The Rise and Fall of Nuremberg Christianity - American Affairs Journal

What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Lay aside the garments that are stained with sin
And be washed in the blood of the Lamb
There’s a fountain flowing for the soul unclean
O be washed in the blood of the Lamb!

—Elisha A. Hoffman, “Are You Washed in The Blood?”

In discussions of the crisis of religiosity across the West, there is a commonly accepted theory of the case. The story goes something like the following: in the beginning, Christianity made the West, first by forming a new and radical moral framework and understanding of humanity’s place in the world, and then by creating the institutions that kept knowledge and tradition alive after the violent collapse of the Roman Empire. The classical world had many gods, but the Europe that slowly took shape during the post-Roman dark ages would come to recognize only one.

In the centuries that followed the fall of Rome, social and political life in Europe was inseparable from Christianity. It was Christian morality that formed the basis for thinking, jurisprudence, and decision-making, both large and small. Christian institutions transmitted knowledge across the hazy tribal borders of a fragmented Europe, providing education for both its haughty princes and lowly commoners, and it was toward these Christian institutions that kings invariably turned in order to confirm their own legitimate right to rule.

For a millennium, this union between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man persisted. It was a powerful source of commonality and understanding across dynasties and nations, and yet also an equally fertile breeding ground for very bloody conflict. From medieval battles over investiture to the Great Occidental Schism to the Thirty Years’ War: politics and religion invariably bled into each other. Just as the shape and content of the Christian creed could not be untangled from the vicissitudes of the Kingdom of Man, neither could the grubby politics of princes ever hope to fully detach from God’s eternal judgement. Like fish not noticing water, Christian concepts and teach­ings had permeated everything to such an extent as to make its influence all but invisible.

Yet this was not to last forever. Starting at some point during the Age of Enlightenment, Christianity’s hold on the world began to slip. Science replaced superstition, and reason supplanted faith. The world was progressively disenchanted,¹ and the Kingdom of Man and the Kingdom of God began to drift apart. Starting with the Napoleonic Wars and culminating in the great slaughters of the early twentieth century, a new era of technological warfare and industrial production would completely destroy what remained of the old world. Peasants were forced into factories, replacing the timeless, simple life of the villages with the seminomadic, boom-and-bust reality of industrial society. Soldiers abandoned what remained of old chivalries, embracing anonymous, mass warfare and the awesome killing power of machine guns, modern artillery, and poison gas. And finally, the climax of violence arrived with World War II, which saw the destruction of almost all of Europe at the hands of fellow Europeans and the industrialized genocide of Jews and various other undesirables.

After the Death of God

If Nietzsche had been premature in proclaiming the death of God in 1882, then 1945 represents the latest possible year anyone alive today would put on the death certificate. After 1945, Christianity’s relevance rapidly dwindled into that of a half-forgotten quarry, to be mined for various useless tidbits of history and some bespoke moral and philosophical “lessons” that are still of use even to a modern society. Christianity is no longer a living force within Western society: instead, we are dealing with echoes or remnants of that force. Of course, those remnants can still be powerful; God still exercises an inordinate amount of influence from beyond the grave.

This is essentially the argument made by the British popular historian Tom Holland in his book, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. Released in 2019, Dominion is partly a history of Christianity itself. As he moves closer to the present, however, Holland’s goal changes: drawing upon a great number of cultural and political examples, from the success of the Beatles’ hit single “All You Need is Love” to the 2015 German refugee crisis and the #MeToo movement, Holland makes the case that most, if not all, of our mores and institutions today cannot be comprehended outside of the long shadow of Christianity. Even those who imagine themselves as great opponents of religion and of Christianity cannot actually escape the effects of two millennia worth of cultural and moral accretion.

