Abstract
Far from deemphasizing Jesus’ Jewishness, as theologians in Nazi Germany regularly did, Dietrich Schuler claims that the New Testament’s message was and continues to be detrimental for “Aryans”. In fact, he finds it far more problematic than the Old Testament. His solution is to invent a new religion. I shall thus delve into Dietrich Schuler’s literature that permeated the German neo-Nazi movement during the first decade of the 21st century. Moreover, this article attempts to answer the question why Schuler was unsuccessful in turning his secular disciples into actual believers. I will use and build on a framework put forth by the American sociologist Rodney Stark. I shall also refer to religious sociologist Martin Riesebrodt and his theory of religion.
Zusammenfassung
Weit davon entfernt, Jesu jüdische Identität in Abrede zu stellen, wie es die Theologen in Nazi-Deutschland regelmäßig getan haben, behauptet Dietrich Schuler, die Botschaft des Neuen Testaments sei schädlich für „Arier“. Tatsächlich findet er dieses Neue Testament weitaus problematischer als das Alte. Kurzerhand erfand Schuler deshalb eine neue Religion für diese sogenannten Arier: den „Kreatismus“. Ich werde in diesem Aufsatz vor allem versuchen, die Frage zu beantworten, warum es Schuler nicht gelang, seine säkularen Anhänger zu echten Gläubigen, also zu Kreatisten, zu machen. Ich werde dafür einen vom amerikanischen Religionssoziologen Rodney Stark entwickelten theoretischen Ansatz verwenden und diesen erweitern, nicht zuletzt unter Bezugnahme auf den Religionssoziologen Martin Riesebrodt und dessen Religionstheorie.
1 Introduction
In his best-selling book Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1899), Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was Richard Wagner’s son-in-law, asserts: “The probability that Christ was no Jew, that He had not a drop of genuinely Jewish blood in his veins, is so great that it is almost equivalent to a certainty.”[1] The book was among the most influential ones published in the Wilhelmine Era. While many Christians throughout the centuries displayed religiously motivated hatred toward their Jewish neighbors because their ancestors were said to be the killers of Christ,[2] some theologians were also uncomfortable with Christianity’s Jewish roots and its dependence on the Old Testament.[3] Therefore, claims were made that Jesus’ teachings had actually originated in Hellenism, Buddhism or Zoroastrianism.[4] Jesus’ Jewishness was deemphasized and his words and deeds “were consistently interpreted as a critique of Judaism rather than an expression of it.”[5] Moreover, arguments were put forward in support of the hypothesis that Jesus himself was not Jewish, but that he was actually “Aryan” instead.[6] Non-theologians like Chamberlain also participated in this discourse, as can be seen from the citation above.
The Aryan-Jesus movement culminated in the founding of the “Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life” in Eisenach,[7] colloquially referred to as Entjudungsinstitut, where hundreds of scholars put themselves to the task of draining Christianity of what was perceived as Jewish influence between 1939 and 1945. Dirk Schuster points out that the work of the institute served the purpose of legitimizing doctrinal changes such as the rejection of the Old Testament for the Protestant faith.[8] At least 200,000 copies of a Bible version that was missing parts of the New Testament as well as the entire Old Testament were printed and disseminated during World War II.[9]
In short, the theologians attempting to “Aryanize” Jesus and the Bible deemed the “Jewish influence on German church life” problematic, while they affirmed the value of Jesus’ teachings. A very different approach was taken by some German neo-Nazis at the turn of the century. One of them was Dietrich Schuler. He even found it necessary to design a new religion from scratch, which he named “Kreatismus.” Schuler wrote his first book on the topic, Die Stunde des Kreatismus, in 1993,[10] but it was not until 2003 when a new, shortened and updated version of his book, quickly followed by a second edition in 2004,[11] was printed and disseminated throughout the German neo-Nazi scene, that his ideas began to be known within the movement. The new version of the book bore the catchy title: Jesus: Europas falscher Gott.
Far from deemphasizing Jesus’ Jewishness, Schuler claims that the New Testament’s message was and continues to be detrimental for “Aryans”. In fact, he finds it far more problematic than the Old Testament.[12] Schuler calls for a shift of focus from blaming Marxism or “Cultural Marxism” for weakening the “Aryan race” toward the damnation of Christianity and New Testament ethics in particular, which he views as the root cause of these ideologies. Schuler was not the first neo-Nazi to criticize the ethics conveyed by the New Testament. Jürgen Rieger, a far-right politician who led a neo-pagan organization called Artgemeinschaft, is a prominent example.[13] But the sentiment was largely popularized through Schuler’s writings.
