The National Socialist German Workers’ Party regime that governed Germany from 1933 to 1945 under the charismatic leadership of Adolf Hitler used propaganda to promoted Nazi ideology and demonize its enemies, notably Jews and communists, capitalists, and intellectuals. The propaganda promoted the values asserted by the Nazis, much of which was taken from the old Norse culture and included heroic death, the leader principle that required blind obedience and “Führer worship. The citizen was expected to live for the greater good and the belief in a superior master race.

Nazi policies included imposed sterilization, abortion, and euthanasia to keep the race pure. The party also annexed German-speaking areas to expand the sphere of influence of Nazi policy.

The Nazi movement was overtly anti-rationalist, favoring appeals to emotion and cultural myths. It preferred such “non-intellectual” virtues as loyalty, patriotism, duty, purity, and blood, and allegedly produced a widespread contempt for intellectuals The secret was to deal with the people not as individuals but as crowds. The message to the crowd is a series of simple, basic, memorable words — nation, people, blood, family, comrade, friend, home, soil, bread, work, strength, hope, life, fight, victory, birth, death, honor, beauty. The Party is set up as having a monopoly on giving the people these virtues and good things. To a people whose immediate past has been hard, muddled and apparently irremediable, simple emotional words have an immense, reverberating authority. But most of all the little man who is lost and friendless in a complex, lonely modern society is treated as important, if only in the mass (LIFE, 1938).

From a religious perspective, the Lutheran Church bought into the message of Adolf Hitler 100% with only a few dissidents. They took scripture out of context so as to put God on their side.

So we take this picture from history and bring it into the 21st. Has Donald Trump become the new Führer? The enemy now is no longer the Jew but Mexicans and the Muslim. Intellectuals referred to as liberals. The message, however, remains the same and uses the same words, nation, people, blood, family, comrade, friend, home, soil, bread, work, strength, hope, life, fight, victory, birth, death, honor, beauty, freedom. Word that ring in the ears of some Christians like the bell in Pavlov’s experiments. It’s a message that is sucking in the Evangelical church. Hitler was not a Christian but made good use of words to convince the church that he was God’s man. Little did they know that he despised the Church and planned to eradicate Christianity from Germany.

So are we doomed to repeat history? I pray that is not the case.