Clerical Fascism Griffin

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Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions,Vol. 8, No. 2, 213–227, June 2007

ISSN 1469-0764 Print/ISSN 1743-9647 Online/07/020213-15 © 2007 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14690760701321130

The ‘Holy Storm’: ‘Clerical Fascism’ through the Lens of

Modernism1

ROGER GRIFFIN

Oxford Brookes UniversityTaylor and FrancisFTMP_A_232009.sgm10.1080/14690760701321130TotalitarianMovements and Political Religions1469-0764 (print)/1743-9647 (online)Original Article2007Taylor & [email protected]

Revaluing a Debased Concept

It is nearly 30 years since, wielding the Occham principle more like a machetethan a razor, the American historian Gilbert Allardyce set himself the task, in hisarticle “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 manicuredgarden of the Human Sciences. The argument he marshalled on that occasionseems curiously passé now that comparative fascist studies are thriving with aluxuriance and degree of scholarly consensus unimaginable at the time.3

Undaunted by Allardyce’s failure to place an embargo on the term’s usage, thisarticle sets out to perform a similar operation – one that will hopefully prove to bemore 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 toenhance its explanatory potential by identifying two types of phenomenacovered by the term, the second of which, in particular, is best illuminated by

being located within the category of ‘political modernism’. The thrust of theargument is that the use of the term ‘clerical fascism’ should be limited to thepeculiar forms of politics that arise when religious clerics and professional theo-logians are drawn either into collusion with the secular ideology of fascism (anoccurrence particularly common in interwar Europe); or, more rarely, manage to

mix themselves a theologically illicit cocktail of deeply held religious beliefswith a fascist commitment to saving the nation or race from decadence orcollapse.

The Hyperinflation of ‘Clerical Fascism’

‘Clerical fascism’ seems to have begun life, appropriately enough, in Italy, at acritical point in the rise of fascism. Walter Laqueur claims to have found it firstmentioned 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 manysquadristi at the time – conflicting, ideological causes, a relationship not of synthe-sis ( pace Laqueur) but of collusion. Even today in Italian historiography, the term



214 R. Griffin

generally retains this refreshingly tidy, specific, non-generic, meaning. Thus anItalian Web Encyclopaedia defines ‘clerical fascism’ as:

a set of attitudes and movements of Catholics favourable to Fascismwhich started to form in the crisis [of Italy] of 1919–1922. … Their inten-

tion to exert influence on Fascism from the wings through autonomousmovements soon proved illusory. Initially welcomed by Mussolini, oncethe regime was established, the Clerical Fascists [i clericofascisti] werelargely marginalised, playing no significant part in the Church except fora minor diplomatic role in the solution of the ‘Roman Question’ [i.e. in theLateran 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 wasalmost 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 theCatholic 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 theelective affinity that could grow up between elements of the clergy and fanaticsof a secular form of revolutionary nationalism. The term now extended toan entire authoritarian regime, one far less ‘totalitarian’ than Mussolini’s,which legitimated itself by invoking Christian values, in this instance EngelbertDollfuss’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 goodmeasure, Murphy extended his pamphlet series to cover the contribution of theCatholic Church to Hitler’s rise to power, and to the ‘Japanese–VaticanEntente’.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, espe-

cially on the Left, to designate not just Christian Social Austria7 and Portugal’sEstado Novo [’New State’] – created by Salazar partly under the influence of aform of political Catholicism called ‘Lusitanian Integralism’ – but also Franco’sSpain, despite the Generalissimo’s much more pragmatic approach to religion.8

Some experts have endeavoured to restrict its application to the more overtlyCatholicised form of regime adopted by Franquismo once the influence of the anti-clerical Falange, fascism and Nazism had waned, and that of Opus Dei hadgrown.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 readinessof revisionist historians to idealise what the Catholic Church in Slovakia gained

by ensuring that their country became such a compliant puppet state under theNazis. It contains the following passage:



The ‘Holy Storm’ 215

The close alliance of Catholicism and Fascism [sic] was not unique toSlovakia, of course. It was found in many other European countries, aswell: in pre-war Austria under Dollfuss, in Salazar’s Portugal, in Romaniaunder the Iron Guard [sic], in Pavelic’s Croatia, in Horthy’s Hungary, inVichy France and, of course, under Generalissimo Franco, who called

himself ‘Leader of Spain by the grace of God’. All of these, to varyingdegrees, exemplified ‘clerical fascism’, that is to say, ‘fascist regimes inwhich 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 symbio-sis. To further compound the confusion, Admiral Horthy’s regime in Hungary, incontrast to the Arrow Cross movement, was not even fascist. Nor were eitherdominated by the clergy, even if Ferenc Szálasi was careful to incorporateCatholicism into his vision of a ‘Hungarist’ national identity. When both ‘clerical’

and ‘fascism’ become this elastic, the binomial expression they form loses anytrace of heuristic rigour. Taking such texts at their face value, there would be noreason to deny ‘clerical fascist’ status to any ultra-nationalist movement or ‘right-wing’ authoritarian regime in which significant numbers of ostensibly devoutChristians – and not necessarily priests – played a conspicuous role. This wouldinclude not only the Iron Guard,11 but also the National-Christian DefenceLeague (LANC), and the National Christian Party in interwar Romania, theChristian National Socialist Movement, the Ossewabrandwag and the post-warAfrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) in South Africa,12 and even the regime of Getulio Vargas, who fostered an alliance between the Brazilian government andthe 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 widespectrum of illiberal Christian politics, such as the ‘Catholic Integralism’ associ-ated with the radical views of Archbishop Marcel Lefevre of France, or theChristian 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 canalso be stretched to include various early twentieth-century right-wing move-ments in Europe that took their inspiration from Charles Maurras’s ActionFrançaise (even though Maurras himself was not a cleric, and possibly not evena Christian),13 as well as products of the highly fecund habitat provided for reli-

gious and pseudo-religious politics by Christian Nationalism in the USA, suchas 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 clericalfascism.16

Deflating ‘Clerical Fascism’

One strategy for restoring to the expression ‘clerical fascism’ some much neededspecificity and rigour is to restate the obvious, namely that it is formed when theconcept ‘fascism’ – about which a tolerable (and, inevitably, in some quarters a

vigorously contested) academic consensus has emerged over the last decade – isqualified by the ambiguous, though not intrinsically problematic, adjective ‘cleri-cal’. If it is to be used binomially with sufficient definitional clarity to describe ageneric political phenomenon (genus) of which ‘clericofascismo’ under Mussolini



216 R. Griffin

was only one local variant (a species) – and Allardyce would doubtless have beenreluctant to concede even this – then these two components need to be consideredseparately.

In the present context, ‘generic fascism’, whose definition is a topic I haveaddressed extensively elsewhere,17 is assumed to be a secular political ideology,

which – on a par with Bolshevism, though invoking overtly mythic, spiritual andirrational forces bound up with the nation and race in its self-legitimation ratherthan economic classes – pursues the goal of total revolution, the creation of a newtype of society and a new type of human being in a new historical era. At theheart of its vision of the regenerative process lies the transformation not of capi-talism into socialism, but of a fragmented, decadent society into a nationalcommunity, 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 frequentrecourse to the language of redemption, sacrifice, faith and immortality, as well as

the powerful charismatic forces it whipped up in the interwar period in somecontexts 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 OldTestament 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 lateGreek klerikos, and hence the Latin clericus, subsequently mutated to clergé inFrench 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 asdistinct from the laity. Here, however, clericia, the Latin collective noun for schol-arly priests, bequeathed the word Klerisei, appropriated into English as ‘clerisy’,meaning the (secular) literati or intelligentsia. In French, the equivalent of thisterm 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 intelli-gentsia. Instead, it acquired the less illustrious meaning of someone doing menialtasks for high-ranking civil servants and bureaucrats or, especially in AmericanEnglish, 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 bedispelled 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 acquiredin standard English. This is consistent with the pronouncement of one of the mostpopular reference works of the electronic age, which defines ‘clerical’ thus:

A member of the clergy of a religion, especially one that has trained orordained priests, preachers, or other religious professionals. Its non-culture-specific nature means it is often used to refer to the religious lead-ership 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 anextremist political ideology out of clerical thought and values represents a politi-cisation of religion, while those cases where fascism incorporated clerical valuesare symptomatic of the sacralisation of politics and its operation as a ‘political




religion’. No matter how much they collude, merge or come to resemble eachother outwardly, their initial ontological premises and metaphysical endgamesremain poles apart. They can thus readily become entwined but not easily synthe-sised or fused – unless they are melded in a process of syncretisation and hybridis-ation, a comparatively rare process to which we will return.

In the light of such considerations, ‘clerical fascism’ may thus be used as aWeberian ideal type for a generic concept that refers to:

The ideology and political praxis of clerics and theologians who eithertactically support fascism as a movement or regime while maintaining acritical distance from its totalising, revolutionary, and basically secularobjectives, or integrate elements of fascist values and policies into the waythey conceptualise their mission on earth as devout believers in a divinelyordained world. As such, clerical fascism can never be a movement in itsown right with a clerical leadership, independent ideology, and autono-

mous organisational structure, though it may operate as a discrete factionor constituency within a fascist regime with which it enters a symbioticrelationship.

What ‘Clerical Fascism’ is Not

If the ideal type of ‘clerical fascism’ we have now constructed is applied tomodern politics, numerous phenomena associated with it in the past fail themembership test for what has now become a much more exclusive club. One suchgroup is made up of non-revolutionary ultra-nationalist movements with proactiveclerical support, such as the bulk of the Irish Blueshirts, the Romanian LANC andregimes in Portugal, Spain, Austria, Greece, Hungary, Poland and Vichy France.None of these had any scruples about imitating elements of fascism’s revolution-ary rhetoric and style, but they remained at bottom modernising forms of conser-vatism – what I have elsewhere termed ‘parafascism’20 – a force that sought toreassert the hegemony of a traditional world view in a modern idiom. In the caseof 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 thelocal variant of ultranationalist politics among the clergy, not the whole regime.

Other excluded categories consist of fascist movements transforming particu-

lar denominations of Christianity into indicators of national identity, or usingChristianity to rationalise racial hatred or anti-socialism, thereby subtly ‘nation-alising’ Christian theology, such as the Spanish Falange, the Legion of theArchangel Michael (Iron Guard) and the AWB; movements in which völkisch21

thought or occultist religiosity22 predominate; or ‘New Religions’ of the sort thatplayed a role in some ideological subcurrents within both Nazism as a move-ment and under the Third Reich. All these should be rigorously dissociated fromestablished Christianity and its clerics on ideological and theological grounds. Inthe case of the German Faith Movement, for example, only someone seduced byNazism 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 hasgone now,/The Sun-wheel shall arise,/And so, with God, we shall be free atlast/And give our people their honour back’.24 However, here again, any genu-ine seminary-trained priests who became caught up in perpetuating such overtly



218 R. Griffin

pagan travesties of Christianity as devout Nazis would de facto constitute indi-vidual 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 lumberroom of comparative studies in this area. As a result, ‘clerical fascism’ emerges asa leaner, less ubiquitous, but still important, phenomenon. Every country inwhich the Church was a dominant force in national life and that hosted an indig-enous fascist movement or became incorporated into the Nazis’ New EuropeanOrder 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 significantcontribution to furthering Nazi ends, including the implementation of the Final

Solution. In practice, the socio-political space available for ‘clerical fascism’ toplay a role in any movement or regime before the war was conditioned by thestance adopted towards organised religion by the national permutation of fascism in question. This could assume two basic forms, only the second of whichcreated a hospitable habitat for it to thrive.