In Schuler’s view, the European peoples will either rid themselves of the imported religion altogether or cease to exist.[14] But what is it that makes Christianity so dangerous in Schuler’s opinion? Why does Jesus become the bogeyman? And what does Schuler offer instead? Most importantly, however, why did Kreatismus fail to attract followers, even among anti-Christian neo-Nazis? I attempt to answer these questions by delving into Dietrich Schuler’s literature that permeated the movement during the first decade of the 21st century. The second half of this article will be an assessment of Schuler’s impact on the broader German neo-Nazi movement. Moreover, in this part, I shall ponder the question why Schuler was unsuccessful in turning his secular disciples into actual believers. I will use and build on a framework put forth by the American sociologist Rodney Stark.
When Stark published a paper on why religious movements succeed or fail in 1996, he greatly expanded the scope of his 1987 theory in order to include all movements, not just cults.[15] Curiously, however, only three out of the ten propositions in his model to determine the success or failure of a religious movement pertain to doctrine. While I do not question the validity of Stark’s sociological approach, I will expand his theoretical framework by adding a few propositions of my own that pertain to the doctrinal nature of a given religion in regard to its “fitness” in evolutionary terms. Studying the failure of Kreatismus, I have become convinced that theology plays a major role in the success or failure of religious movements. In order to answer the question why Kreatismus did not become a practiced religion as envisioned by Schuler, I will also draw on Martin Riesebrodt’s book The Promise of Salvation and the theory of religion he proposes.[16]
The anti-Christianism this paper is concerned with is no less anti-Semitic than were the aforementioned theologians who tried to purge Christianity of its Jewish elements. One core belief of its proponents is that the Jews purposely (or subconsciously aware of the negative implications) passed on Christianity to the Romans and thereby accomplished the downfall of the Roman Empire.[17] This, of course, is a conspiracy theory: A set of explanations of events that are claimed to have been caused by a conspiracy.[18] While I will point out the conspiratorial nature of some of Schuler’s claims en passant, they are by no means a focus of this paper.[19]
The aim of this article is to explain what Kreatismus was and why it failed. Curiously, there is to date no scholarly book or article that focusses on or even mentions Dietrich Schuler’s megalomaniacal attempt to replace Christianity with a new religion. The scholarly neglect of Kreatismus, three decades after its “invention” and 20 years after it started to have an impact on the broader German neo-Nazi movement, is especially odd given the fact that there is an abundance of literature on the Ludendorff movement and neo-pagan far-right groups in contemporary Germany.[20]
2 A New Religion: Dietrich Schuler’s Kreatismus
Born to a teacher and his wife in Stuttgart in 1927, Dietrich Schuler spent most of his childhood in the Black Forest.[21] A few months before the end of the war, he was drafted and stationed in Bohemia. Between 1947 and 1949, he studied in Reutlingen to become a teacher like his father, who had not survived the war. Schuler was a member of the Sozialistische Reichspartei until this far-right party was banned in 1952. In July 1963, his home was searched and a political manuscript titled Ketzeraphorismen was confiscated. On the grounds of this manuscript, he was briefly incarcerated in Stuttgart-Stammheim and later sentenced to seven months in jail. Although he had initially lost the status of civil servant, he soon became a teacher again. It was only after his retirement in 1991 that Schuler would start publishing his thoughts on Christianity, which he had developed in a “period of silence”. As mentioned in the introduction, with his book Jesus: Europas falscher Gott, Schuler was able to reach a wider audience for the first time. He died in 2011.[22] In this section, I will explore the nature of his “new religion”, but I shall start by dealing with his rejection of Christianity.
