Alfred Rosenberg - Religious Theories

Religious Theories

Rosenberg argued for a new "religion of the blood," based on the supposed innate promptings of the Nordic soul to defend its noble character against racial and cultural degeneration. He believed that this had been embodied in early Indo-European religions, notably ancient European (Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Roman) paganism, Zoroastrianism and Vedic Hinduism.

He rejected Christianity for its universality, for original sin, at least for Germans whom he declared on one occasion were born noble, and for the immortality of the soul. Indeed, absorbing Christianity enfeebled a people. Publicly, he affected to deplore Christianity's degeneration owing to Jewish influence. Following Chamberlain's ideas, he condemned what he called "negative Christianity," the orthodox beliefs of Protestant and Catholic churches, arguing instead for a so-called "positive" Christianity based on Chamberlain's claim that Jesus was a member of an Indo-European, Nordic enclave resident in ancient Galilee who struggled against Judaism. Significantly, in his turgid, tortuous work explicating the Nazi intellectual belief system, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, Rosenberg cryptically alludes to and lauds the anti-Judaic arch-heretic Marcion and the Manichaean-inspired, "Aryo-Iranian" Cathari, as being the more authentic interpreters of Christianity versus historically dominant Judaeo-Christianity; moreover these ancient, externally Christian metaphysical forms were more "organically compatible with the Nordic sense of the spiritual and the Nordic 'blood-soul'." For Rosenberg, the anti-intellectual intellectual, religious doctrine was inseparable, in the peculiar Nazi outlook of "mystical Darwinist vitalism", from serving the interests of the Nordic race, connecting the individual to his racial nature. Rosenberg stated that "The general ideas of the Roman and of the Protestant churches are negative Christianity and do not, therefore, accord with our (German) soul." His support for Luther as a great German figure was always ambivalent.