In one sense, Holland’s argument in this regard is neither particularly new nor very controversial. Oswald Spengler famously named Christian theology as the “Grandmother of Bolshevism,”² and we see similar arguments today being made about the conservative bête noire of “wokeness.” Wokeness, so the argument goes, is in reality a continuation, if not of Christianity itself, then at least of Christian moral and theological principles.³ What tends to unite all of these arguments, however, is that they all tacitly accept the death of Christianity as having taken place; the woke, insofar as they have an authentic connection to Christianity, are framed as “descendants” and “inheritors” of its tradition. Holland shares a version of this larger view:

Christianity, it seemed, had no need of actual Christians for its assumptions still to flourish. Whether this was an illusion, or whether the power held by victims over their victimisers would survive the myth that had given it birth, only time would tell. As it was, the retreat of Christian belief did not seem to imply any necessary retreat of Christian values. Quite the contrary. Even in Europe—a continent with churches far emptier than those in the United States—the trace elements of Christianity continued to infuse people’s morals and presumptions so utterly that many failed even to detect their presence. Like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye, they were breathed in equally by everyone: believers, atheists, and those who never paused so much as to think about religion.⁴

For better or worse, Christian belief died or retreated into the distance, while the values remain, for now. Identifying the influence of Christian belief on our society is thus a game of finding “trace elements,” “dust particles,” and other marginal phenomena. God, now fully dead, is honored in the breach and not the observance. Christianity is the exception that still sets the rule.

There is at least one obvious reason why this narrative almost always goes unchallenged. In an odd way, it comes off as deeply flattering to both sides of the argument. For those who are still practicing Christians, the death of Christianity allows for a self-image wherein the last remaining believers have made their return to the catacombs, assuming once again the role of being lone voices for God in the otherwise desolate pagan wilderness. For secular society, the story is one of conquest: the defeat of religiosity and superstition and the creation of a humanist society built upon reason rather than blind faith. Yes, some stubborn Christians remain, still wedded to their archaic rites. But in the fullness of time, they too will abandon their premodern communities and join modernity as the only universal fraternity of man.

This story is fatally deficient in several ways. It is a poor telling of the dynamics of the twentieth century and an even poorer telling of the crisis of moral authority we so obviously face today. Rather than serving as Christianity’s death knell, the horrors of the last century arguably became the crucible for the continuation of active, society-wide Christian belief. This belief persisted by changing shape, becoming a new Christian heresy, one whose presence is still very active even today. I will refer to this heresy, which currently lacks a name, as Nuremberg Christianity, as explained below. It is thus not incorrect to say, as Holland does, that our societies are still shaped by the legacy of two millennia of Christendom. But to only say that is to ignore the still very much alive elephant in the room.

Though Nuremberg Christianity is a heresy that pretends to be, and in a very real sense understands itself as, a genuine refutation of both religious superstition in general and of the Christian belief system in particular, its concepts of history, cosmology, and (for lack of a better term) the basic theology involved have all carried over from the mainline Christian belief system it supplanted. Far from being a niche or edge phenomenon in an otherwise disenchanted and nihilistic era, Nuremberg Christianity has achieved mass adoption in every stratum of Western society, claiming for itself the role of de facto state religion in many Western countries. Rather than being passive receptacles for the “echoes” or “remnants” of mass belief, these countries have instead eagerly fanned the flames of collective faith, vigorously proselytizing both internally and externally while discouraging or even punishing acts of blasphemy and unbelief.

Nuremberg Christianity, like its rivals and predecessors, comes with its own assortment of sacred days and collective rites; it has its own list of saints and holy martyrs. Centrally, it is built around its own interpretation of the Passion and the redemption of humanity through the blood of the sacrificial lamb. Like its rivals and predecessors, it divides the world into a “before” and “after,” drawing what is essentially a metaphysical and transcendental line between the world before and after the coming of the faith. Through a blood sacrifice of unprecedented proportions, the path toward grace was once again pried open: by availing themselves of the blood of the innocent lamb, humans have been given access to forms of enlightenment and redemption that did not and could not exist before. What makes this belief system so effective, furthermore, is that it replicates a feature of a much earlier period of Christianity: rather than perceiving itself as a discrete “religion” competing with other “religions,” it simply views itself as the correct and truthful way to understand the world.