2.1 The Jew Jesus
Richard Steigmann-Gall tells the story of a 13-year-old squad leader of the Hitler Youth who wrote to Heinrich Himmler in June 1937 after hearing a political speaker mention that Jesus had been a Jew.[23] Finding this particular piece of information hard to digest, he asked Himmler for clarification in his letter. He received an answer from Rudolf Brandt, who was Himmler’s personal assistant. It read: “The Reichsführer is of the opinion that Christ was not a Jew. You must certainly have misunderstood the speaker.”[24] In the same month, Himmler issued an internal SS memorandum that forbade any attack on Jesus, “since such attacks or insults that Christ was a Jew are unworthy of us and certainly untrue historically.”[25] Dietrich Schuler, on the other hand, appears to be very certain about Jesus’ Jewishness, and it is probably not far-fetched to assume that this is the main reason for his rejection of the Christian faith. To Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s verdict that Jesus “had not a drop of genuinely Jewish blood in his veins,”[26] Schuler responds: “Greater nonsense is hardly conceivable.”[27]
In his final book, Kreatismus als geistige Revolution, published two years before his death, Schuler states: “There can be absolutely no doubt that the Bible is entirely Jewish at heart, that it was written by Jewish authors, and that the twelve apostles were also Jews.”[28] He then goes on to claim: “Only the Jesus handed down in the New Testament, whether he actually lived or not, became historically effective. And he, with his ‘Marxist-proletarian’ characteristics, was a Jew through and through. Any other assertion is folly dictated by wishful thinking.”[29]
In Schuler’s opinion, Jesus was “in many ways the most typical Jew of all.”[30] He further states that there was never a “biological connection” between the Europeans and their imported religion: “But this is what has always connected the Mosaic religion with Judaism.”[31] Thus, the German Christians rowed helplessly somewhere between Berlin and Jerusalem in Schuler’s view.[32] He states: “A genuine Volksgemeinschaft is unthinkable without a uniform religion that is valid for everyone. Such a religion must not be adopted from foreign cultures, but must grow out of one’s own blood.”[33] Although Schuler rejects any notion of other-worldly creators, he writes: “We could still sympathize with some ideas regarding a creator [...], but the connection of this creator with the figure of a crucified Jewish rebel prophet [...] displays an awful tastelessness and is absolutely unworthy of a great civilization.”[34] Note that there were thinkers, from the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate to the realist writer Theodor Storm, who found the notion of a god nailed to a cross unacceptable and even appalling, but it is especially the fact that it was a “Jewish rebel prophet” that seems to bother Schuler.
What Schuler dislikes most about Christianity, besides its Jewish origins, is that its ethics inevitably lead to a situation, sooner or later, in which the “mighty” find themselves turned into the slaves of the “weaklings.”[35] He subsumes the tenets of Christianity as follows: “Everything that is small, despised, and worthless ‘in the eyes of the world,’ has been chosen by ‘God.’”[36] Therefore, according to Schuler, the current day and age are “marked by a pushy cult of the Negro, colored and handicapped, an obvious byproduct of the Christian idealization of all that is miserable (Miserabilismus).”[37] Christianity is thus also inherently anti-German and anti-Germanic in Schuler’s view because “the German” allegedly embodied everything that the Christian “minus spirit” despises: “Order, authority and superior creativity.”[38] Moreover, the greater a people or an individual are, the easier it is to condemn them through the lens of Christianity.[39] The export of Christianity to Europe was therefore a “salesman-like masterstroke” in Schuler’s eyes: “The Oriental was selling a sacred magic potion to the Europeans, and little did the gullible know that it was the most deadly long-acting poison ever concocted.”[40] He goes on to mock “‘Christian’ anti-Semitism” that accused “the Jews” of not having tasted of the supposed poison themselves: “The rabbis must have laughed their heads off.”[41] He also speaks of Christianity having been “smuggled in” (eingeschleust), which implies conscious actors behind the scenes. I have stressed the fact that this is a typical conspiracy theory in the introduction.
However, this is not the only conspiracy theory. Another narrative of a conspiratorial nature to be found in Schuler’s writings concerns the supposed Jewish world domination: The Europeans have turned the insignificant Hebrew god Yahweh into “God” proper and, during their expansion over the globe, established him in every corner of the world.[42] Had it not been for Christianity, asserts Schuler, “the Jews” would be but an insignificant tribe with a strange monotheistic religion.[43] In Schuler’s opinion, the alleged Jewish world domination is a direct consequence of the link between Judaism and Christianity. He claims that there is a “magic fascination” with “God’s chosen people” that has taken hold of the subconscious.[44] To Schuler, it appears only logical that a culture that does not develop its “own religion and instead accepts one that is foreign, at the center of which are [...] the ‘People of God,’ the ‘People of the Bible’ and the ‘Holy Land,’ [...] finally has to submit to this people politically and spiritually.”[45] The fact that this is one of very few bold sentences in the entire book highlights its importance to the author.