The first and most unpropitious habitat for fostering the active collaborationof a section of the clergy was created by variants of fascism like the BritishUnion of Fascists, which pursued a scientistic, overtly modernising and techno-cratically advanced vision of the reborn nation. To take another example, evenafter the Concordat between fascism and the Vatican, Giovanni Gentile contin-ued to promote a neo-Hegelian theory of the ethical state as an alternative toChristian society, much to the chagrin of the Catholic Church. No less antagonis-tic to ‘clerical fascism’ were the völkisch variants of Nazism. In these cases theultra-nationalism or racism that fascism posited as the foundation of the neworder tended to assume the guise of a secular, historicising political religion,even if the rituals it inspired were saturated with the topoi of Christian religioussymbolism and ritual or enacted an elaborate pagan travesty of it. Emilio Gentilehas analysed the lengths to which fascism went to sacralise the state underMussolini,25 while Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch has shown how extensively theNazis’ ideology and ritual were structured by the Christian world view, but stillremained a political religion rather than a form of religious nationalism or politi-

cised religion.26 Certainly Oswald Mosley’s BUF would have aspired to emulateNazism’s power as a political religion if it had ever ruled Britain. However, itwould have done so with much less Christian baggage than either fascism orNazism, 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 ‘cler-ics’ who, in contrast with the majority of their fellow clergy, go out of their way toadapt their religious beliefs in order to legitimise their support of fascism,producing convoluted arguments for Christianity’s compatibility with fascismwith endorsement neither from the Church hierarchy nor from the fascist leader-

ship.27

Nevertheless, as the histories of both fascism and Nazism show, fascismcould be tolerated by the bulk of the Church-going public, a connivance activelywooed and manipulated by Mussolini and Hitler. However, the passive supportfor fascism by practising believers is not the same as the active collaboration of




clerics that is the hallmark of ‘clerical fascism’. Nor does the fact that a fascistmovement 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 hasalready 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 theOrthodox Church, thereby surreptitiously historicising and politicising it.28 Sucha conjunction of theoretically incompatible world-views fosters pockets of activecollusion between both fascists and clerics in insidiously ‘temporalising’ the tradi-tional religious narrative, and in the interwar period induced some Church clericsto doctor its ‘soteriological’ content and function so that by implication Christ’ssacrifice 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 Guardand Romanian Orthodoxy. He contends that:

Despite its pronounced orthodox character, legionary mysticism did notmean the total assimilation of orthodox theology by a fascist politicalmovement, but on the contrary an attempt at subordinating and trans-forming that theology into a political instrument.29

The ethos in the early years of the Third Reich encouraged countless practisingChristians to persuade themselves that a profound compatibility existed betweentheir religious beliefs and Nazism,30 and that Hitler’s dictatorship offered a totalsolution not just to the political crisis of Weimar, but its spiritual one as well. It isa bleak episode in ecclesiastical history which illustrates the importance of ‘cogni-tive dissonance’ in conditioning beliefs and perceptions in times of crisis.31 Beforesuch 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 andChristianity started well before the Seizure of Power. Thus it was that oneGerman 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 forthe doves of Divine Providence, it produced many specifically Nazi permutationsof ‘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 theapparent conversion of German clerics to Nazism emerges when we focus on theambiguities of the two terms ‘confluence’ and ‘synthesis’, which it is importantnot to use interchangeably in discussion of the relationship between theology and

politics in the context of ‘clerical fascism’. We propose to tease the two termsapart, giving them contrasting connotations in order to further clarify our ownideal type of the term which presents ‘clerical fascism’ as a combination of twopotentially conflicting ideological components.