In order to trace the shape and nature of Nuremberg Christianity, and to understand how it came to dominate the West, we may turn first to this religion’s harshest contemporary critic: the American author and essayist Dara Horn, and in particular, her 2021 essay collection entitled People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present.

Horn’s central arguments are more nuanced than the eye-catching title would initially suggest. Horn’s primary goal, which appears as the common theme of every essay in the book, is the defense of a certain kind of Jewish particularism, stressing rather than underplaying the unique character of Jews as a people fundamentally apart. It is this aim that sets her on a collision course with Western society’s habit of trying to universalize Jews and turn them into morality lessons or even objects of communal worship. The parallels and angles she explores in doing so are very telling: to start with, she explicitly makes the point that Anne Frank has the dubious honor of being “Everyone’s (Second) Favorite Dead Jew,” after Jesus. As we shall see, this parallel goes much further than mere popularity or name recognition.

If Christ was the first time in history that gentile society took a dead Jew and turned him into an object of common veneration, stripping away every specifically Jewish attribute and imbuing him instead with a moral and spiritual mission to be shared by all of humanity, then the only other person who can realistically compare to Christ in this regard is Anne Frank. Does that make Anne Frank some kind of secularized or humanist analogue to Christ? Is she too then the object of some sacral belief system, or the center of a new gentile cult of worship? The answer, according to Horn, is yes, this is exactly the case.

It is hard to argue against Horn’s core thesis with regard to Anne Frank: that the respect and veneration paid to her by Western society is not actually addressed to Anne Frank as a Jew, or to her as a speaker of Yiddish, or to any other particularist attributes denoting her as a member of God’s chosen tribe.⁵ No, the veneration of Anne Frank is bound up with her assigned role as the universal human; in this way, her appeal to Western society mimics, beat for beat, that other favorite “dead Jew” of the West:

The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” before meeting people who weren’t.⁶

Visiting the Auschwitz exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown Manhattan, Horn describes an impeccably produced and high-budget spectacle that leaves her increasingly cold. Produced by the Spanish for-profit company Musealia, the Auschwitz exhibit initially checks all the boxes. It boasts hundreds of original artifacts from the camp itself; it has reconstructed cattle cars, sleeping barracks, and gas chambers. It has rooms dedicated to the rise of Nazis, the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and other related topics. In Horn’s own words, the exhibit does absolutely everything right. More than anything else though, it makes Horn never want to visit such exhibits ever again.

Horn’s criticism of the Musealia exhibit (and of the genre that this exhibit sits at the pinnacle of) follows two lines of interest to us. First, there is the general theme of Jews being robbed of their particular identity, which also comes through in her other essays. But Horn also has a very specific critique of the Auschwitz exhibit, and of the logic of Holocaust remembrance that it embodies. At the end of the exhibit, the visitors are bombarded with one uniform message: people just need to love each other. To Horn, this is infuriating:

That the Holocaust drives home the importance of love is an idea, like the idea that Holocaust education prevents antisemitism, that seems entirely unobjectionable. It is entirely objectionable. . . . And I find myself furious, being lectured by this exhibition about love—as if the murder of millions of people was actually a morality play, a bumper sticker, a metaphor. I do not want my children to be someone else’s metaphor.⁷

The problem here is obvious. Christians talk about love, deriving their universal lessons from the deaths of the innocent. But Jews do not talk in this way, or at least only rarely: to think that the Holocaust would represent an object lesson in love in the eyes of Jewish families and survivors, or even Jews in general, is patently absurd. Yet at the end of the day, that is the message of the Holocaust: hope, survival, love, redemption, grace. The Holocaust is not actually about the Jews, or their actual lives, or even their feelings; it is about what lesson the Jews can teach the gentiles. And that lesson has not changed in the millennia between the birth of Christ and the death of Anne Frank.