Other grounds on which Schuler opposes Christianity include its neglect of nature,[46] its hostility towards science,[47] its devaluation of sexuality (eros) and the body in favor of the spirit, its negation of the actual world in favor of an imaginary afterworld,[48] as well as the absolutizing of “female” virtues like forgiveness.[49] Moreover, Schuler rhetorically raises the question why an almighty and good god would permit the manifestation of evil in the world.[50] Since the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, this question has been known as “theodicy”. Often Schuler’s reasoning is similar to that of prominent critics of Christianity, such as Bertrand Russell or Richard Dawkins, and has nothing to do with his National Socialist background. Like Bertrand Russell in Why I Am Not a Christian, Schuler quotes passages of the New Testament that call Jesus’ moral character into question by the standards of his own teachings.[51] Passages such as Luke 19,27 (“But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.” KJV). Just as the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, Schuler maintains that all gods were created by humans, not the other way around.[52]
Since Dietrich Schuler believed that a particular religion can only be defeated by and replaced with another faith and never with skepticism alone,[53] and he also acknowledged that taking something away from people without offering them something new in its place was cruel,[54] he set out to design such a new religion himself.
2.2 Schuler’s Theology
Since Schuler systematically developed his religious belief and theory, one must, by definition, speak of theology when referring to the edifice of ideas subsumed under the term Kreatismus.[55] This worldview was, after all, meant to replace Christianity – and it includes a notion of God, albeit one that is radically different from that of the Abrahamic religions. I shall start this chapter by summing up its ontology. Afterwards, I will deal with the political and ethical implications.
One of the main tenets of Schuler’s Kreatismus is the unity of matter and spirit: “There can be no matter without spirit, but the reverse is also true.”[56] For Schuler, even atoms and subatomic particles have a sort of consciousness,[57] and he evokes quantum physics to make his point: “Subatomic particles seem to possess ‘free will’ and spirit in the higher sense. [...] They seem to guess what the researchers’ intentions are, only to react in very different ways.”[58] Since matter dissolves into energy and waves, it is “force” in which spirit and matter are “harmoniously wedded.”[59] Moreover, according to Schuler, the borders between “living matter” and “dead matter” no longer exist. He credits the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel with this discovery.[60] Starting from this premise, he concludes that eternal death is an impossibility.[61] While Schuler, just like the ancient Epicureans and the dialectical materialists, is convinced that the soul (i. e., our consciousness) perishes with the body, he claims that “every being must be based on something permanent, something unmistakable.”[62] He dubs this permanent entity Urmonergon and speculates that it is an “existential cosmic code.”[63] He goes on to assert that this Urmonergon constantly strives for higher embodiment: “We are ‘seeking’ our parents!”[64] In the citation, “We” is identical with the postulated Urmonergon.
This brings us to the second fundamental axiom of Schuler’s theology: Reincarnation. For Schuler, reincarnation is a certainty because he deems it impossible that where once there was light, everything should now sink into eternal darkness.[65] According to him, it was the overwhelming feeling in almost all human beings that a life of maximum 80 years could not be all there was, that ensured the longevity of the Christian religion.[66] He writes: “The Christian churches very skillfully used and misused people’s anticipation, indeed knowledge, of resurrection and continued life in a different form after death.”[67] And in his final book on the matter, written a decade later, he asserts: “Typically a short, harsh, self-denying life and then – eternal nothingness! Such a bleak, choking perspective, such a hopeless outlook, instinctively repels people, which in itself proves that it cannot be true.”[68]
Having established reincarnation as a tenet of Kreatismus, it is easy to comprehend that Schuler declares the future Earth to be the actual afterworld.[69] However, the resurrection pertains only to the Urmonergon, not to the consciousness of any individual. This consciousness ceases to exist as soon as the brain stops operating. Schuler clearly tries to span the bridge between his religious claims regarding a purposeful universe and a scientific worldview. In Schuler’s opinion, “only philosophers who stand upon trifles, claim that the world has no purpose.”[70] He asserts: “Ultimately, the world must be knowable, ‘intelligible’, because the idea of its absolute incomprehensibility would be unbearable and an ontological error.”[71] According to Schuler, it is the purpose of the universe to be able to reflect itself in the most perfect individual of the highest yet-to-come species, before it implodes and the whole cycle repeats itself. God is thus the primus inter pares “of a highest species,”[72] the endpoint of a teleological evolution: “This God struggles with evolution, in evolution, and in conjunction with other beings, to the light of his self-awareness, which is also the self-awareness of the universe.”[73] Needless to say, the concept of a teleological evolution is not the one put forth by Charles Darwin or contemporary biologists.
