The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis' Christian Reich

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The Modernist God State seeks to overturn the traditional secularization approach to intellectual and political history and to replace it with a fuller understanding of the religious basis of modernist political movements. Lackey demonstrates that Christianity, instead of fading after the Enlightenment, actually increased its power by becoming embedded within the concept of what was considered the legitimate nation state, thus determining the political agendas of prominent political leaders from King Leopold II to Hitler.

Lackey first argues that novelists can represent intellectual and political history in a way that no other intellectual can. Specifically, they can picture a subconscious ideology, which often conflicts with consciously held systems of belief, short-circuiting straight into political action, an idea articulated by E.M. Forster. Second, in contrast to many literary scholars who discuss Hitler and the Nazis without studying and quoting their texts, Lackey draws his conclusions from close readings of their writings. In doing so, he shows that one cannot understand the Nazis without taking into account the specific version of Christianity underwriting their political agenda.

Reviews

"From Lackey's opening argument about the centrality of the novel to human understanding and concepts of social order to his careful analysis of the role of religion in conceptualizing and justifying the Nazi world view, this is a provocative book. It is also deeply informed, fervently purposeful, and decidedly unsettling. A must read." -John Ernest, Interim Chair, Department of EnglishEberly Family Distinguished Professor, Department of English, West Virginia University and author of Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History
"Courageous, provocative and insightful, Michael Lackey's The Modernist God State sees through our ingrained but unearned assumption that true' Christianity is always and naturally benevolent. As he reveals, novelists often understood what political philosophers did not: that the twentieth-century was an age of faith, of subconscious, in-depth Christianization. This is a powerful and fascinatingly-researched account of how secularization stories have blinded us to the many forms of Christian violence in the modern period. Michael Lackey is the Richard Dawkins of Literary Criticism." - Christopher Douglas, Associate Professor of English, University of Victoria, Canada.
"Michael Lackey has given us a passionate, penetrating study of how the novelist (more than the philosopher or the social scientist) has illuminated the monstrous pairing of the Third Reich with Christianity." - James L. W. West III, Sparks Professor of English, Pennsylvania State University, USA, and author of William Styron: A Life (1998).
"The Christian cross underlies the Nazi swastikasuch is the startling thesis of this boldly revisionist work. Drawing on novelistic insights (Conrad, Styron) more discerning about humanity's unconscious heart of darkness than anything to be found in shallowly rationalistic philosophers, Michael Lackey challenges dominant readings of the Holocaust and the ideology of National Socialism. Against the conventional narrative of Nazi secularism, Lackey insists on the centrality for the key Nazi thinkers of a Christian God-state to be realized through the purification of the world of those whose incapacity for transcending the material demonstrates their sub-humanityJesus Christ as Our Aryan Redeemer, bearing not just a sword but a case of Zyklon B." - Charles W. Mills, John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, Northwestern University, USA
"Michael Lackey's provocative claimsthat modernity is not essentially secular but sustains religious belief at the level of the subconscious, that modernism should be understood in 'theological terms' not as anti-religious, and that secularization theories have distorted our understanding of 20th-century political historywill garner wide attention and arouse vigorous debate among a range of scholars, from modernist literary scholars to historians to theologians. Lackey insists that the 20th-century novel be understood as a theoretical instrument, producing insights into the origins of Hitler's National Socialism that philosophers and historians have missed. Written in an accessible prose style with helpful summaries of the philosophies he examines, The Modernist God State offers compelling, if sometimes controversial, insights into the modernist novel and the origin of the nation state that should be read by anyone interested in the growing field of theology and literature." -- Pamela L. CaughieProfessor of English, Loyola University Chicago, USA, and Past President of the Modernist Studies Association.

Author Bio

Michael Lackey is Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, USA. He is the author of African American Atheists and Political Liberation: A Study of the Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Faith (University Press of Florida), which won the Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title in 2007. He has published articles in numerous journals, including Callaloo, African American Review, Philosophy and Literature, Journal of the History of Ideas, and Modern Fiction Studies.