The only way of getting rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little. – Adolf Hitler

Yes, there have been evil men who have done evil things in the name of false Christianity. To a limited degree, Adolf Hitler was one such man. Still, and as even he frequently admitted outside the public eye, he was no Christian.

As a counterweight to stigma associated with the tens of millions slaughtered in the 20th century alone under the atheist regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, et al., the secular left is quick to thunder, “But what about Hitler? He was a Christian!”

Bad news, kids. Herr Führer was your guy, too.

“I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie,” Hitler confessed (audio transcribed in “Hitler’s Table Talk” [1941-44]). “It would always be disagreeable for me to go down to posterity as a man who made concessions in this field.”

Did Adolf Hitler ever call himself a Christian? Certainly. He did so, and as he would later admit, for the singular purpose of disseminating political propaganda. “To whom should propaganda be addressed?” he wrote. “It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses. … The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real.”

His “pro-Christian” proclamations in Mein Kampf and elsewhere, for instance, were a shrewd perversion of Christianity used to justify the extermination of the Jewish people. “My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter,” he wrote. “In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge [the Jews] to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. … For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.”

That was the extent of Hitler’s plastic “Christianity” — ignoring the fact that Jesus, all his apostles and all the earliest Christians were Jewish, and that the gentile Romans also participated in Jesus’s death. No matter. The Bible, always taken out of context, served as a tool in Hitler’s hand to rationalize the mass slaughter of millions of Jews along with many Christians, disabled people and other “undesirables.”

In reality, Hitler insisted, “In the long run, National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together.”

What Brutal Hitler and Softer Modern Day Progressives Share in Common

Sounds similar in this regard to American church-state separatists. Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU, for example, said, “I am for socialism, disarmament, and, ultimately, for abolishing the state itself. … I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.”

Indeed, the ACLU’s promotional materials similarly advocate anti-Christian discrimination and mirror Hitler’s directive that, “Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together.” “The message of the Establishment Clause is that religious activities must be treated differently from other activities to ensure against governmental support for religion,” imagines the “American” so-called “civil liberties” union.

This is secular socialism in a nutshell.

“There is something very unhealthy about Christianity,” Hitler opined. “As far as we are concerned, we’ve succeeded in chasing the Jews from our midst and excluding Christianity from our political life. … The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. … Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless.”

Indeed, Hitler’s robust anti-Christian agenda lives on beyond the death of the Third Reich. Modern-day progressives like Hillary Clinton, though, tend to take a kinder, gentler, more surreptitiously totalitarian approach: “Rights have to exist in practice — not just on paper,” the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee recently said in the context of some phantom “right” to exterminate undesirable infants. “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”

Hitler’s religion was national socialism. “We’ll see to it that the Churches cannot spread abroad teachings in conflict with the interests of the State,” he explained. “We shall continue to preach the doctrine of National Socialism, and the young will no longer be taught anything but the truth.”

Hitler, borrowing from socialist icon Karl Marx, said that all Germans must “free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let’s be the only people who are immunized against the disease.” Marx, a hero to the secular socialist left, famously called religion, “the opium of the people.”

Hitler a Christian? No chance.

Anti-Semitism, Islam and a Dash of Darwin

Moreover, like many of today’s anti-Semitic secular progressives, Hitler was an apologist for Islam, partnering with Iran, present-day “Palestine” and other Islamist regimes against the Jews. Hitler differed from modern-day secular progressives, however, in that he embraced — rather than denied — the violent roots of Islam. “The world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing was Christianity!” he fumed. “Then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens the seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so!”

Hitler also parroted the godless ideology of modern atheists. Like so many of today’s secular progressives, he was an avowed materialist, Darwinian evolutionist and hard-hearted God-denier: “When understanding of the universe has become widespread, when the majority of men know that the stars are not sources of light but worlds, perhaps inhabited worlds like ours, then the Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity.”

“Christianity, of course, has reached the peak of absurdity,” he said. “And that’s why one day its structure will collapse. Science has already impregnated humanity. Consequently, the more Christianity clings to its dogmas, the quicker it will decline.”

Hitler endeavored to assist “natural selection” and, as he wrote in Mein Kampf, “establish an evolutionary higher stage of being.” He placed his hope in Germany’s youth because they were “absolutely indifferent in the matters of religion.”

A beloved Hitler Youth marching song captured the Führer’s heart on matters of Christ and Christianity:

We follow not Christ, but Horst Wessel,
Away with incense and Holy Water,
The Church can go hang for all we care,
The Swastika brings salvation on Earth.

Today’s progressive “social justice” warriors are angling for a Swastika-free repeat. Their hope, too, lies in the youth (witness the socialism-fueled anarchist insurgence occurring on college campuses nationwide). Like then, progressive secular socialists endeavor to rule the world by converting the young.

And “Christianity alone,” to update Hitler’s own words, can prevent “them from doing so.”

Matt Barber is founder and editor-in chief of BarbWire.com. He is author of Hating Jesus: The American Left’s War on Christianity, a columnist, a cultural analyst and an attorney concentrating in constitutional law. Follow him on Twitter.