Schuler takes the idea of Nietzsche’s Übermensch to a new level: God must be created.[74] “The divine is something that has yet to be realized in body, flesh and blood in a future higher type.”[75] This is the axiom that both lends Kreatismus its name and outlines its political program: In Schuler’s opinion, the tasks at hand are eugenics and the separation of the races in order to ensure the optimal outcome for the universe in the shortest time, so to speak, because the vanishing of the Europeans and East Asians, due to infertility and intermixing with other branches of humanity would be a step backwards, according to this view of evolution. In an article published in 2007, Schuler declares with regard to Europeans and White Americans, Australians, etc.: “Without a decisive turning point, the blossom of the human kingdom [in analogy to the animal kingdom] will be lost in a few decades, and with it the biological basis for a creatistic upward development.”[76]
Already in his 2000 book Zeitenwende total, he makes the course of action explicit: “It is therefore important to now consciously continue on the path of life upwards, which the world process has only apparently taken ‘blindly’ from the primal elements to the European genius through a thousand setbacks.”[77] Schuler envisions the transformation of our societies into a giant nursery, so that our inheritance might bear the promise of becoming God.[78]
One may rightfully call this religion and worldview totalitarian, for Schuler rejects the separation of powers as well as the separation of the religious and the political spheres. In his view, its laicism was one of the gravest mistakes of the Nazi regime: “The typical statement in any discussion of religion during the ‘12 years,’” says Schuler, “went something like this: ‘How a person imagines God is his private affair.’”[79] The only thing that mattered to the regime was whether the person concerned was “a good National Socialist.”[80] However, this modus operandi, according to Schuler, “only continued the centuries-old tradition of separating religion and politics, which is totally wrong and disastrous.”[81] Since a person cannot be split into a religious and a political subject, there ought to be no separation of religion and state. Moreover, the “fundamental transformation of everything that exists must,” in Schuler’s view, “include all spheres from art, science, politics, economics and law to education and sports.”[82] From the perspective of a Kreatist, all these spheres are inherently religious: “There are no more partitions. And every single act in the direction of something higher” is considered “worship.”[83]
3 An Assessment of Schuler’s Impact
I have already touched on Schuler’s impact on the broader German neo-Nazi movement in the 2000 s. However, before I will attempt to further assess this impact and subsequently raise the question why Kreatismus failed, I must briefly deal with a possible objection to its conception as a religion in this article. What may count as a religion, and what may not, has been the subject of fierce debate for centuries.[84] While the proponents of an intellectualist theory viewed “religion as an attempt to explain the world and so satisfy the inquiring intellect,”[85] Ludwig Feuerbach described it as “an illusion, the result of a psychological projection with imagined gods that could help humans cope in a harsh world”,[86] and Friedrich Nietzsche maintained that religion was simply “a means of exercising power.”[87] Émile Durkheim, who formally established the academic discipline of sociology, stated in 1912 that “[t]he division of the world into two comprehensive domains, one sacred, the other profane,” was “the hallmark of religious thought.”[88] Many scholars of religion have since operated with this distinction, most prominently the Romanian historian of religions Mircea Eliade.[89]
Another theory of religion is promoted in Martin Riesebrodt’s 2010 book The Promise of Salvation.[90] According to this theory, “the establishment of contact with superhuman powers” through prayers and rituals is essential.[91] He calls such actions “interventionist practices.”[92] Viewed through the lens of some of these theories, Kreatismus would not classify as a religion. However, Schuler and some of his readers clearly viewed Kreatismus as a religion. Moreover, it would be far-fetched to classify football and fandom as religious phenomena and at the same time negate the “religious nature” of a conscious attempt to go beyond skepticism in the effort to replace Christianity. While I agree with Jeppe Jensen that “[r]eligions typically attribute authority to invisible or abstract powers”,[93] my own definition of religion allows for Kreatismus to be studied as a religion that is simply atypical. I suggest the following working definition: A religion is a system that provides meaning. It poses as the answer to existential questions. The meaning offered by Kreatismus lies in the pursuit of a yet-to-come species of gods, in which the universe might ultimately reflect itself.
