Protestant Reich Church
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Protestant Reich Church (colloquially Reichskirche, officially in German: Deutsche Evangelische Kirche, in English: German Evangelical Church) was formed by Adolf Hitler in 1933 by an attempt to merge 28 regional churches into one church. The founding of the church was the result of work by the German Christians, who had gained a large majority at the 1933 church elections.[1] In September 1934 the merger finally failed, when the synods of two of the 28 church bodies, to wit the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria right of the Rhine and the Evangelical State Church of Württemberg, rejected to dissolve their church bodies as independent entities, and the Berlin based Landgericht I court restored the biggest church body, the then already merged Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union by its verdict in November the same year, thus resuming independence. However the German Evangelical Church, meant to be a merger, then continued to exist as a mere umbrella.
The merger was based on Nazi ideas of creating a "positive Christianity", namely purifying Christianity of any Jewish elements, including even the Old Testament. The idea had existed within a small minority of Christian groups since the time of Marcion of Sinope, but the Protestant Reich Church embraced it for racial rather than theological reasons. Ludwig Müller was elected "Reich Bishop".[2]
Although the church was initially supported by the regime, the Nazis eventually lost interest in the experiment after it failed to supplant or absorb traditional Christian churches. After 1937, relations between the Reich Church and the Nazi government began to sour.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ The 1933 German Protestant Church Elections: Machtpolitik or Accommodation? by Shelley Baranowski. Church History, Vol. 49, No. 3 (Sep., 1980), pp. 298–315. Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society of Church History.
- ^ Thomas M. Schneider, Reichsbischof Ludwig Müller: Eine Untersuchung zu Leben und Persönlichkeit. Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte, Series B: Darstellungen 19, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1993, 384 pp.