The Weak and the Strong

Nuremberg Christianity recycles the cosmology and theology of its predecessors, which is presumably also why it has so easily been able to supplant them. Rather than the singular figure of Christ serving as the metaphysical pivot point of the world, Nuremberg Christianity builds upon the blood sacrifice of Jews as a collective. The concept of grace, central to Christianity and previously understood as the means to achieve the salvation of the human soul, is now retained in an altered and “humanist” form. While Christ died in order to open the path toward the Kingdom of God, Nuremberg Christianity instead sees grace as a concept intimately tied to the Kingdom of Man. Grace belongs to this world, not the next. This is the reason that the Holocaust is so incredibly important: its occurrence is viewed as the necessary precondition for humanity building a world where injustice, racism, and all kinds of oppression are finally abolished.

In the bleak view of human history, what we see stretching back for thousands of years is an endless litany of violence, oppression, and murder. The world is unjust, and the strong take from the weak. In theory, the deaths of the victims of the Holocaust could just be seen as another tally in that endless ledger. But at the beating heart of Nuremberg Christianity lies a white-hot, fanatical faith that they are in fact not that and cannot be that. Anne Frank did not die so that five generations from now, a hundred more like her could die in the very same way. No, Nuremberg Christianity asserts: Anne Frank died in order to become the very last girl in the world to ever have to die such a gruesome and senseless death. That is the true nature of the “grace” she offers to the supplicants who are the targets of Dara Horn’s critique. It offers the redemption, not just of Jewish children, but of all children everywhere.

As Holland rightly points out in Dominion, the shocking novelty of Christianity when it first appeared is often underappreciated. Before Christianity, the strong ruling the weak was seen as the natural order of the world; the Christian assertion that it was the weak who would inherit the Earth was seen as scandalous on an almost existential level. And here too, Nuremberg Christianity is true to its roots. By recasting all of history before the Holocaust, including the history of Christianity itself, as a continuation of the strong exploiting the weak, through the means of superstition, religious exclusion, witch burnings, racism, nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, and so on, Nuremberg Christianity achieves its very own “year zero.” As God once chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, the Jews of Europe were now chosen by the spirit of history to do the same.

For the reasons outlined above, Nuremberg Christianity is intrinsically bound up with the Holocaust, just as Christianity is bound up with the figure of Christ. It is these similarities that make the transition from Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, to Nuremberg Christianity so seamless. Like resetting a breaker or rebooting a computer, the movement involved was fundamentally one of mere repetition. For parents and children living in societies where the schools only recently put on plays reenacting the Nativity and Passion of Christ, switching over to reenacting the Nativity and Passion of the victims of the Holocaust was as simple as going out and buying new stage props. The end of the play, just like the end of the Auschwitz exhibit in Downtown Manhattan, would not actually have to change, since “all you need is love.”

Nuremberg Christianity cannot exist without reference to the Holocaust, given its central function as the spiritual pivot point for humanity. This characteristic has the inevitable effect of creating a demand for memorials and public holidays, for guilt and shame that often overlap incredibly poorly with the contours of the empirical or “worldly” Holocaust. Consider the case of Sweden, which was a neutral nation and did not consent to the deportation of its Jewish citizens during World War II. Nevertheless, during the mid-2000s, the Swedish Ministry for Living History tried for close to thirteen years to install so-called Stolpersteine (memorial cobble stones) in Stockholm in order to commemorate Swedish victims of the Holocaust. The requests to install these memorial stones were repeatedly denied by the city council, and the project itself was harshly critiqued for the simple reason that there were no Swedish victims of the Holocaust. This minor empirical quibble did not dissuade anyone involved; if anything, these complaints were entirely beside the point.