3.1 The Impetus to Overcome the Wüstenreligionen
One is clearly able to notice an impetus to “overcome the desert religions” within parts of the German far right in the 2000 s and the first half of the 2010 s that stems from Schuler’s writings. Apart from Pierre Krebs’ Thule-Seminar, Andreas Thierry’s Verlags- & Medienhaus Hohenberg was mainly responsible for this development. Starting in 2003, the company published and republished several of Schuler’s books. And while the anti-Christian literature of obscure neo-pagan groups did not manage to impact the broader German neo-Nazi movement, the books published by Thierry’s company permeated the scene. In contrast, again, to literature of neo-pagan groups such as Rieger’s Artgemeinschaft, or compared to Roland Bohlinger’s reprints (facsimiles),[94] these books were both affordable and visually appealing. Furthermore, it was possible to order the books through Deutsche Stimme, then the newspaper (today it is a monthly magazine) and main publication of the National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands).
During the final decade of his life, Schuler actively campaigned for his new religious proposal, giving speeches at far-right gatherings and annual celebrations such as those commemorating Bismarck’s Reichsgründung on January 18, 1871. Among far-right activists, he was not just viewed as a philosopher and religious thinker, but also as a historian, since he had written two non-philosophical books, one regarding the potential decline and fall of the United States,[95] the other one dealing with anti-German sentiments in Europe and overseas.[96] After Schuler’s death in 2011, Pierre Krebs’ Thule-Seminar held its annual symposium under the “spiritual patronage” of Dietrich Schuler. In the following years, a few attempts were made by his readers to form a religious group that would implement his religious proposal. The high-water mark of Schuler’s impact was probably between 2007 and 2012.
In 2007, an entire issue of the journal Volk in Bewegung was dedicated to the perceived danger of Christianity and the necessity for Europeans to replace it with a new religion. In the journal’s editorial, Andreas Thierry postulates: “We Europeans should set out to follow our own ideological and religious path, beyond the monotheistic Offenbarungsreligionen.”[97]
It is, of course, no wonder that the attempt to replace Christianity with an anti-Semitic religion in 21st-century Germany was destined to fail. Why Kreatismus did not have an impact on German society at large, is not the question I am posing. The interesting and potentially fruitful question from a religious-studies perspective is: Why did Schuler’s religious proposal not catch on with anti-Semites? More specifically, why did it not catch on with anti-Semites who believed the conspiracy narrative and, like Schuler, felt the need to replace Christianity with a new religion?
Many of Schuler’s readers fully agreed with his negative verdict regarding Christianity and were eager to replace it with something new. However, most of them rejected Schuler’s claim of reincarnation or found the presupposed existence of an Urmonergon too speculative. While this is hardly surprising when it comes to philosophical materialists, I will subsequently ponder the question why the more spiritually minded among his readers might have rejected the alternative to Christianity he proposed.
3.2 The Failed Attempt to Establish a New Religion
Rodney Stark sought to identify the factors that led to the tremendous success of religions such as Christianity, Islam and Mormonism.[98] His theory consists of ten conditions he deems necessary and sufficient for a religious movement to succeed. As mentioned in the introduction, only three of these propositions pertain to the content or theology of a religion. “Other things being equal,” writes Stark, “religious movements will succeed to the degree that:
They retain cultural continuity with the conventional faiths of the societies within which they seek converts.
Their doctrines are non-empirical.
They maintain a medium level of tension with their surrounding environment – are strict, but not too strict.
They have legitimate leaders with adequate authority to be effective.
Adequate authority requires clear doctrinal justifications for an effective and legitimate leadership.
Authority is regarded as more legitimate and gains in effectiveness to the degree that members perceive themselves as participants in the system of authority.
They can generate a highly motivated, volunteer, religious labor force, including many willing to proselytise.
They maintain a level of fertility sufficient to at least offset member mortality.
