Little Hitler, Big Hitler

Some thoughts on total depravity and its present misinterpretations

I didn’t expect the first week of 2022 to be spent reflecting on a major pastor’s continued and unrepentant assertion that everyone has an “inner Hitler,” but here we are.

The above passage is from Scott Sauls’ book Befriend. Sauls is the head pastor of Christ Presbyterian in Nashville, which - as anyone who’s followed the open letter knows - is the home church of nakedly Sinophobic senator Marsha Blackburn. Her husband, Chuck, is an ordained deacon at the church; his 1.4.21 call for VP Pence to reject the 2020 election results is still up on his Twitter profile.

It’s true that, elsewhere in the same book, Scott implicitly critiques Hitler by decrying his regime’s ableist policies. But this fleeting references offers nothing to cancel out the above contention that Hitler was just the ultimate Type A personality.

It should be said at the outset that I am not a mind reader. I do not know Sauls’ motives in describing “the Hitler in me” as “the controlling, intense, hardly-ever-satisfied-with-the-way-things-are part of me,” as if Hitler was simply a byword for being anal retentive. I tentatively doubt that Scott has an active interest in furthering the cause of the white supremacists who scheme daily about how best to disseminate their ideas in society.

Nonetheless, it must be stated as bluntly as possible: Scott’s description of “the Hitler in me” not only butchers Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity (more on that in a moment) but also aids neo-Nazis everywhere. As recently observed on the antifascist website Angry White Men, the goal of neo-Nazis like podcaster Warren Balogh is to “desensitize” white people to Hitler, such that they ultimately feel “neutral” about Nazis and, ultimately, the Holocaust itself:

As for Adolf Hitler, Balogh told viewers that their goal should be to “desensitize” white people to the Nazi leader and his admirers. “This Hitler question has to be cleared up in peoples’ minds. Or they have to at least be open to it,” he said.

“It’s not like you’re gonna get every white person in America out there throwing up [Roman salutes] and thinking that Hitler was the greatest man who ever lived,” he continued. “But what you have to do is you have to at least desensitize them to it. You have to get them used to accepting that there are good people who think that Hitler was that great and who think of themselves as National Socialists.”

Keep that in mind when assessing the ramifications of the fact that, in Befriend, Sauls goes on to illustrate his “inner Hitler” by citing 1) a time when he got defensive in the face of his wife’s questioning his Biblical interpretation, 2) a time when he got defensive in the face of his daughter’s correcting his memory of Scripture, and 3) a time he got pissed at a slow-moving car in traffic.

The good news for Scott is that none of these examples lend any credibility to the manifestly absurd notion that he, and everyone else, has an “inner Hitler.” The bad news is that Scott not only refuses to reconsider this awful analogy, but also recently extended it to entertain the notion that we should equally praise Saint Paul and Hitler.

Oh yeah—I forgot to warn you that this thread was sparked by the notion that Trump, who recommended injecting bleach to cure COVID, somehow deserves credit for “pushing hard to create a vaccine.” (It’s worth noting that the vaccine was also created by immigrants whom Trump’s policies would have prevented from coming to America.)

Why am I going on and on about these offenses to reason and basic compassion for Hitler’s victims? Because the offender is ostensibly the shepherd of a sitting member of Congress who is known to consort with actual neo-Nazis. That matters at a time when interest in white supremacism is rising. And it matters when said pastor, faced with criticism, refuses to take a hint and rethink his abominable metaphor.

What can one even say to the contention that knowing about one’s "inner Hitler” increases the pleasure one takes in the Beatitudes? Probably something similar to the response most of us would have to the following unhinged sentences from another of Saul's theological meditations, which he first posted in 2016 and reposted as recently as 3 days ago.

Yup, that’s Sauls again, trying to illustrate everyone’s sin nature with a baffling list that includes an array of figures from the Hebrew Bible alongside Hitler and the singer Pink. (The “context,” such that there is, involves Sauls’ framing Pink’s lyric “don’t let me get me” as some kind of profound disquisition on human nature.)

All this would be alarming in and of itself, but for the fact that an interest in hearing what Nazis and their advocates have to say also apparently characterizes Scott’s co-pastor, David Owen Filson. Filson is the “pastor of theology and discipleship” at Christ Presbyterian. He also takes an avid interest in such far right personalities as Tucker Carlson and Jack Posobiec, the latter of whom has been known to post coded affirmations of Nazi ideology and collaborate with Nazis.

