by Radu Ioanid’s analysis of the relationship between the Iron Guard and Romanian Orthodoxy. He contends that:

Despite its pronounced orthodox character, legionary mysticism did not mean the total assimilation of orthodox theology by a fascist political movement, but on the contrary an attempt at subordinating and transforming that theology into a political instrument.29

The ethos in the early years of the Third Reich encouraged countless practising Christians to persuade themselves that a profound compatibility existed between their religious beliefs and Nazism,30 and that Hitler’s dictatorship offered a total solution not just to the political crisis of Weimar, but its spiritual one as well. It is a bleak episode in ecclesiastical history which illustrates the importance of ‘cognitive dissonance’ in conditioning beliefs and perceptions in times of crisis.31 Before such a fundamental betrayal of theological principles is attributed to the impact of living in a Terror State, it is important to note that collusion between Nazism and Christianity started well before the Seizure of Power. Thus it was that one German pastor recalled how Hitler’s election to Chancellor unleashed a tide of optimism among church-goers: ‘a great optimism that national renewal would bring with it an inner, moral revitalisation’ as if ‘the wing of a great turn of fate [were] fluttering above [them].’32 When Christian clergymen – and some of the theologians who helped train them – also mistook the beat of vulture’s wings for the doves of Divine Providence, it produced many specifically Nazi permutations of ‘clerical fascism’ in the lives of Germans with a religious vocation.

‘Collusive’ and ‘Syncretic’ Clerical Fascism A more nuanced picture of the internal ideological dynamics at work in the apparent conversion of German clerics to Nazism emerges when we focus on the ambiguities of the two terms ‘confluence’ and ‘synthesis’, which it is important not to use interchangeably in discussion of the relationship between theology and politics in the context of ‘clerical fascism’. We propose to tease the two terms apart, giving them contrasting connotations in order to further clarify our own ideal type of the term which presents ‘clerical fascism’ as a combination of two potentially conflicting ideological components. 8 R. Griffin

We have already argued that it is the general ethos of spiritual and moral renewal created by fascism that encouraged some religious clerics to enter an inti- mate relationship with it in the interwar period. By probing into this relationship further, it soon becomes evident that the ‘clerical fascism’ that results can assume not one, but two distinct forms. One results when clerics convince themselves that it is in the best interests of the Church to promote the national form of fascism (or, in the case of Nazi puppet states, to collaborate with the invader). This means blinding themselves to the secular, elitist nature of the fascist revolution, whether blatant or covert, against the status quo, a revolution carried out within historical time through human agency, which makes it the ultimate enemy of genuine Christianity. Such self-deception can arise when the cleric convinces himself that the two ‘faiths’ share enough common enemies – communism, materialism, anarchy, Judaism, individualism, alleged social and moral decadence – to make collaboration fruitful. The result is a confluence, a ‘flowing together’, of two sepa- rate ideological currents. The corresponding relationship is then one of ‘collusion’, in which, as the etymology of the term highlights, each party or faction joins in the other’s ‘game’ for its own, partially compatible, but in the last resort conflicting ends. It was solely this collusive relationship that was denoted by the original expres- sions ‘clerical fascism’ and ‘clerical fascists’ in the early years of Italian fascism. In the ‘fascist epoch’ (1918–1945) untold numbers of Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox believers in the most crisis-torn parts of Europe were lured into supporting the politics of ultra-nationalism and authoritarianism by the spectre of Bolshevism and anarchy, seduced by the fatally flawed logic that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. Such regimes as Mussolini’s Italy, Hlinka’s Slovakia,