Eventually, in 2019, Stockholm’s city council finally relented. The memorial stones were installed, dedicated to three Jews whose petitions for asylum in Sweden had been rejected. Not to be outdone by the capital, the city of Malmö then decided in 2022 to install three such memorial stones of its own. Other cities in Sweden, like the city of Uppsala, have tried joining this memorial race. Unfortunately, lacking even the tenuous connection that Stockholm and Malmö have to victims of the Holocaust (i.e., as the natural ports of entry for any Jewish asylum seekers), cities like Uppsala have generally been unable to answer the question of which Jewish victims of the Holocaust the memorial stones are actually for. In such cases, city councilors have argued that their city, having been home, at some point in time, to racism in the general sense,⁸ qualifies as having enough of a connection to the Holocaust to make a memorial necessary and worthwhile. In this case, the love of “dead Jews” no longer even requires reference to actual physical or historical dead Jews. In cases where these do not exist, they are simply replaced with virtual dead Jews.⁹

Another Holocaust-related controversy in Germany sheds further light on how the project of “remembrance” has always been a site of political and religious struggle, not about history, but about the here and now. In 2008, Berlin inaugurated yet another memorial; this time dedicated to the homosexual victims of the Holocaust.¹⁰ This memorial was dogged by controversy and debate since its inception, and its final form only came about as the result of a compromise of sorts.

The question that loomed large was whether to commemorate only the seven thousand male homosexual victims of the Holocaust, or to make the memorial more inclusive by including lesbians as well. Complicating the issue was the basic fact that the Nazis did not persecute lesbians to begin with, and so a memorial to lesbian victims made little sense. This did not stop Berlin’s lesbian community from organizing against the building of the memorial, and their main complaint was not one of historicity, but of representation. Why exactly should lesbians be left out, if the obvious point of a memorial like this was to guard against the universal evils of prejudice and exclusion? Eventually, a compromise was reached: the monument would begin its life with an exhibit showing a film of two men kissing each other, but the film would be replaced after two years with one featuring two women instead.

The line from memorializing the Jewish victims of the Holocaust to various modern forms of “wokeness” is thus a straight one. If the Berlin memorial had been inaugurated in 2018 rather than 2008, it would have likely sparked controversy about its refusal to properly center the trans victims of the Holocaust. The first South African Holocaust museum mixes the Holocaust and apartheid into one single exhibit; even as Nuremberg Christianity is built upon the Holocaust, it constantly seeks to transcend its historical, empirical roots.

Lockheed at Pride

As Nuremberg Christianity has waxed in power and adherents, “real” Christian denominations have collapsed. For that reason, the story of the twentieth and early twenty-first century has hitherto been written as a story of the absolute and precipitous decline of Christianity as such. And while that decline is true to a certain extent, it also highlights the strange way in which Nuremberg Christianity has deftly taken the concepts and worldview of its predecessors and used them to its advantage.

Because Christianity has for so long been used to dividing the world up into the secular and the religious, Nuremberg Christianity has had an easy row to hoe: the pump was already primed for a redefinition of all previous forms of Christianity as being particularist rather than truly universal. Yes, Catholics and Protestants promise grace and salvation to mankind, but they only promise it to people who are Christian, or who subscribe to the right form of Christianity. Nuremberg Christianity, on the other hand, promises to share its grace with everyone: Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, atheists, and even (horror beyond horrors!) other Christians.¹¹

What then about the other side of the ledger? Why did organized Christianity prove so feeble in the face of this new heresy? One major contributing factor is likely to be found within the way Christianity has changed and adapted as a result of secularism. In theory, secularism is merely a political and social expediency: a set of rules governing the role of religion in public life, meant to avoid conflicts between different denominations. But the rules of secularism have seemingly been internalized by many Christians, altering the way in which they understand the natural remit of their own religion.

Consider the way in which conservative Christians routinely mock what they see as the irrational excesses of Nuremberg Christianity’s sway over Western states, producing such supposedly ridiculous initiatives as “feminist foreign policy” in Sweden and Germany, or the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon ostentatiously celebrating Pride Month. These critiques, at least on the surface, seem commonsensical: how in the world can foreign policy ever hope to be “feminist”? Why should an arms manufacturer like Lockheed Martin be part of a Pride parade, when their business is producing bombs that kill people? Isn’t this all, on some level, deeply irrational and strange?