They compete against weak, local conventional religious organisations within a relatively unregulated religious economy.
They sustain strong internal attachments, while remaining an open social network, able to maintain and form ties to outsiders.
They continue to maintain sufficient tension with their environment – remain sufficiently strict.
They socialise the young sufficiently well as to minimise both defection and the appeal of reduced strictness.”[99]
While some of Stark’s propositions, like the one regarding the level of fertility or that concerning the socialization of the young, only come into play once a religious community has already successfully managed to establish itself as a distinct group, others are effective from the start. One of these is the first proposition. Whoever is socialized into a particular culture, also invests in this culture. Time and effort are expended “in learning, understanding and remembering cultural material.”[100] Thus, if “faced with the option of shifting religions, the maximisation of cultural capital leads people to prefer to save as much of their cultural capital as possible.”[101] Rodney Stark provides the example of a young person who has a Christian background and is contemplating whether to join the Mormons or the Hare Krishnas. Since he will retain most of his cultural capital and simply add to it when joining the former, he is more likely to become a Mormon. The reverse is, of course, true in a Hindu context.[102]
In the case of Schuler’s Kreatismus, a follower with a Christian background would have to throw overboard every bit of cultural capital. Moreover, such a person would have to regard every trace of it as evil and perilous. Even if not consciously labelled “Christian”, attitudes and moral responses could be the result of this cultural capital. A person adhering to Kreatismus would have to constantly question whether an emotion or a moral judgment might stem from Christian morality. This is extremely costly with regard to cultural capital. Someone who believes in the Aryan-Jesus hypothesis, on the other hand, gets to keep much of the cultural capital he or she has invested in prior to subscribing to the new faith. It is a relatively uncostly modification. Such a belief would, using Rodney Stark’s model, have a clear advantage over the costlier one.[103]
Another proposition in Stark’s framework that can help to explain the obvious failure of Kreatismus within the German neo-Nazi movement is proposition 4 a. Schuler offers no “clear doctrinal justifications for an effective and legitimate leadership”. Even though most of his readers who were inclined to establish a new religion would have probably accepted Schuler’s leadership, he does not raise such practical questions in his writings at all.
While all the above propositions might suffice to explain the non-success of Schuler’s proposed religion, I am inclined to believe that the main reason for its failure to attract devout followers among the more spiritually minded readers of Schuler’s books is of a doctrinal nature and nowhere to be found in Stark’s framework.[104] The so-called Urmonergon that is supposed to survive death is just a specific “code” somewhere at the interface of spirit and matter. It has absolutely nothing to do with our notion of the soul or individual consciousness. In Schuler’s Kreatismus, soul or consciousness cease to exist when a person dies. Naturally, there is not much comfort in such a religion compared to religions that speak of salvation and eternal bliss. To me, it seems far from coincidental that the most successful religions and sects, Christianity, Islam, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others, are similar in this regard. Furthermore, in Schuler’s Kreatismus, there are no supernatural powers followers could turn to “for protection, help, and blessings”.[105] In Riesebrodt’s opinion, by “bringing threats into significant relation to superhuman powers, people can attempt, by communicating with these powers, to actively manage such situations rather than panicking or despairing.”[106] Although I disagree with Riesebrodt’s assertion that “all religions claim to have the ability to avert misfortune, overcome crisis, and provide salvation”,[107] this is most certainly true of the more successful ones. I thus propose to extend Stark’s useful framework by adding the following propositions:
Religious movements will be more successful if they offer to ward off misfortune, help to overcome crises and provide blessings via the communication with superhuman powers.
They will be more successful if they maintain that the soul lives on once the body dies and offer ways of obtaining individual salvation.
Cicero lamented that “without great hope for immortality no one would ever give his life for his country.”[108] Likewise, a religious movement that upheld a solely materialistic worldview would have a hard time producing martyrs. As to the first proposition I added, I find it noteworthy that this feature is particularly pronounced in Pentecostalism, which is “the only Christian movement that even begins to match the explosive growth of Islam in the ‘developing’ regions of the globe.”[109] In Pentecostalism, the Holy Spirit is viewed as a powerful ally in achieving one’s goals in life. There is a particularly strong “belief in the presence of the supernatural in everyday life.”[110] When I attended a Sunday service of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, a Pentecostal church from Nigeria, in The Hague in October 2022, about a dozen people gave testimony to the working of the Holy Spirit in front of the congregation. While many thanked God for the invitation to a job interview, a more prestigious job they had prayed for or academic success, one young man said he had recently bought a house and then found out it was worth about € 10,000 more than what he had paid. Everyone started and ended their testimonies with the phrase “Praise the Lord”, to which the congregation responded in the same vein. When the lucky house owner had told his story, the pastor doubled down on his testimony, exclaiming: “It’s always like that! Believe me, this is not the last house you will buy!” Kreatismus, on the other hand, has nothing of the kind to offer to potential followers.
