Yeah, I was wondering about that… 
Okay, glad you liked it. And yes, if a book contains endorsements from Hugh Ross, Dennis Prager, James Tour, Stephen Meyer, and Sarah Salviander, I know exactly what kind of book it will be.
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We call that a clue.
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OK…here I go with the responses to multiple people in one post…the way Biologos seems to hope we will do…
@beaglelady …re wanting to be like a frog and breathe both underwater and on land — you will have to take that issue up with the Creator of the Universe. Maybe it was just to keep us from colonizing the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and building McDonalds franchises down there… We also are not able to operate the Crab Nebula or to keep things from falling down black holes. (Neither can frogs)
@Pastore … I appreciate your comments and examples from your own experiences.
@HEYMIKE3…The brother’s name is Peter Hitchens. I think the two of them used to “debate” each other in public …if so, that was long ago. The Peter Hitchens book that I read (assume more than one out there but not sure) was somewhat autobiographical (that is “his journey”) but touched on some of the religious issues. As for “his journey”…was intrigued by how his experiences living (as a British correspondent) in the former USSR impacted some of his religious views…OK, now we are talking about a different book.
@PEVAQUARK…I don’t suppose I think such is necessarily “Boring” — though it could be. But the point of the post was for people who actually had read it to comment…Reading Cliff’s Notes may have gotten you enough to write high-school “reports,” but it was still cheating a bit…As for me, this book was reading someone whose books I have not read before. Disappointed with the citations here showing Metaxes endorsing the fictional election results…but that was Nov 2020. Hopefully, he has resolved that issue in his head by this point. If he hasn’t…what can I say? Cannot agree with everyone.
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To be sure - “equivalencies” will work less and less well as we try to look so far back. I agree. That’s why I think I would limit the comparison more to within the last couple centuries where there is at least a bit more similarity that might roughly map onto the way we think of things today.
If there were openly gay Nazis in Hitler’s time, that is news to me. I’ll listen and learn (or be reminded).
And yes - such generalizations are simplistic. The question for me is: are the generalizations true enough to warrant some consideration?
So were media pundits like Carlson who get their bread-and-butter from appealing to a right-leaning demographic - are those pundits just wrong about what conservatism is then or wrong about what their audience wants to hear them say? It would probably be unusual for those crowd-tuned sensationalists to miss-judge so badly on the material needed to tickle itching ears. IOW, if Putin is not somebody the right should be admiring, then maybe somebody ought to inform them so that they stop doing it?
I am aware of a few that were socially radical in some respects, but not in many others: Jan Matthys and Jan of Leyden in the Anabaptist Kingdom of Munster come to mind.
The Anabaptist Kingdom of Munster was a millenarian Anabaptist attempt to control Munster, because Jan Matthys said that that would be the location of the second coming and institution of the millennium in 1534 or 1535. Jan Matthys’s predecessor in leadership, Melchior Hoffman, had believed that this would happen in Strasbourg in 1533, and went there to try to convert the town to his ideas, instead he got arrested for his statements that the sinners needed to be purged from the city. Jan Matthys claimed the same things about purging the sinners in order to make the city more welcoming for the second coming, and forcibly converted Munster to Anabaptism (convert, leave, or be executed). Jan of Leyden (and to a lesser extent Jan Matthys), used patriarchal examples to try to turn Munster into a communist, polygamist theocracy.
Then there are the loopy “ME!” types that just promote whatever they want to do, whether radical or not. Commodus (or should I say Hercules?) would be a good example, as would Nero.
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I encountered a quote in a lecture series (either late in one on WWI or early in one on WWII):
“Signoro Mussolini, what is ‘faschism’?”
“Me”
Thanks Mervin. I think the original comment was along the lines of “think about it” and concluding that only right-wing socially conservative people are into being or following dictators. This is supposedly because it suits their authoritarian tendencies. The comment came originally from someone’s son. And that is all right. Good starting point for a debate topic. Less to do with Metaxes’ book, of course.
But the notion that right wingers bear the burden for spawning dictators right and left is, in itself, kind of (well) a subjective remark. Would that thought have been spoken in that way if the speaker were conservative?
As for the proclivities of dictatorships such as in the Third Reich and other modern groups — fascinating topic for a separate blog/post…And what do we ascribe the Reign of Terror *French Revolution) to in the late 1700s? Right wing authoritarian types?
Well…authoritarian maybe…but…?
But yes, read William Shirer, for one, if you want to know more about the Third Reich. While the Nazi regime considered outlawing homsexuality (for example), various leading and early Nazis were gay ( Goering among them is one I can think of off the top of my head). Shirer is decidedly not-PC on the issue…or he was not in the edition of his book that I read long ago.
The Third Reich had many demented aspects to it – including sexuality, abortion, weird experiments on human beings — no need to go into it all here …but see degruyter.com/document plus other sources. I have a collection of videos on aspects of WW2/Third Reich/ history – produced by Time-Life and others…worth exploring if you want to know more. . …look up the “Strength through Joy” movement and other things if you want a look at their attitude toward sexuality. Hardly what one would call “right wing” or conservative stances…nor is the gassing of “challenged” people…the experiments on twins etc. The closing of religious schools…the pressure put by the Nazis on religious people …
It would be hard to label these trends either liberal/progressive or conservative/right wing…even if you really tried.
And this is just for starters. Communism as a whole —to look at another dictatorship – was staunchly anti-religion…although it developed its own theology. Dictatorships do know how to use religious imagery and give it a secular spin. Witness the “Lord’s prayer to Hitler” and attempts at his deification – not something most conservative folks would (by modern definitions) support…And, in the realm of Communism, we have the Little Red Book in China, Russian visits to Lenins Tomb…no resurrection event surmised here with his tomb, but still…
If NO religion is allowed in a government system, the trappings of it will still be used…and this is another subject, of course. But using the “trappings of religion” is not a right wing or conservative tendency any more than it may be inherently liberal/progressive. It also is not religious, it is just the “use” of it because, well because it just happens to be true that people are inherently religious — and will substitute lower-case gods for the Real Thing when necessary.