In today’s world, it is the conservative Christian who is most likely to offer you the persuasive case for why Christianity should not play a role in foreign policy, or why it would be deeply inappropriate for it to guide the choices of the U.S. military when it comes to the use of lethal force. Christianity, in this mode of viewing the world, simply does not “belong” to the world of geopolitics. States are not meant to act according to Christian precepts, as the realists at the Chicago school would tell us, and so mutatis mutandis Christians who engage in statecraft are not meant to act like Christians either. To do so would be to mix incompatible worlds together: that of the realm of naked force and Machiavellian calculation with the world Christian ethics. But this argument betrays a fundamental shift in perspective: secularism, which once began as a set of rules and principles to preserve social peace, has imperceptibly mutated into a form of metaphysics.

Earlier, non-secularized Christianity never recognized these kinds of artificial limits. There was no conception of a world divided into spheres where Christianity was “on” and spheres where it was “off,” and there was no expectation that a Christian could move between the two. In the seventeenth century, questions of foreign policy or the use of military force were, like everything else, simply assumed to fall within the remit of Christianity. Cardinal Richelieu might have been one of Europe’s greatest masters of cynical realpolitik, but he never believed that politics or foreign policy were somehow outside of or exempted from God’s judgment. Richelieu’s actions naturally opened him up to fierce criticism for his supposed hypocrisy, but hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. The accusation only makes sense because Richelieu was supposed to act like a Christian even when conducting foreign policy: the idea of corralling off Christianity or the demands of the faith only to certain limited areas of society was not taken seriously.

One can contrast this situation with that of a great many Christians today, for whom faith itself has been demoted to an object of theological‑political scholasticism, or as another tribal identity marker. Unlike older generations of Christians, modern believers generally have little use for hypocrisy: the expectation of actually acting on their religious faith in their everyday lives is simply so alien that it doesn’t occur to them in the first place.

Nuremberg Christianity, by contrast, painted bombs and drones in rainbow colors, and it assumed, or rather demanded, that even the most cynical arms manufacturer should make a display of good faith and moral rectitude. The big oil companies, the military, even the CIA, all of them were required to show up during Pride month. All of them were expected to demonstrate, again and again, that they had fully joined the great church that was Nuremberg Christianity.

The beating heart of Christianity has always been a sweeping universalism: it seeks to shatter boundaries and transcend human limits. It is not a doctrine meant for slaves or kings, for public life or private life, for family or politics. It lays claim to everyone, everywhere, at all times. Few conservative Christians in America would even dream of demanding that the CIA or Lockheed Martin conduct themselves according to Christian precepts. But that lack of desire is proof of just how weak and perfunctory their own beliefs have become. The true faith will naturally seek to assert itself in every arena; it does not respect or even recognize neat limits to its authority. For every young person after 1945 who actually wanted a faith that took itself seriously, and which acted as if faith truly was a matter of life and death, Nuremberg Christianity appeared as the only credible alternative.¹²

Being concerned with Mankind’s salvation on this Earth, Nuremberg Christianity neither needed nor tolerated any form of secular limits to its own reach and authority. Nor did it need to see itself as a “religion.” It was, after all, merely a set of true beliefs and assumptions about the world. In this manner, Nuremberg Christianity remained both invisible and nameless to its adherents and opponents alike. It is only today, as it has begun to rapidly collapse, that it has become worthwhile, or even possible, to finally give it a name.

The Fall of Nuremberg Christianity

The secret behind the popularity of Nuremberg Christianity, like that of its distant cousin socialism, was that it solved the great tension between the Kingdom of Man and the Kingdom of God by simply doing away with the latter. The grace and salvation it promised to humanity would be realized in this world, not the next. Yet, though that message is inherently appealing to a great many people, it is also a fatal weakness: for what if the promised enlightenment, wealth, and harmony never comes?