As Teemu Taira points out in an article, “one of the most common legitimation strategies” of movements that brand themselves as religions is to “argue that they are a direct continuation of an ancient tradition or a modern rehabilitation of one.”[111] Kreatismus, however, was invented from scratch, and its creator did not feel the need to veil this fact. Quite to the contrary. The third addition to Stark’s model that I propose, albeit with less confidence than the first two, thus reads:
Other things being equal, religious movements will be more successful if they maintain that they represent an ancient tradition or are, in fact, a modern rehabilitation of such a tradition.
Finally, drawing on Stark’s own 1987 theory of religion, I would like to add one more proposition pertaining to the theology of a given religion:
Religious movements that assume the superhuman powers, on whose existence they insist, act rationally, will be more successful than others because they offer greater certainty of reward.[112]
In Schuler’s theology, no individual rewards can be expected – neither in this world nor in another. Even if our individual Urmonergon were indeed able to reincarnate itself in a higher being one day, what is that to us? We will never know since our consciousness will have ceased to exist a long time ago.
4 Conclusion
In this article, I have introduced a religion that failed to attract followers, even among the people who were ideologically inclined to replace Christianity with something new, their main “argument” against Christianity pertaining to its Jewish roots. After thoroughly examining Dietrich Schuler’s theology, I assessed the influence of his writings on the German anti-Christian far right in the first two decades of the current millennium. While many German neo-Nazis agreed with Schuler’s negative depiction of Christianity and his verdict that it ensured “Jewish world domination,” they did not “convert” to Schuler’s Kreatismus for various reasons. In other words, his secular disciples did not become believers. On the one hand, the materialists among his readers rejected the tenet of reincarnation or found the presupposed existence of an Urmonergon too speculative. This, of course, is hardly a surprise. On the other hand, the more spiritually minded individuals who engaged with Schuler’s religious proposal also, by and large, did not become practicing Kreatists. When attempting to answer the question why this was the case, I chiefly drew on Rodney Stark’s 1996 article “Why Religious Movements Succeed or Fail” and Martin Riesebrodt’s book The Promise of Salvation.
By combining the two approaches toward religion, Kreatismus serving as a case study, I arrived at the conclusion that Stark’s sociological model may indeed help to explain the non-success of Kreatismus, but that the main reasons for its failure are more likely to be content-based. In my opinion, they are theological. I thus added four propositions of my own to Stark’s framework, hitherto consisting of ten propositions. All other things being equal, I predict that religious movements will be more successful if they
offer to ward off misfortune, help to overcome crises and provide blessings via the communication with superhuman powers;
maintain that the soul lives on once the body dies and offer ways of obtaining individual salvation;
maintain that they represent an ancient tradition or are, in fact, a modern rehabilitation of such a tradition;
assume the superhuman powers, on whose existence they insist, act rationally, because this would increase the certainty of reward.
While the presupposed teleological evolution in Schuler’s ontology could be perhaps viewed as a superhuman power of some sort, there are no individual rewards to be reaped, neither in this world nor in another, for the soul dies with the body and there are no superhuman powers to which an adherent of Kreatismus could turn “for protection, help, and blessings”.[113] I do not claim that my additions to Stark’s model complete the theory. However, the only way to find out whether other propositions should be added or some of them must be discarded, is to apply the framework to other groups. Future avenues of research could include a comparison of Dietrich Schuler’s “Kreatismus” with William Luther Pierce’s “Cosmotheism” and Ben Klassen’s “Creativity”. Both being White supremacists, naturalists and what Max Weber would have described as “tone deaf” to religion,[114] they, too, tried to found religions.
© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Dieses Werk ist lizensiert unter einer Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International Lizenz.
