You Tube Theology

The age of Hitler, and how we can escape it

This year, the Bampton Lectures are delivered by Professor Alec Ryrie FBA is Professor of the History of Christianity in the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Durham.

The age of Hitler is not the 1930s and 1940s: it is our own lifetimes. It is the period in which Western culture has come to define its values not by Christianity, but by the narrative of the Second World War. It is the period in which our most potent moral figure has been Adolf Hitler, and in which our only truly fixed moral reference point has been our shared rejection of Nazism.

Which is good: but it’s not enough. And even if defining our values this way was wise, it’s clear that this postwar, anti-Nazi moral consensus is unravelling, and our whole system of values coming under pressure. What is going to come next? These lectures will give an account of how the ‘secular’ values of the postwar world came about, and what will happen now that the age of Hitler seems to be passing. They will show that for a new shared system of values to emerge from our current turmoil, we will need to draw creatively both on the newer, secular, anti-Nazi value system and on the older Christian value systems which remain powerfully present in European and Western culture. And they will show that such a creative synthesis is not only desirable, but also possible – perhaps even likely.

Tuesday 17 May

10.00am Lecture 3: Heroes and Villains
For those of us who have grown up formed by its certainties, the fracturing of the postwar moral consensus is unnerving. This lecture will offer some cold comfort, by examining the weaknesses and inadequacies of the Second World War and of the mythology of anti-Nazism as a basis for our value systems. It will argue that for those weaknesses and inadequacies to be addressed, we will need to draw on deeper resources, which in the western world must mean principally theChristian moral frameworks that are still buried deep in our culture’s foundations. It remains to be seen whether this will be done well or badly.

The inadequacy of the Second World War as a basis for our ethics is not a matter merely of the moral messiness of the struggle itself (the Bengal famine, Dresden, Hiroshima); nor of the problematic lessons the war has taught us (the phobia of ‘appeasement’ almost annihilated the planet during the Cuban missile crisis). More fundamentally, the very fact of replacing a positive moral exemplar with a negative one has left us with a social consensus that knows what is evil but has no agreement on what is good, and indeed with a severely impoverished notion of the good. One result is a worsening shortage of those pragmatic moral lubricants, repentance and forgiveness. Another is an almost comical tendency, especially in Britain, to read complex problems, from the COVID pandemic to the climate emergency, through the lens of the Second World War – as if all true evils have villains at their heart. A third is a persistent inability to find a cultural place for religion, especially for religions that do not feel the need to emulate postwar European Christianity’s tamed social role. The lecture will argue that these inadequacies are amongst the reasons why our postwar value system is failing, and why we ought to be glad of the fact. It will also argue that, while Christianity cannot be the only set of moral resources drawn on to address these problems, it can and should play a distinctive and decisive part in doing so. And it will draw on examples from around the world that suggest this is already beginning to happen.

You can find the other lectures on the Bampton Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWCAltzb4KrORSI9r8KLs8AIlWEPNyryI

Produced by Ana-Maria Niculcea, Communications, Digital and Marketing Officer