After the events of October 7, 2023, the moral authority, and indeed, the entire cosmology undergirding this belief system has begun to break apart. Israel’s ruthless behavior against the Palestinians, and Western governments’ clear unwillingness to do anything about it, has not just exposed a rich vein of hypocrisy; it has put the entire Weltanschauung of the West into jeopardy. Humanity did not reach some new plateau of reason, nor did it free itself from violent particularism, nor is there today any pretense that we are even moving in that direction. Judges at the International Criminal Court are being sanctioned for attempting to act in line with the official remit of their institution. International law, reinterpreted after 1945 into a supporting pillar for the project of worldwide human enlightenment, is rapidly being dismantled. Less than a hundred years after the Nuremberg trials, the West is now openly denouncing the ideals that supposedly imbued them.

In reality, the cracks were beginning to show even before October 7. Nuremberg Christianity evolved into a belief system over several dec­ades in the wake of 1945. Casting the dead Jews of the Holocaust into the role of the universal givers of grace, it also made living Jews into the supposed standard bearers of universalism. As God once chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong, Nuremberg Christianity chose the weak and the small and the marginalized to lead the way for humanity. But what if they no longer want the job?

One of the core themes of People Love Dead Jews is Dara Horn’s growing discomfort with—and desire to escape from—Christian universalizing logic. To Horn, Jews are not universal, and they shouldn’t have to be: their suffering is theirs to draw lessons from, and it does not and should not belong to anyone else. The Stockholm declaration, issued in January 2000 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, asserts that the Holocaust “will always hold universal meaning.”¹³ These two viewpoints are obviously incompatible, and the marriage of convenience that allowed everyone to pretend otherwise would probably have unraveled even without the cataclysmic aftermath of October 2023. The vast majority of Israeli citizens, for their part, are no longer interested in playing along with a “never again” that applies to everyone. The time of pretending to honor the post-1945 universalism is over.¹⁴

Thus, Nuremberg Christianity is a dying belief system, and there are almost no prospects for halting its rapid collapse. In theory, it could try to move away from relying on the Holocaust and find other groups and causes to center. But the problem is that the kind of grace it offers has now been revealed to be false: the blood of Anne Frank did not actually possess the power to cleanse the stained garments of humanity from sin. Finding a substitute is almost certainly going to be pointless: if her blood can’t do it, then no blood can.

Looking back on the long twentieth century, the rise of Nuremberg Christianity and the emptying out of the churches should perhaps not be understood as a demand crisis for Christian belief. If anything, the truth might be closer to the situation around the time of the Reformation: the churches, unable to provide enough of a credible outlet, merely created a supply bottleneck. With too much faith chasing too little credible supply in the years after 1945, a massive flowering of new creeds and heresies ensued. The West after 1945 has not been a land of nihilism and anomie: it has seen wave upon wave of new fanaticisms and popular movements. The reason the concept of Nuremberg Christianity is important is simply because it highlights the obvious: it is not just Christian ideas, but also Christian faith, that shapes us even today. As he was despairing at the death of God in 1882, Nietzsche wondered what kind of festivals and sacred rituals future humanity would invent in order to cope with their deicide. Today, we have the answer.

Once again, the West stands at the cusp of a generational crisis of faith. The post-1945 church is dying, and it might soon disappear entirely. Like the Catholic Church at the cusp of the Reformation, Nuremberg Christianity has succumbed to hypocrisy and contradiction and can no longer offer enough of a credible outlet for channeling belief. The Holocaust has died; it has bled to death underneath our bombs. But the need for faith has not gone away; the thirst still exists, and it will be slaked one way or another. Will we set out in search of even newer fountains for our souls unclean, or will the crises of coming decades compel many of us to return to older ones? It is too early to tell.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume X, Number 1 (Spring 2026): 226–40.

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Notes