220 R. Griffin

We have already argued that it is the general ethos of spiritual and moralrenewal created by fascism that encouraged some religious clerics to enter an inti-mate relationship with it in the interwar period. By probing into this relationshipfurther, it soon becomes evident that the ‘clerical fascism’ that results can assumenot 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 historicaltime through human agency, which makes it the ultimate enemy of genuineChristianity. Such self-deception can arise when the cleric convinces himself thatthe two ‘faiths’ share enough common enemies – communism, materialism, anar-chy, Judaism, individualism, alleged social and moral decadence – to makecollaboration fruitful. The result is a confluence, a ‘flowing together’, of two sepa-rate ideological currents. The corresponding relationship is then one of ‘collu-

sion’, in which, as the etymology of the term highlights, each party or faction joinsin the other’s ‘game’ for its own, partially compatible, but in the last resortconflicting 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. Inthe ‘fascist epoch’ (1918–1945) untold numbers of Catholics, Protestants andOrthodox believers in the most crisis-torn parts of Europe were lured intosupporting the politics of ultra-nationalism and authoritarianism by the spectre of Bolshevism and anarchy, seduced by the fatally flawed logic that ‘my enemy’senemy is my friend’. Such regimes as Mussolini’s Italy, Hlinka’s Slovakia,Paveli[cacute] ’s Croatia and Pétain’s France provide many individual examples of afully 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 Churchduring a time of profound crisis.

However, the entente between clerics and fascists assumes a quite differentform, one generally neglected by scholars, when, instead of confluence, a genuineidentification and synthesis occurs in the deepest recesses of a cleric’s mind

between theological beliefs and fascist sympathies. The result is aclerical variant of fascism in which the vision of a cleansing national revolution is expressed andrationalised in a seemingly homogenised, unified Christian discourse. For exam-ple, 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 religiousfaith.33 This synthesising, syncretic mode of ‘clerical fascism’ is a less pragmatic,more psychologically complex phenomenon than the collusive variety whichgave 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) andmerely ‘collusive’ (weak) ‘clerical fascism’ can be illustrated by a concrete exampletaken from Christianity’s contorted relationship with Nazism. The degree to which

the Vatican ever proactively supported either the fascist or Nazi regimes underPope Pius XI and Pope Pius XII is still energetically contested,34 as is the degree towhich Hitler and some of the top Nazi leaders retained elements of the Christianfaith. However, there is no doubt that some elements within the Protestant,

c




Catholic and Orthodox clergy in various parts of Europe gave active support to theNazi occupation of their country, even to the point of conniving with, or in someinstances actively participating in, the extermination programme. This occurredprincipally in Germany,35 France,36 in the Baltic region37 and in the Balkans, wherea minority of Catholic clergy – some of them high-ranking dignitaries – played a

proactive role in governing the Nazi fiefdom, the Independent State of Croatia, andwere directly involved in episodes of systematic genocide carried out against Jews,Gypsies and Serbs.38 There is also abundant documentation that elements in theVatican secretly connived in helping Nazi and Ustasha war criminals escape justiceafter the war.39

Yet, there is little to suggest that such collaboration involved Christian clergymaking the considerable intellectual effort required to fascistise their own theo-logical beliefs to the point of creating an actual hybrid between Nazism andChristianity. Rather, they tailored and edited their religious beliefs to defendtheir support of fascism and racism, while keeping them distinct from the ideol-

ogy promulgated by the party itself, whether fascist, Nazi, Ustashan or theirlocal permutation. In particular, they managed to retain the other-worldly soteri-ology of Christianity, along with its distinctive creed and liturgy. It was whenChristian belief was twisted to sanction mass murder that collusive ‘clericalfascism’ assumed its most devastating and morally repugnant forms as a politi-cal ideology.

However, the response of the Deutsche Christen [German Christians] – thefaction of Protestants led by Ludwig Müller – to the rise of Nazism went beyondtactical collaboration by encouraging Germans to work towards the Führer both aspatriotic Germans and as fervent Christians. The more radical German Christiansproposed to Nazify Lutheranism by removing the Old Testament from the Bible,so as to purge Christianity of its Jewish contamination. Their emblem, a combina-tion of the Cross and the Swastika, epitomises the degree to which theyconsciously sought to weld into a single alloy the alien metals of Nazism andChristianity. This was no simple collaboration or collusion, but an attemptedsynthesis between clericalism and fascism carried out with such theologicalearnestness that it makes it possible to talk of the wholesale hybridisation of thetwo.40