Paveliacue][t ´’s Croatia and Pétain’s France provide many individual examples of a fully fledged ‘clerical fascism’ in the sense of extensive collaboration with fascism by clerics bent on safeguarding what they saw as the best interests of the Church during a time of profound crisis. However, the entente between clerics and fascists assumes a quite different form, one generally neglected by scholars, when, instead of confluence, a genuine identification and synthesis occurs in the deepest recesses of a cleric’s mind between theological beliefs and fascist sympathies. The result is a clerical variant of fascism in which the vision of a cleansing national revolution is expressed and rationalised in a seemingly homogenised, unified Christian discourse. For example, the pro-fascist fervour of the Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Schuster, pointed to a profound, albeit subliminal, amalgamation in his totalising world view, between the regime’s secular ultra-nationalism and the teachings of his religious faith.33 This synthesising, syncretic mode of ‘clerical fascism’ is a less pragmatic, more psychologically complex phenomenon than the collusive variety which gave rise to the relatively unproblematic episodes of Catholic priests prepared to become fellow-travellers of fascism under Mussolini as the least of the triad of contemporary evils: liberalism, Bolshevism or authoritarian nationalism. The distinction we are attempting to draw here between ‘syncretic’ (strong) and merely ‘collusive’ (weak) ‘clerical fascism’ can be illustrated by a concrete example taken from Christianity’s contorted relationship with Nazism. The degree to which the Vatican ever proactively supported either the fascist or Nazi regimes under Pope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII is still energetically contested,34 as is the degree to which Hitler and some of the top Nazi leaders retained elements of the Christian faith. However, there is no doubt that some elements within the Protestant, Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe 9

Catholic and Orthodox clergy in various parts of Europe gave active support to the Nazi occupation of their country, even to the point of conniving with, or in some instances actively participating in, the extermination programme. This occurred principally in Germany,35 France,36 in the Baltic region37 and in the Balkans, where a minority of Catholic clergy – some of them high-ranking dignitaries – played a proactive role in governing the Nazi fiefdom, the Independent State of Croatia, and were directly involved in episodes of systematic genocide carried out against Jews, Gypsies and Serbs.38 There is also abundant documentation that elements in the Vatican secretly connived in helping Nazi and Ustasha war criminals escape justice after the war.39 Yet, there is little to suggest that such collaboration involved Christian clergy making the considerable intellectual effort required to fascistise their own theological beliefs to the point of creating an actual hybrid between Nazism and Christianity. Rather, they tailored and edited their religious beliefs to defend their support of fascism and racism, while keeping them distinct from the ideology promulgated by the party itself, whether fascist, Nazi, Ustashan or their local permutation. In particular, they managed to retain the other-worldly soteri- ology of Christianity, along with its distinctive creed and liturgy. It was when Christian belief was twisted to sanction mass murder that collusive ‘clerical fascism’ assumed its most devastating and morally repugnant forms as a political ideology. However, the response of the Deutsche Christen [German Christians] – the faction of Protestants led by Ludwig Müller – to the rise of Nazism went beyond tactical collaboration by encouraging Germans to work towards the Führer both as patriotic Germans and as fervent Christians. The more radical German Christians proposed to Nazify Lutheranism by removing the Old Testament from the Bible, so as to purge Christianity of its Jewish contamination. Their emblem, a combination of the Cross and the Swastika, epitomises the degree to which they consciously sought to weld into a single alloy the alien metals of Nazism and Christianity. This was no simple collaboration or collusion, but an attempted synthesis between clericalism and fascism carried out with such theological earnestness that it makes it possible to talk of the wholesale hybridisation of the two.40 A vivid testimony to the complex psychological and intellectual process involved in the perversion of an established religion into the warrant for racial persecution and imperialism has been bequeathed by Emanuel Hirsch. A devout Protestant much influenced by Søren Kierkegaard, Hirsch was professor of ‘systematic theology’ at Göttingen University from 1936 to 1945. In the years 1930–1933 he had undertaken an in-depth investigation of the spiritual crisis of contemporary Germany ‘from a philosophical and theological perspective’.41 Certain passages in the resulting work, published in the second year of Hitler’s dictatorship, express the extraordinary degree to which in the deepest recesses of his mind he melded the Nazis’ pagan belief in the imminent rebirth of the Volk through the renewal of its Aryan heritage and ‘blood’ with the Christian faith in redemption through the sanctity and blood of Jesus. Hirsch discerned a new collective ‘will’ emerging in Germany powerful enough to banish the sense of dissolution and catastrophe prevailing in the last years of the Weimar Republic. He was adamant that this was not a rational, progressive process occurring from within human history. Rather it was ‘a holy storm that has come over us and grasped’ the entire people.42 As a result, the encounter with God 10 R. Griffin was now mediated directly ‘through Volk and fatherland’, implicitly dispensing with Christ’s intercession.43 Unlike Martin Heidegger or Ernst Jünger, who, by 1936, had both withdrawn into ‘inner emigration’, the unfolding realities under the new regime seemed to have only intensified Hirsch’s missionary zeal to fuse the Nazi and the Christian faith into a new whole, and to use his prestige as a university professor to further the dissemination of the Nazi New Testament. In a dense theological discourse, his publications continued to preach the fundamental identity of the traditional Christian religious congregation [Gemeinde] with the new Nazi national community [Volksgemeinschaft]. Thus, on the eve of the war Hirsch, could declare in all sincerity that:

