Hitler, Jesus & How to Win a Culture War - Alec Ryrie

Oct 14, 2025

In this engaging discussion, Alec Ryrie, a historian specializing in the Reformation and modern Christian thought, tackles profound cultural shifts since World War II. He examines how moral authority transitioned from Jesus to Hitler, revealing the fragility of our current moral framework. Ryrie critiques the limitations of anti-Nazi values and proposes that both conservatives and progressives could benefit from integrating deeper traditions. He advocates for a synthesis of ideas to enrich moral discourse and encourage shared human flourishing.

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INSIGHT

From Positive To Negative Moral Lodestone

Western moral focus shifted from Jesus as a positive exemplar to Hitler as a negative lodestone after WWII.
That switch taught us what to hate but left us weaker at teaching what to love.

INSIGHT

War Revealed Church Failings

WWII exposed deep failures of Christian institutions, including complicity in antisemitism and slow resistance to Nazism.
That moral failure undercut Christianity's cultural authority and opened space for a secular values system.

ANECDOTE

Dorchester Chaplains' Sacrifice

The Dorchester sinking shows interfaith heroism as four chaplains gave up life jackets and prayed together as the ship went down.
That story became a potent symbol for the postwar idea of Judeo-Christian civilisation.

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Since 1945 Hitler and the Nazis have been the Western world’s one fixed moral reference point: the way we know what evil is. But that consensus has always been more fragile than it felt, and now it is unravelling. This lecture will trace how we came to build our values around the memory of the Second World War, why that consensus isn’t enough to deal with our current predicaments – and why the resolution to all this might be more hopeful than you think.

This lecture was recorded by Alec Ryrie on the 30th of September 2025 at Bernard's Inn Hall, London

Alec Ryrie was Gresham Professor of Divinity. He is also Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University, Co-Editor of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and President of the Church of England Record Society. From 2015-17 he was Visiting Professor in the History of Religion at Gresham College and gave two series of lectures on the history of Protestant Christianity. In 2019 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

He studied History as an undergraduate, at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, before completing a Master's in Reformation Studies at St. Andrews and a D.Phil. in Theology at St. Cross College, Oxford. From 1999-2006 he taught at the University of Birmingham, moving to Durham in 2007. He was Head of the Department of Theology and Religion from 2012-15 and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow from 2015-18. He is on the editorial boards of St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Ashgate) and the Royal Historical Society's New Historical Perspectives. Since 1997 he has been a Reader in the Church of England, and he is licenced to the parish of Shotley St. John (diocese of Newcastle).

Professor Ryrie is a historian of the Reformation era and of Protestantism more widely, with a particular focus on England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is an expert on the emergence and development of Protestant and radical beliefs, identities and spiritualities, and on the history of Protestant missions and missionaries. He has written several prize-winning books and his 2017 book Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World gives an overview of the history of Protestantism from Luther to the present. Much of the book was prefigured in his lectures at Gresham College in 2015-17. His Gresham lectures from 2018-19 presented aspects of his 2019 book Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt; his Gresham lectures from 2020-1 presented aspects of his 2020 book The English Reformation.

His lectures on the early global spread of Protestantism form the basis of his forthcoming book The World’s Reformation, due to be published in 2026. Meanwhile, in 2025 he published The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It, and will be speaking about its themes at Gresham in September 2025.’

The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/hitler-jesus

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