A vivid testimony to the complex psychological and intellectual processinvolved in the perversion of an established religion into the warrant for racialpersecution 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 years1930–1933 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’sdictatorship, 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 inredemption 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, progressiveprocess occurring from within human history. Rather it was ‘a holy storm that hascome over us and grasped’ the entire people.42 As a result, the encounter with God



222 R. Griffin

was now mediated directly ‘through Volk and fatherland’, implicitly dispensingwith Christ’s intercession.43 Unlike Martin Heidegger or Ernst Jünger, who, by1936, had both withdrawn into ‘inner emigration’, the unfolding realities underthe new regime seemed to have only intensified Hirsch’s missionary zeal to fusethe 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 adense theological discourse, his publications continued to preach the fundamentalidentity of the traditional Christian religious congregation [Gemeinde] with thenew Nazi national community [Volksgemeinschaft]. Thus, on the eve of the warHirsch, 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 aGerman to be a Christian, or as a Christian a German. Faith and love arecreated 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 byan intellectual clerk but a highly studious and scholarly cleric, is to be found in theresearch of social anthropologists into ‘revitalisation movements’. These suddenflare-ups of charismatic, culture-constituent energy have arisen sporadicallythroughout human history, either to regenerate a society that has entered aprofound crisis or to create a new community out of the collapse of the old. Intheir pioneering research into this phenomenon, both Victor Turner45 and EdgarWallace46 emphasise that a key factor in the success of such a movement is theelaboration of a new ideology culled syncretically from a variety of sourcesthrough what Wallace describes as a ‘mazeway resynthesis’. In this process,disparate ideological components are ‘ludically recombined’ into a new worldview (mazeway), which offers those disaffected with the old order not just a diag-nosis of the contemporary crisis, but the imminent prospect of its resolution in areborn society.

A similar process of combining disparate elements into new aesthetic, social orpolitical 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 conno-tations can be extended to refer to myriad initiatives for change and renewal thatexpress 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 existingmodernity, modernism quickly acquires an enlarged (‘maximalist’) semanticscope which makes it applicable to a vast array of heterogeneous attempts carriedout in the aesthetic, intellectual, cultural, social, scientific, technological and polit-ical spheres of the Europeanised world, especially in the period 1880–1950, to

renew the sense of transcendence and sacrality so seriously eroded by the impactof secularisation and disenchantment.

This use of the term has much in common with the way in The Politics of Timethe Marxist intellectual Peter Osborne applies modernism to any projects in art,




philosophy, social thought and politics which specifically ‘affirm the temporalityof the new’ in the face of the erosion of meaning and transcendence under west-ern modernity.48 The logic of his argument leads him to a conclusion that flies inthe face of much traditional Marxist thinking, namely he treats fascism as anexample 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 withradically new futures’ (my emphasis). The inference Osborne draws from this anal-ysis is striking in both its simplicity and its radicalness: ‘contrary to receivedopinion … fascism is neither a relic nor an archaism, but a form of politicalmodernism’.49

The hypothesis that emerges from this line of argument is consistent with thewidespread 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 ‘maze-way resynthesis’ to achieve closure and enter a new age. These took place inspheres as apparently unrelated as occultism, architecture, biopolitics, bodyculture, social hygiene, sexual mores and vegetarianism, spawning a vast varietyof disparate schemes and projects whose common utopian goal was to resolve theacute ambivalence, liminality and anomie of the age and usher in a visionary neworder, or at least a renewed sense of personal nomos. It was the prevalence of thismodernist cultural climate that subliminally predisposed millions of ‘ordinary’human beings to sacrifice themselves for the renewal of history in the First WorldWar, 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-Hungarianempires during their collapse, or in European states under Nazi occupation – itcould also lead broad swathes of the population to respond with enthusiasm andeven fanaticism to some of the most radical, totalising, and potentially devastatingsolutions offered by visionary political leaders, something impossible outside thecontext of a generalised ‘sense-making crisis’. (The partial resolution of Europe’snomic crisis after 1945 with the advent of the Cold War helps explain why the revo-lutionary intensity of its modernist climate abated after 1945.)