There exists between German Volkstum [ethnic nationhood] and Christian belief absolutely no division or contradiction to make it difficult as a German to be a Christian, or as a Christian a German. Faith and love are created to be the deepest sustaining basis for a life in freedom and honour, as is appropriate to our community ethos.44

The Role of Modernism in ‘Clerical Fascism’ One clue to explaining this extraordinary example of religious ‘betrayal’, not by an intellectual clerk but a highly studious and scholarly cleric, is to be found in the research of social anthropologists into ‘revitalisation movements’. These sudden flare-ups of charismatic, culture-constituent energy have arisen sporadically throughout human history, either to regenerate a society that has entered a profound crisis or to create a new community out of the collapse of the old. In their pioneering research into this phenomenon, both Victor Turner45 and Edgar Wallace46 emphasise that a key factor in the success of such a movement is the elaboration of a new ideology culled syncretically from a variety of sources through what Wallace describes as a ‘mazeway resynthesis’. In this process, disparate ideological components are ‘ludically recombined’ into a new world view (mazeway), which offers those disaffected with the old order not just a diagnosis of the contemporary crisis, but the imminent prospect of its resolution in a reborn society. A similar process of combining disparate elements into new aesthetic, social or political values or ideologies may be seen as one of the defining features of ‘modernism’. This term is still associated by cultural historians mainly with formal experimentation and innovations in avant-garde art and thought in late- nineteenth and early twentieth-century century Europe. Nevertheless, its connotations can be extended to refer to myriad initiatives for change and renewal that express a profound reaction against the increasingly secularising, disenchanting, disembedding impact of the western, and increasingly globalised forces of modernisation.47 Seen in the context of a generalised revolt against existing modernity, modernism quickly acquires an enlarged (‘maximalist’) semantic scope which makes it applicable to a vast array of heterogeneous attempts carried out in the aesthetic, intellectual, cultural, social, scientific, technological and political spheres of the Europeanised world, especially in the period 1880–1950, to renew the sense of transcendence and sacrality so seriously eroded by the impact of secularisation and disenchantment. This use of the term has much in common with the way in The Politics of Time the Marxist intellectual Peter Osborne applies modernism to any projects in art, Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe 11 philosophy, social thought and politics which specifically ‘affirm the temporality of the new’ in the face of the erosion of meaning and transcendence under western modernity.48 The logic of his argument leads him to a conclusion that flies in the face of much traditional Marxist thinking, namely he treats fascism as an example of future-oriented, revolutionary politics on a par with Bolshevism. Despite the profound differences between the two ideologies, Osborne portrays both as avant-garde phenomena ‘by virtue of their explicit political identification with radically new futures’ (my emphasis). The inference Osborne draws from this analysis is striking in both its simplicity and its radicalness: ‘contrary to received opinion … fascism is neither a relic nor an archaism, but a form of political modernism’.49 The hypothesis that emerges from this line of argument is consistent with the widespread perceptions and presentiments encountered at all levels of European- ised society from the 1880s onwards that the West had entered a permanent state of moral decay, crisis, and transition. The resulting mood of ‘decadence’, interpreted in a thousand nuanced ways, called forth countless instinctive attempts at ‘mazeway resynthesis’ to achieve closure and enter a new age. These took place in spheres as apparently unrelated as occultism, architecture, biopolitics, body culture, social hygiene, sexual mores and vegetarianism, spawning a vast variety of disparate schemes and projects whose common utopian goal was to resolve the acute ambivalence, liminality and anomie of the age and usher in a visionary new order, or at least a renewed sense of personal nomos. It was the prevalence of this modernist cultural climate that subliminally predisposed millions of ‘ordinary’ human beings to sacrifice themselves for the renewal of history in the First World War, causing ‘war fever’ to break out in several combatant countries. Where soci- eties underwent severe crisis or – as in the case of the Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian empires during their collapse, or in European states under Nazi occupation – it could also lead broad swathes of the population to respond with enthusiasm and even fanaticism to some of the most radical, totalising, and potentially devastating solutions offered by visionary political leaders, something impossible outside the context of a generalised ‘sense-making crisis’. (The partial resolution of Europe’s nomic crisis after 1945 with the advent of the Cold War helps explain why the revolutionary intensity of its modernist climate abated after 1945.) From this perspective, Hirsch’s passionately intellectual synthesis of Nazism with Christianity may be taken at face value as an idiosyncratic ‘solution’ to the intense spiritual and moral crisis of Weimar Germany. It constituted the ‘mazeway’ which he hoped would lead his fellow countrymen and women into a new age of transcendent spirituality and community. At the same time, Hirsch’s thor- ough Nazification of Christianity was symptomatic of a generalised longing for rebirth and a new temporality among Germans provoked by the real and imagi- nary traumas following its defeat in the Great War. The palingenetic climate of cultural despair that resulted was intensified further by the effects of the Wall Street Crash to become a pandemic of anomie. This generated countervailing long- ings for salvation in every social stratum – hence the strikingly trans-class nature of support for Nazism as a movement. In the deepening climate of socio-political modernism that ensued after 1929, millions of ‘modern’ German citizens in every social milieu found themselves driven by an urgent need to take refuge from the mounting chaos under the new nomos and cosmological sky offered by Nazism, or to use Hitler’s own term, a Weltanschauung. It was the collective projection of hopes for a new beginning onto the Bewegung [movement] orchestrated by Adolf 12 R. Griffin