P.S. “WHY are we inherently religious?” you ask.
Hmmm…A: atheism is not only dead. It just never really makes sense of things, after all. Does it?
Too big a topic for here…Enough for now…but I think others also have objected to the suggestion made above that right wing people are the ones focused on authoritarian governments and dictatorships.
And no comment on Tucker Carlson.
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That reminds me of someone … but I just can’t remember who!
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These guys claim a lot of things.
I remember picking up The God Delusion in a bookstore and flipping through it. Right about the middle of the book was such a gloriously large hole in his case that I later took the book out of the library and made copious notes. I wish I had kept the notes.
But claiming to disprove something is not the same as disproving it.
The Nazis really did persecute gay people. But communist Cuba also persecuted gay people.
The Nazis only pressured religious people who opposed them. And most Protestants were only too happy to embrace Nazi ideology. Bonhoeffer was the exception.
Or as R.C. Sproul would say, just because you can say something, doesn’t make it true. Whether it’s the existence of nothing, an infinite number of universes, or married bachelors 
Oh and I also remember reading Dawkins counter arguments in The God Delusion, and I’m pretty sure I read the same type of disproof in God is Not Great, and The End of Faith.
I learned the ontological argument from Sproul and Gerstner’s book Classical Apologetics, and then worked through the cosmological in a philosophy of religion class with Paul Draper. Good times!
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Bonhoeffer was an exception; not the exception.
True, but those who resisted were in the minority.
Hmmmm…well this began as a post that wanted to discuss people’s views of the book “Is Atheism Dead?” — and it seems that as soon as many here saw the author’s name, plus the back cover quotes, everyone went haywire.
No one wanted to do more than throw spitwads at the book and go off on a rant.
And then we morphed into an assertion that dictators are mostly conservative/right wing because people like “that” are inclined to such things whereas liberal/progressive people are not.
I missed the segue on that.
The French Revolution, for example, is believed by some to have been the end of the Enlightenment. This was hardly a right-wing gig.
We just forget because, of course, neither we nor our great-grandparents were around at the time.
The Nazis did close religious schools and sought to make churches places where the state could be worshipped. Some also wanted to bring back worship of ancient Germanic gods. Hail Tyr, I suppose!! I could cite the title of a recent book naming the concern over the closing of religious schools and treatment of religious people by the Nazis in Germany and in the countries they conquered, but don’t want to start another name-calling event. (Nope…author NOT right wing but …) The matter is not really news…has been mentioned elsewhere in the huge body of literature about that era.
A former landlady of mine – who was a child during the Third Reich – noted that they could only celebrate Winter Solstice, not Christmas. I pressed her for more memories, but she said she was trying to forget “that painful time.”
Abortion…gassing of “useless eaters” like handicapped people (plus others whom they did not like)…various other issues that we today might not consider the province of “right wing” people were endorsed by the Third Reich and its various adherents. The recitation of a sort of Lord’s prayer to Hitler, etc…I think I mentioned all that. There was more…
William Shirer, in his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, noted that “many” of what he called “the early Nazis” were gay — and I did note Herman Goering. The fact that there were places in concentration camps for homosexuals does not change that fact. It just adds a layer to things. I once flipped through a biography of a noted Nazi and happened to note (I did not read the whole book) that this particular Nazi had been severely abused by his own father as a child. It stuck in my mind because the form of abuse that this particular Nazi was infamous for inflicting on tens of thousands of others was, in fact, exactly what his own father had done to him.
In that case, it would not be surprising if some other members of that regime did not also go after people who bore traits matching their own — distorted or otherwise.
They were a complex bunch. Human beings are complex.
The point here though is that much of what passed for standard thinking in that particular dictatorial regime — along with others – was neither left wing or right. It was just their own weirdness…Remember “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,”
The Bible does say that we are basically evil. And that is not a province of the right wing. That was my point.
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How many early Nazis were homosexual? Did the Nazis change their policy?
Here is an article from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals
I gave you a source of information regarding one detail. The point of the discussion – after it ceased to be analysis of a book no one wanted to read because of the identity of its author – is that conservative people/right wing/whatever are not more inclined to be authoritarian – or gravitate to that sort of government — than are liberal/progressive people. The “homosexual” issue is yours in this instance, and is not a primary sign of dictatorship or conservative politics or opposition to abortion or support for euthanasia or infanticide anything else here.
And I am not the one who first brought it up either.
I’m not the one who first brought it up.
Hey - y’all can throw all your stones at me. I think I’m the one who derailed this away from the book, which it seems pretty clear Robin and others here see as needing more discussion. I’m not in a position to contribute to that since I haven’t read the book, nor do I intend to. That’s why I’ve kind of bowed out here. You don’t need to keep discussing the thesis I brought up about which side of the political spectrum may or may not be more hospitible to authoritarian thinking. If I feel strongly enough about talking more about that, I can always start another thread.
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Which religious schools did they close? Certainly the Jewish ones. But what else?
I heard a disturbing online lecture from the National Library of Israel on efforts by Nazi propaganda to recast Jesus as an Aryan. It was a hellish collaboration between church and state.
*In 1939, certain German theologians established the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life, which was financed by the Protestant church and flourished successfully until 1945. * The Institute’s members – over 200 professors, bishops and pastors – published a new version of the Bible and hymnal purged of Jewish references, as well as “research” on Judaism aimed at supporting Nazi measures against the Jews.
I’ll try to find it.
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