From this perspective, Hirsch’s passionately intellectual synthesis of Nazismwith Christianity may be taken at face value as an idiosyncratic ‘solution’ to theintense spiritual and moral crisis of Weimar Germany. It constituted the ‘maze-

way’ which he hoped would lead his fellow countrymen and women into a newage of transcendent spirituality and community. At the same time, Hirsch’s thor-ough Nazification of Christianity was symptomatic of a generalised longing forrebirth 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 WallStreet Crash to become a pandemic of anomie. This generated countervailing long-ings for salvation in every social stratum – hence the strikingly trans-class natureof support for Nazism as a movement. In the deepening climate of socio-politicalmodernism that ensued after 1929, millions of ‘modern’ German citizens in every

social milieu found themselves driven by an urgent need to take refuge from themounting 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



224 R. Griffin

Hitler that made him, almost overnight, the centre of a leader cult and politicalreligion 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 aChristian mission to fulfil – underlines the need not just for political but for meta-

physical principles of order to be renewed so that the mounting anarchy couldfinally be banished from society. The Spiritual Condition of the Age, published in1935, presents the Third Reich as reintroducing the three primordial precondi-tions to a society’s viability without which he claimed it was doomed to disinte-grate from within: Horos, or ‘uncrossable boundaries’; Nomos, the orderingprinciple 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 orderingprinciples that defines the individual destiny of every historical people. Hirschconvinced himself that this divine matrix could not have been restored in itsarchetypal German form if the Nazi revolution had not intervened to save the

nation from total collapse and the threat of Bolshevism. In the theological systemhe concocted out of an intensely personal act of ‘ludic recombination’, the ThirdReich and God’s Reich had become coterminous: the mission of Jesus Christ onEarth 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, academicswill only exacerbate the taxonomic confusion at present reigning in the study of ‘clerical fascism’ as long as they remain reluctant to specify the conceptual frame-work 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 liter-ature on this subject is bound to be a growing tangle of case-studies where like israrely being compared with like. It is a situation that makes it extremely difficultto 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 Anglophonepolitical science and historiography to be drastically pruned away, so as to returnthe concept to its original, highly delimited meaning. In other words, ‘clericalfascism’ should strictu sensu characterise professional clerics of an established reli-gion, including interpreters of theological doctrine, who enter either a collabora-

tive or symbiotic relationship with fascism, a revolutionary, secular variant of ultranationalism bent on the total rebirth of society through human agency. Assuch, ‘clerical fascism’ should never be used to characterise a political movementor regime in its entirety, since it can at most be a faction within fascism, and mayrefer to no more than a highly personal and atypical response to it by an individ-ual cleric such as Emanuel Hirsch. Applying it to contemporary politicised reli-gions such as Hindutva, Christian Identity or Islamism51 only fuels the ‘Babeleffect’ that still envelopes the term.

Third, it is important that ‘clerical’ is not allowed to decay into an adjectiveloosely describing the politics of any practising Christian. In particular, it should

remain carefully cordoned off from the realm of the secular intelligentsia [’lesclercs’], no matter how keen they are to solve the spiritual crisis of modernity.52 Itis also important that, even when clerics and theologians proactively supportfascism, or when a fascist movement seeks to gain their support by making a




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-disciplinaritywhen studying ‘clerical fascism’. It suggests, for example, that social and political

scientists keen to explore the historical dynamics of ‘clerical fascism’ couldusefully draw more extensively on theological expertise when making judgementsabout the compatibility of certain political positions with Christianity in its vari-ous denominations. It is easy to get the impression that for some secular mindsanything that involves mobilizing myths and unfashionable meta-narratives fallsinto a cavernous wheelie bin designated for ‘religion’, which leads to some partic-ularly perverse judgements of the compatibility of fascism and Christianity.Scholars should also be encouraged to take advantage of readily accessible areasof expertise within specialist areas contiguous with religion, such as millenarianstudies, social psychology and cultural anthropology. As this article has stressed,

my own particular line of enquiry also highlights the value of exploring the rele-vance to understanding ‘clerical fascism’ of research into both modernity andmodernism.