Hitler that made him, almost overnight, the centre of a leader cult and political religion after 1929.50 It is thus no coincidence that Hirsch’s own diagnosis of the contemporary crisis – and the key to his self-delusion that Nazism had not just a providential but a Christian mission to fulfil – underlines the need not just for political but for metaphysical principles of order to be renewed so that the mounting anarchy could finally be banished from society. The Spiritual Condition of the Age, published in 1935, presents the Third Reich as reintroducing the three primordial preconditions to a society’s viability without which he claimed it was doomed to disinte- grate from within: Horos, or ‘uncrossable boundaries’; Nomos, the ordering principle in life and thought; and Logos, the animating value-system and ethos of communal existence. It is the unique form assumed by this trinity of ordering principles that defines the individual destiny of every historical people. Hirsch convinced himself that this divine matrix could not have been restored in its archetypal German form if the Nazi revolution had not intervened to save the nation from total collapse and the threat of Bolshevism. In the theological system he concocted out of an intensely personal act of ‘ludic recombination’, the Third Reich and God’s Reich had become coterminous: the mission of Jesus Christ on Earth was now being fulfilled through the intercession of Adolf Hitler.

Inferences for the Comparative Study of ‘Clerical Fascism’ A number of conclusions can be drawn from this line of analysis. First, academics will only exacerbate the taxonomic confusion at present reigning in the study of ‘clerical fascism’ as long as they remain reluctant to specify the conceptual framework within which they approach the topic. Without formulating an ideal type – or at least providing a working definition – of what is meant by the term, the literature on this subject is bound to be a growing tangle of case-studies where like is rarely being compared with like. It is a situation that makes it extremely difficult to embark on a fruitful ‘nomothetic’ quest for general patterns in this area. Second, our own investigation suggests that it would be advisable for most of the extraneous semantic connotations the term has acquired within Anglophone political science and historiography to be drastically pruned away, so as to return the concept to its original, highly delimited meaning. In other words, ‘clerical fascism’ should strictu sensu characterise professional clerics of an established religion, including interpreters of theological doctrine, who enter either a collaborative or symbiotic relationship with fascism, a revolutionary, secular variant of ultranationalism bent on the total rebirth of society through human agency. As such, ‘clerical fascism’ should never be used to characterise a political movement or regime in its entirety, since it can at most be a faction within fascism, and may refer to no more than a highly personal and atypical response to it by an individual cleric such as Emanuel Hirsch. Applying it to contemporary politicised religions such as Hindutva, Christian Identity or Islamism51 only fuels the ‘Babel effect’ that still envelopes the term. Third, it is important that ‘clerical’ is not allowed to decay into an adjective loosely describing the politics of any practising Christian. In particular, it should remain carefully cordoned off from the realm of the secular intelligentsia [’les clercs’], no