In the 2017 film Wonder Woman, Diana, the Amazon daughter of Zeus, is pulled into the world of men during the first World War. While the U.S. pilot she becomes romantically entangled with sees the great war as nothing more than human politics as usual, Diana suspects Ares, the Greek god of war, as the animating force behind the scenes.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why so many who claim Christianity simultaneously abandon the cross of Christ for political violence and hatred. While one could appeal to human nature—the ways in which our fear, selfishness, and pride often overcome our highest ideals and can even cloud the prompting of the Holy Spirit within us—the Christian scriptures tell us that there’s also something else happening behind the scenes.
The Bible presents a vision of the world in which the conflict and machinations of empires and states reflect a spiritual reality of demonic forces operating just below the surface. Even though Jesus dealt a critical blow to the “old gods” which the apostle Paul called the powers and principalities, they are not yet dead. They struggle, with their last gasps, to dig their claws into the world which Christ has laid claim upon.
In lands where many claim the name of Jesus, this means persuading them to follow a false Christ who urges them to take up arms instead of their own crosses. This serves a demonic dual purpose of appearing to baptize what can never be washed clean and in discrediting the one thing that has power to draw in outsiders: the authentic Jesus.
For the Nazis, the war-loving, aryan Christ was only a stop gap until the time when the old gods might come again. The Jewish Christian Heinrich Heine seemed to foresee their time clearly, writing this in his 1834 book Religion and Philosophy in Germany:
“Christianity — and that is its greatest merit — has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals.”
A few decades forward in time, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his book Antichrist contrasted the Christian God with the old nationalist gods, saying, “The truth is that there is no other alternative for gods: either they are the will to power—in which case they are national gods—or incapacity for power—in which case they have to be good.” For Nietzsche, the “death of [the Christian] God” meant that men must become God and define good and evil for themselves. The reader may recall that this is the same temptation that Satan presented to Adam and Eve in order to gain power over them in their ignorance—essentially “you can be like God, defining right and wrong and ruling the world yourself (but really you will have given yourselves over to me).”
While the frailties and depravities of human nature can go much of the way toward explaining how self-proclaimed followers of the crucified Prince of Peace can become cheerleaders for the crucifying empires of men, the Bible pulls back the curtain to let us know that yet more sinister forces are pulling the strings.