re: #131 Decatur Deb

It’s hard to hang Coughlin on the RC hierarchy. They cut him some slack through his early (lee rabid) radio shows, but his bishop finally told him to STFU.

Very true. I wasn’t trying to pinpoint any one particular sect. One of the main inspirations for anti-Semitism and therefore the Nazis rise to power was Martin Luther who was a founder of the Protestant Reformation. An excerpt from that link:

According to Daniel Goldhagen, Bishop Martin Sasse, a leading Protestant churchman, published a compendium of Luther’s writings shortly after Kristallnacht, for which Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church in the University of Oxford argued that Luther’s writing was a “blueprint.” Sasse applauded the burning of the synagogues and the coincidence of the day, writing in the introduction, “On 10 November 1938, on Luther’s birthday, the synagogues are burning in Germany.” The German people, he urged, ought to heed these words “of the greatest antisemite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews.” According to Professor Dick Geary, the Nazis won a larger share of the vote in Protestant than in Catholic areas of Germany in elections of 1928 to November 1932.