matter how keen they are to solve the spiritual crisis of modernity.52 It is also important that, even when clerics and theologians proactively support fascism, or when a fascist movement seeks to gain their support by making a Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe 13 national religion the mainstay of its ideology of national rebirth, the secular, anti- Christian core of fascism’s ideology is not lost from view in the ensuing muddy- ing of the waters. Fourth, my own research underlines the need for multi- or trans-disciplinarity when studying ‘clerical fascism’. It suggests, for example, that social and political scientists keen to explore the historical dynamics of ‘clerical fascism’ could usefully draw more extensively on theological expertise when making judgements about the compatibility of certain political positions with Christianity in its various denominations. It is easy to get the impression that for some secular minds anything that involves mobilizing myths and unfashionable meta-narratives falls into a cavernous wheelie bin designated for ‘religion’, which leads to some particularly perverse judgements of the compatibility of fascism and Christianity. Scholars should also be encouraged to take advantage of readily accessible areas of expertise within specialist areas contiguous with religion, such as millenarian studies, social psychology and cultural anthropology. As this article has stressed, my own particular line of enquiry also highlights the value of exploring the relevance to understanding ‘clerical fascism’ of research into both modernity and modernism. Used judiciously, insights from these various disciplines may prove invaluable to deepen our insight into the way disparate ideological elements can be rapidly syncretised into a homogeneous and fanatical ‘world view’ that in extreme circumstances can find a resonance with broad sectors of the public, and may even become the mobilising myth of a mass movement. In applying such perspectives outside the sphere of European politics, the distinction between collusive and synthetic forms of ‘clerical fascism’ might help researchers understand better the complex dynamics at work when clerics reject or promote the contemporary rise of a politicised religion such as Islamism with differing degrees of intensity.53 It is particularly by using the lens of a ‘maximalist’ concept of modernism to explore patterns of similarity and contrast between fascism, ‘clerical fascism’ and politicized religions such as Islamism that human scientists of all cultures may find it easier to come to grips conceptually with cultural forces stemming from religion in both its traditional and more recent political forms whose virulent power to change the course of history – like those of nationalism, Bolshevism and fascism, before them – seems to have taken much of the West’s academic community by surprise. One can only speculate about how, reincarnated 70 years on, Walter Benjamin would have reacted to finding the Angel of History no longer flung backwards by the ‘storm of progress’ as he depicted it in 1930s Germany when writing Theses on the Philosophy of History. Instead, this creature finds itself buffeted violently to and fro between the fierce, desiccating trade winds of modernity and repeated outbreaks of ‘holy storms’, whose human vectors have undertaken the mission to ensure that the Fukuyamian ‘end of history’, and hence the shattering of their closed cosmological world, remains indefinitely postponed.