Besides stating the obvious—Sauls’ book should be pulled from circulation; Sauls should either repent or step down from ministry; Nazi sympathizers at Christ Presbyterian and other churches should be confronted and publicly shamed until they repent or remove themselves from public life—I think it’s worth pointing out why this juvenile reading of the doctrine of original sin misses the point. I myself wrote an article on the Calvinist concept of total depravity in September, arguing that it offers a way to think about America’s ongoing captivity to systemic racism. The relevant passage from Calvin metaphorizes sin as the mythical hydra, a multiheaded beast that “lurks in every breast.” I can hear the counterarguments of Sauls and his ilk now: surely metaphorizing sin as an ever-present monster is the same as stating that everyone carries the potentiality of the Third Reich?

No. It doesn’t. In my article, I pointed to Calvin (via Marilynne Robinson) as a champion of the “workshop of grace” abiding in the human spirit, without which his doctrine of depravity indeed collapses into a pure nihilism. Had I more space, I would have expanded on my claim that antiracist protestors and radical liberationists represent the “highest fruits” of that workshop of grace, to affirm unreservedly that such persons exude a spirit that renders any notion of a universal inner Hitler absolutely preposterous.

In my view, Christian theologians who swim in the Calvinist stream of the faith have got to recuperate and, frankly, renovate Calvin’s understanding of total depravity. In the very same chapter where Calvin broaches the hydra analogy, he immediately goes on to stipulate that such an analogy does not erase the clear and obvious differences between the moral capacities of various human beings, nor does it permit the “objection” that all humans must therefore retain equal propensity for monstrous evil:

…The surest and easiest answer to the objection is, that those [i.e., virtues] are not common endowments of nature, but special gifts of God, which he distributes in divers forms, and in a definite measure, to men otherwise profane. For which reason, we hesitate not, in common language, to say, that one is of a good, another of a vicious nature; though we cease not to hold that both are placed under the universal condition of human depravity. All we mean is, that God has conferred on the one a special grace which [253] he has not seen it meet to confer on the other.

When I said above that anyone who affirms the doctrine of total depravity has to renovate Calvin’s thought, here is what I mean: we need to tease out the implications here and unequivocally state that the human spirit’s “workshop of grace,” mysterious and wondrous as it is, means that the ever present hydra is simply never going to break out into genocidal impulses for a significant portion of the human species. Calvin, intelligent though he was, didn’t exactly offer a consistently full-throated celebration of that workshop of grace. As humanity faces an extinction-level threat in the face of global heating, it should be absolutely incumbent on anyone engaging in theology to proclaim, loudly and clearly, the gifts that such a threat would extinguish.

One could say that it’s a sign of depravity that self-absorbed Reformed theologians continually decline to do so.

Sauls is not alone in his mangling of total depravity. This invocation of an “inner Hitler” echoes the unceasing drumbeat of existential masochism that pervades Reformed theologians. One likely finds its origins in the neo-Puritan slaveholder Jonathan Edwards, whose “Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God” has long enraptured predestinarians with its visions of eternal punishment for the wicked. In his enthusiasm for ensuring readers know how wicked they are, though, Sauls has embraced an analogy whose implications we should find totally horrific.

It’s one thing to say that the motives, means, and ends of virtue everywhere fall short of what they could be, and that even the kindest and most upright of people are asymptotically striving towards the moral perfection of Christ. It’s another thing entirely to say, as Sauls literally did, that “the seeds that made [Hitler] that way reside latent in every heart.” Taken to its logical conclusion, such a statement would require ascribing the seeds of Hitler to the inner recesses of all of Hitler’s victims. Can any self-respecting minister commit to such an obscene statement?

I can’t believe this needs to be said, but: no, the victims of the Holocaust did not carry within them the potential to carry out the Holocaust. Granting the premise that there are no morally unimpeachable victims—that “depravity” arguably manifested, to some degree, in the kapos whose suffering impelled them to carry out the will of their tormenters—I find it utterly abhorrent to encourage the presumption that those victims, in their varying distances from absolute and frankly unknowable perfection, carried within them the seeds of the Final Solution’s architects. I find it especially abhorrent when one surveys the long history of Christians blaming Jews for the agony that Christians themselves have inflicted upon them.

I don’t think I should be alone in finding that reckless. I don’t think I should be alone in finding that anti-Semitic. And I don’t think I should be alone in finding that grounds for a permanent break from ministry. But then again, I’m not a megachurch pastor who’s accrued no small amount of profit from purveying such “ideas.”

Do you also think that influential pastors have to do a better job of taking Nazism and fascism seriously? Then I invite you to tell Sauls yourself via his public email address: ssauls@christpres.org. Perhaps the next time Marsha Blackburn’s pastor brings up Hitler, it will, at last, be in the context of an apology for having mentioned him at all.