‘Spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison,’ C.S. Lewis famously said. In western countries, organised religion has been declining for the last two centuries; Friedrich Nietzsche even declared that ‘God is dead’. Does the decline and fall of religion have political consequences? Can totalitarian ideology grow in the void left by religion?

To find the answer, it’s worth looking to 1930s Germany. Did shallow Christianity – a lack of deep-rooted Christian beliefs – make Germans more susceptible to the Nazi party’s message during the years of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power?

In the less-than-fertile Christian soils of Germany, there was room for new gods and messiahs to sprout

Germans first converted to Christianity during the Roman Empire, when it was a grassroots movement. In other parts of Germany, Christianity arrived up to 1,000 years later. There, conversion was often by the sword, with authorities forcing subjects to change their faith.

In the less-than-fertile Christian soils of Germany, where the cross was planted somewhat belatedly, there was room for new gods and messiahs to sprout. Enter the Nazi party, with a flair for the dramatic and an eye for the devoutly theatrical. Their party congresses weren’t just meetings; they were grand spectacles held in ‘cathedrals of light’, courtesy of anti-aircraft searchlights. These weren’t just political rallies; they were near-religious experiences.

The party’s penchant for sacred symbolism didn’t stop there. Their flags weren’t just adorned with symbols; they were ‘blood banners’, steeped in the blood of their martyred brethren. And Hitler? He wasn’t merely a political leader; he was the Führer, almost a messianic figure, imbued with otherworldly powers. He was Germany’s ‘redeemer’, the one to lift the nation out of the ashes of Versailles.

A rainbow appears over the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp (Credit: Getty Images)

Closing speeches with ‘Amen’, Hitler was not just running a political campaign; he was leading a quasi-religious crusade. As political commentator Walter Lacquer wryly noted in 1962, casting your lot with Hitler wasn’t a mere political decision; it was a leap of faith into a quasi-religious mass movement. In the world of German politics of the era, one might say, the faithful didn’t just vote; they converted.

To test our theory – that a lack of deep-rooted religious conviction aided the Nazis – we weaved together three measures in a new research paper. We counted how many people in a location gave their children religious names; we examined whether they believe in clairvoyance (not exactly sanctioned by the official church); and we measured the share of famous people from any one place who came up through the church. These factors in combination we call ‘shallow Christianity’, or a lack of heartfelt Christian belief. The data show a striking pattern: where religious names are rare, beliefs in clairvoyance are common, and few if any local leaders have religious occupations, the Nazi party did spectacularly well. In the last election in 1933, the least religious areas registered a Nazi vote share of 55 per cent; the most religious ones, of ‘only’ 40 per cent or so. Party entry rates were 50 per cent higher in the least Christian areas.

Christian first names seem to have a predictive power for who did, and didn’t, join the Nazi ranks

Why was Christianity so much more firmly rooted in some parts of Germany than others? The answer lies in the days before Luther nailed his theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517. If you examine what Germany was like before the 16th century, a couple of handy yardsticks suggest themselves as reasons why Christianity did, and didn’t take root: the proximity to medieval monasteries, bastions of Christianisation, and the distance from old pagan worship sites.

Picture Germany, dotted with Stonehenge-esque stone circles and mysterious moors, where, let’s just say, more than just prayers were offered up, human sacrifices included. These sites were the hotspots of pagan rituals, long before the church bells started ringing.

If you map these ancient sites and measure the distances from them to the constituencies across interwar Germany, the tape measure reveals an interesting answer: the closer a place was to these relics of paganism, and the farther from the shadow of a medieval monastery, the more ‘shallow’ the Christianity there still was, some 400 years after the end of the Middle Ages. This isn’t just a hunch – it’s etched in the very names people bore, the superstitions they harboured, and the jobs they held.

Intriguingly, when you zoom to the individual level, the link between religiosity and Nazi support becomes even clearer. Christian first names seem to have a predictive power for who did, and didn’t, join the Nazi ranks. Party members consistently had less religious names than their fellow townsfolk. And as for the party bigwigs, the upper echelons? They’re at the very bottom of the piety ladder, the least religious of the lot. It’s almost as if, the higher you climbed in the party, the further you drifted from the church steeple.

That the decline of traditional community ties and weakened religiosity might prepare the ground for totalitarian ideology has long been suspected by political scientists. Our study, ‘From the death of God to the rise of Hitler’, provides some of the first detailed, local and individual-level data to show how powerful this link can be. Humans have spiritual and communal needs, desire a purpose and want to see that their efforts are rewarded with meaning as much as money and goods. Where traditional religion failed to provide the spiritual ‘sustenance’, citizens indeed began to ‘gobble poison’, in C.S. Lewis’ phrase. In doing so, they fell for the siren song of the Nazi party and its quasi-religious message which promised to redeem Germany under the guidance of a leader with extraordinary, seemingly supernatural powers: Adolf Hitler.