Notes

1. This article is based on a keynote address presented at the conference “‘Clerical Fascism’ in Interwar Europe”, held at Oxford Brookes University in April 2006. My thanks go to the organis- ers Matthew Feldman and Marius Turda for providing the incentive to write it. 2. Gilbert Allardyce, “What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept”, The American Historical Review, 84/2 (1979), pp.367–88. 14 R. Griffin

3. See, for example, the review article covering five recent books on fascist studies by António Costa Pinto, “Back to European Fascism”, Contemporary European History, 15/1 (2006), pp.103–15. 4. Walter Laqueur, “The Origins of Fascism: Islamic Fascism, Islamophobia, Antisemitism”, New York OUP Blog, at: http://blog.oup.com/oupblog/2006/10/the_use_of_the_.html (last accessed 6 December 2006). 5. See http://www.sapere.it/tca/MainApp?srvc=vr&url=/7/6786_1 (last accessed 6 December 2006). 6. Murphy’s pamphlets are accessible in the Aleck Kringlock Pamphlet Collection held at Iowa University, see: http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/speccoll/MSC/ToMsc200/MsC182/MsC182 _kringlock.html (last accessed 6 December 2006). 7. For example, Erik Loewy, Freedom and Community: The Ethics of Interdependence (New York: New York State University Press, 1993), p.xxiii; and Anton Pelinka and Ruth Wodak, The Haider Phenomenon (New York: Transaction, 2001), p.111. 8. For instance, an article in Socialist Worker of 19 November 1977 entitled “Spain’s Long Night of Fascism” claims that ‘Spain suffered under its own form of military–clerical fascism which, especially in its early years, was just as brutal as Hitler’s or Mussolini’s regimes’. See Socialist Worker online at: http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=7774 (last accessed 5 December 2006). 9. Thus, in his attack on the canonisation of Escriva de Balaguer, founder of Opus Dei, Jesus Ynfante complained that: ‘He had Madrid under his control, starting with the dictator. Under Franco the clerical fascism of Opus Dei won out over the true fascism of the Falange’. Quoted by Giles Tremlett in The Guardian of 5 October 2002 at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/ 0,3604,804978,00.html (last accessed 6 December 2006). 10. Muriel Fraser, “Why Slovakia?”, National Secular Society, 27 November 2005, at: http://www.secu- larism.org.uk/whyslovakia.html#six (last accessed 6 December 2006). 11. See Leonard Weinberg and Ami Pedhazur, eds, Religious Fundamentalism and Religious Extremism (London: Frank Cass, 2004). 12. The AWB’s logo is made up of three 7s, representing the forces of Good arranged to evoke both the Nazi Swastika and the triumph over the Beast whose number according to the Book of Revelations is 666. This is an apt symbol for the appropriation and perversion of Christianity, rather than for the politicisation of a genuine form of Christianity. 13. See Leonidas Donskis, Identity and Freedom: Mapping Nationalism and Social Criticism in Twentieth- Century Lithuania (London: Taylor and Francis, 2005). 14. See, for example, http://www.publiceye.org/frontpage/911/clerical-911.html#Clerical%20 Fascism (last accessed 6 December 2006). 15. See http://www.churchofthesonsofyhvh.org/ (last accessed at 11 December 2006). 16. See Chip Berlet “Pat Buchanan and Fascism” at: http://www.niskor.org/ftp.cgi/people/b/ buchanan.pat/ftp.py?people/b/buchanan.pat//berlet-on-buchanan (last accessed 9 December 2006). 17. See my introduction to Cyprian Blamires, with Paul Jackson, ed., World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia (New York: Clio, 2006). A more sustained account of fascism as a form of political modernism is to be found in my Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave, 2007), ch. 6. 18. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleric (last accessed 11 November 2006). 19. Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 20. On ‘parafascism’, see Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991), ch. 5. 21. Jost Hermand, Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkisch Utopias and National Socialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 22. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1985). 23. The best account of Jakob Hauer’s neo-pagan movement – eventually absorbed into Nazism – revealing its fundamentally anti-Christian nature, is Karla Poewe’s excellent New Religions and the Nazis (London: Routledge, 2005). 24. See the web article on the Swastika and the Nazis at: http://www.intelinet.org/swastika/ swasti07.htm (last accessed 5 January 2007). 25. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralisation of Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Harvard University Press, 1996). 26. Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch, Die politische Religion des National-Sozialismus (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1998). For extensive documentation of how profoundly hostile Nazism remained to core Christian values see The Journal of Contemporary History, 41/1 (2007), which contains five scholarly articles devoted to a detailed critique of Richard Steigmann-Gall’s thesis in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe 15

