For centuries, the lodestone of the West's moral compass pointed to Jesus. Today, it points away from Hitler. That shift from a positive to a negative moral touchstone can be seen in popular culture's panoply of dark lords—Darth Vader, Sauron, Voldemort—each a rather unsubtle echo of Hitler himself.
Join Sam Fornecker for a conversation with Alec Ryrie, Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University and author of The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (Reaktion, 2025). According to Ryrie, the story of the war against Hitler has become “not only our Trojan War, but our Paradise Lost." What Ryrie calls anti-Nazi values have set the agenda for the West since the war: but that moral consensus is fast collapsing.
The question is, what will follow it? And what is the Church's role in preserving the moral lessons of the twenty-first century, while also—God willing—modeling a way of being in the world that leads to greater human thriving than anti-Nazi values on their own can sustain?
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