Matthew Feldman, Genocide between Political Religion and Religious Politics
February 17, 2008 Religion and Nationalism, Religion and Genocide, Christianity, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust No CommentsFTMP_NDH_conclusion.pdf (application/pdf Object), TMPR, 2008
Across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, a cross-section of Orthodox, Protestant and Catholic clerics - and occasionally their religious organisations - gave material support to radical right and fascist movements. While comparative research on this phenomenon is in its infancy, a few claims made be made, however tenuously, bearing directly upon the case of the NDH [Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, or Independent State of Croatia, created in April 1941].
In the new Yugoslav state, like elsewhere in interwar Europe, political Catholicism and its lay institutions (most notably Catholic Action) were of recent vintage. These movements came to prominence in no small measure as a proactive response to many of the same perceived decadences of modern life that fascism, likewise, arose to combat in the
wake of World War One: Marxism and materialism, liberalism and individualism, capitalism and cosmopolitanism. This amorphous movement may thus be regarded as fellow-travellers of fascism, with an important article of faith separating their paths: the Christian God (in an extensively elaborated and ‘revised’ understanding) came first for clerics intervening in politics where, for fascists, the nation became a partially-revealed, ersatz god.