of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) that mainstream Nazism repre- sented a genuine form of ‘positive Christianity’. 27. For an example of this phenomenon taken from British fascism, see the account of the Reverend Nye’s prolific contribution to the BUF newspaper Action in Michael Spurr, ‘“Living the Blackshirt Life’: Culture, Community and the British Union of Fascists, 1932–1940”, Contemporary European History, 12/3 (2003), p.319. 28. This fate could theoretically befall not just Christianised nations under modernity, but any established religion if modernisation has proceeded to a point where an essentially secular regime adapts a national religion to sacralise the state. For a fascinating case study in a non- Christian milieu producing phenomena akin to European ‘clerical fascism’, see Walter Skya, Japan’s Holy War: The Ideology of Radical Shinto Ultranationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 29. Radu Ioanid, “The Sacralised Politics of the Romanian Iron Guard”, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 5/3 (2004), p.419 (my emphasis). 30. On the insidious appropriation of Christianity by Nazism, see Uriel Tal, Religion, Politics, and Ideology in the Third Reich (London: Routledge, 2004). 31. See Christopher Burris, Eddie Harmon-Jones and Ryan Tarpley, “’By Faith Alone’: Religious Agitation and Cognitive Dissonance”, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 19 (1997), pp.17–31. 32. Cited in Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936, Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), p.432. 33. The zealous collaboration of Schuster with Fascism was one of the many topics dealt with in Avro Manhattan’s famous exposé of clerical fascism – in the original sense – published shortly after the war, The Vatican in World Politics (New York: Horizon Press, 1949). 34. For a strongly anti-Papal (and much challenged) account of Hitler’s relationship with Eugenio Pacelli, see John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (New York: Viking, 1999). 35. Robert Eriksen and Susannah Heschel, Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999). 36. W. D. Hall, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France (Oxford: Berg, 1995). 37. Dov Levin, “On the Relations between the Baltic Peoples and their Jewish Neighbors Before, During, and After World War II”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 5/1 (1990), pp.53–66. 38. Menachem Shelah, “The Catholic Church in Croatia: The Vatican and the Murder of The Croatian Jews”, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 4/3 (1989), pp.323–339. 39. See Mark Aarons, John Loftus, Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, The Nazis and The Swiss Banks (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998). 40. See Doris Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 41. Emanuel Hirsch, Die gegenwärtige geistige Lage im Spiegel philosophischer und theologischer Besinnung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1934). 42. Ibid., pp.29–30, cited in Robert Eriksen, Theologians under Hitler (New Haven: Yale, 1985), p.152. 43. Ibid., pp.161–2, cited in Eriksen (note 42), p.162. 44. Emanuel Hirsch, Das Wesen des Christentums [The Essence of Christianity] (Weimar, 1939), p.155, cited in Eriksen (note 42), p.166. See also Eriksen, Heschel (note 35) chs 2 and 4. 45. Victor and Edith Turner, “Religious Celebrations”, in Victor Turner, ed., Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982). 46. Robert Grumet, ed., Anthony Wallace: Revitalization and Mazeways, Essays on Cultural Change, Volume 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003). 47. This thesis, and its development in what follows, is explored at considerable length in Modernism and Fascism (note 17). 48. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time (London: Verso, 1995), p.164. 49. Ibid., p.166 (original emphasis). 50. For empirical corroboration of this line of interpretation see Ian Kershaw (note 32). 51. The outstanding example of a text that equates Islamism with ‘clerical fascism’ is Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present, Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 52. One sustained example of this taxonomic confusion in this area is Meera Nanda’s Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003). This fascinating analysis of politicised Hinduism, Hindutva, purports to be a study of ‘clerical fascism’, but her subject turns out to be a stratum of Hindu intelligentsia (i.e. ‘les clercs’) who have become involved in the dissemination of a form of right-wing populism which lacks the revolutionary and secular orientation of fascism. 53. It should have become abundantly clear just how obfuscating the neologism ‘Islamofascism’ really is, and how perverse its use in neo-Bushian discourse. This page intentionally left blank