Used judiciously, insights from these various disciplines may prove invaluableto deepen our insight into the way disparate ideological elements can be rapidlysyncretised into a homogeneous and fanatical ‘world view’ that in extremecircumstances can find a resonance with broad sectors of the public, and mayeven become the mobilising myth of a mass movement. In applying such perspec-tives outside the sphere of European politics, the distinction between collusiveand synthetic forms of ‘clerical fascism’ might help researchers understand betterthe complex dynamics at work when clerics reject or promote the contemporaryrise 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 toexplore patterns of similarity and contrast between fascism, ‘clerical fascism’ andpoliticized religions such as Islamism that human scientists of all cultures mayfind it easier to come to grips conceptually with cultural forces stemming fromreligion in both its traditional and more recent political forms whose virulentpower to change the course of history – like those of nationalism, Bolshevism andfascism, before them – seems to have taken much of the West’s academic commu-nity 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 Germanywhen 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 haveundertaken the mission to ensure that the Fukuyamian ‘end of history’, andhence the shattering of their closed cosmological world, remains indefinitelypostponed.

Notes

1. This article is based on a keynote address presented at the conference “‘Clerical Fascism’ inInterwar 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.



226 R. Griffin

3. See, for example, the review article covering five recent books on fascist studies by António CostaPinto, “Back to European Fascism”, Contemporary European History, 15/1 (2006), pp.103–15.

4. Walter Laqueur, “The Origins of Fascism: Islamic Fascism, Islamophobia, Antisemitism”, NewYork OUP Blog, at: http://blog.oup.com/oupblog/2006/10/the_use_of_the_.html (last accessed6 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: NewYork State University Press, 1993), p.xxiii; and Anton Pelinka and Ruth Wodak, The HaiderPhenomenon (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 SocialistWorker online at: http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=7774 (last accessed5 December 2006).

9. Thus, in his attack on the canonisation of Escriva de Balaguer, founder of Opus Dei, Jesus Ynfantecomplained that: ‘He had Madrid under his control, starting with the dictator. Under Francothe clerical fascism of Opus Dei won out over the true fascism of the Falange’. Quoted by GilesTremlett 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 theNazi Swastika and the triumph over the Beast whose number according to the Book of Revelationsis 666. This is an apt symbol for the appropriation and perversion of Christianity, rather than for thepoliticisation 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%20Fascism (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 December2006).

17. See my introduction to Cyprian Blamires, with Paul Jackson, ed., World Fascism: A HistoricalEncyclopedia (New York: Clio, 2006). A more sustained account of fascism as a form of politicalmodernism is to be found in my forthcoming 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 theNazis (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 Christianvalues see The Journal of Contemporary History, 41/1 (2007), which contains five scholarly articlesdevoted to a detailed critique of Richard Steigmann-Gall’s thesis in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions




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 ReverendNye’s prolific contribution to the BUF newspaper Action in Michael Spurr, ‘“Living the BlackshirtLife’: 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 anyestablished religion if modernisation has proceeded to a point where an essentially secularregime 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 UniversityPress, 2007).

29. Radu Ioanid, “The Sacralised Politics of the Romanian Iron Guard”, Totalitarian Movements andPolitical Religions, 5/3 (2004), p.419 (my emphasis).

30. On the insidious appropriation of Christianity by Nazism, see Uriel Tal, Religion, Politics, andIdeology in the Third Reich (London: Routledge, 2004).

31. See Christopher Burris, Eddie Harmon-Jones and Ryan Tarpley, “’By Faith Alone’: ReligiousAgitation 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 thewar, 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 EugenioPacelli, 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 (NewYork: 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 Modernismand 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: RutgersUniversity 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 populismwhich lacks the revolutionary and secular orientation of fascism.

53. It should have become abundantly clear just how obfuscating the neologism ‘Islamofascism’ reallyis, and how perverse its use in neo-Bushian discourse.

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