Adolf Hitler “Nazified” Germany, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is about to “homosexualize” California. Extreme language? I don’t think so. The governor signed a bill that would require all schools, churches, businesses, and any group receiving state funding with no exception for faith-based organizations or business owners with sincerely held religious convictions—even if it’s a state grant for a student to attend a school—to condone homosexuality, bisexuality and transsexuality. Are public roads, which are used to transport people to churches and are paid for by tax revenue, considered “state funding”? How about clean air? Police and fire protection? Incorporation? As we saw with the RICO statute, social engineering liberals will use everything at their disposal to make life miserable for the opposition.

Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families, explained, “It’s because Christian colleges and churches have ignored the political process for so long. Now the political process, absent religious values, is coming back to assault the church.”[1] While churches and schools should not be taking tax money for their work, the larger goal of liberals in California is to control their part of the world in a way similar to the way Adolf Hitler tried to control his ever-expanding world. There can’t be any contrary opinions. All opposing views must be silenced.

When Martin Niemoeller used his pulpit to expose Hitler’s radical politics and its comprehensive worldview implications, “He knew every word spoken was reported by Nazi spies and secret agents.”[2] Leo Stein describes in his book I Was in Hell with Niemoeller how the Gestapo gathered evidence against Niemoeller:

Now, the charge against Niemoeller was based entirely on his sermons, which the Gestapo agents had taken down stenographically. But in none of his sermons did Pastor Niemoeller exhort his congregation to overthrow the Nazi regime. He merely raised his voice against some of the Nazi policies, particularly the policy directed against the Church. He had even refrained from criticizing the Nazi government itself or any of its personnel. Under the former government his sermons would have been construed only as an exercise of the right of free speech. Now, however, written laws, no matter how explicitly they were worded, were subjected to the interpretation of the judges.[3]

In a June 27, 1937 sermon, Niemoeller made it clear to those in attendance that they had a sacred duty to speak out on the evils of the Nazi regime no matter what the consequences: “We have no more thought of using our own powers to escape the arm of the authorities than had the Apostles of old. No more are we ready to keep silent at man’s behest when God commands us to speak. For it is, and must remain, the case that we must obey God rather than man.”[4] A few days later, he was arrested. His crime? “Abuse of the pulpit.” Shirer paints a depressing picture of the state of the Christian church in 1938.

The “Special Courts” set up by the Nazis made claims against pastors who spoke out against Hitler’s policies. Niemoeller was not the only one singled out by the Gestapo. “Some 807 other pastors and leading laymen of the ‘Confessional Church’ were arrested in 1937, and hundreds more in the next couple of years.”[5] A group of Confessional Churches in Germany, founded by Pastor Niemoeller and other Protestant ministers, drew up a proclamation to confront the political changes taking place in Germany that threatened the people “with a deadly danger. The danger lies in a new religion,” the proclamation declared. “The church has by order of its Master to see to it that in our people Christ is given the honor that is proper to the Judge of the world . . . The First Commandment says ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ The new religion is a rejection of the First Commandment.”[6] Five hundred pastors who read the proclamation from their pulpits were arrested. “Not many Germans lost much sleep over the arrests of a few thousand pastors and priests.”[7]

A recent discovery of a confidential U.S. government report that was prepared for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg documents how the Nazis wanted to “take over the churches from within, using party sympathizers. Discredit, jail or kill Christian leaders. And re-indoctrinate the congregants. Give them a new faith—in German’s Third Reich.” The ultimate goal was to “eliminate Christianity.” A 120-page report titled ‘The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches’—was prepared by the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA.” The OSS document reported in 1945:

Important leaders of the National Socialist party would have liked to meet this situation [church influence] by complete extirpation of Christianity and the substitution of a purely racial religion. . . . The best evidence now available as to the existence of an anti-Church plan is to be found in the systematic nature of the persecution itself. . . . Different steps in that persecution, such as the campaign for the suppression of denominational and youth organizations, the campaign against denominational schools, the defamation campaign against the clergy, started on the same day in the whole area of the Reich. . . and were supported by the entire regimented press, by Nazi Party meetings, by traveling party speakers.[8]

Churches were “confined as far as possible to the performance of narrowly religious functions, and even within this narrow sphere were subjected to as many hindrances as the Nazis dared to impose. Implementation of this objective started with the curtailment of religious instruction in the primary and secondary schools with the squeezing of the religious periods into inconvenient hours, with Nazi propaganda among the teachers in order to induce them to refuse the teaching of religion, with vetoing of . . . religious text books, and finally with substituting Nazi Weltanschauung [world-and-life view] and ‘German faith’ for Christian religious denominational instruction. . . . At the time of the outbreak of the war . . . religious instruction had practically disappeared from Germany’s primary schools.” [9]

Hitler knew that to secure the future, he had to take hold of the present and reshape the worldview of a new generation. Only by controlling the schools and churches could this be accomplished.

So what will a significant number of Christians do in California do? I know! Wait for the rapture, because Jesus must be coming soon. It didn’t happen in Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, and it’s not going to happen in California. So Californians, what are you going to do about it?

Endnotes:

[1] “Gov. Arnold tosses school moral codes” (August 29, 2006).
[2] Basil Miller, Martin Niemoeller: Hero of the Concentration Camp, 5th ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1942), 112. [3] Leo Stein, I Was in Hell with Niemoeller (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1942), 175. [4] Quoted in Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 239
[5] Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 239. [6] Quoted in Eugene Davidson, The Trials of the Germans: An Account of the Twenty-Two Defendants before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, [1966] 1997), 275. [7] Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 240. [8] Quoted in Edward Colimore, “Papers reveal Nazi aim: End Christianity,” Philadelphia Inquirer (January 9, 2002).
[9] The report is available online at www.camlaw.rutgers.edu/publications/law-religion/nuremberg/nurinst1.htm