Marking the 80th Anniversary of Hiroshima
6th August, 2025
Alec Ryrie’s new book, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It, is an examination of our Nazi fixation and the unravelling of post-war moral consensus today. In this blog, Alec takes a closer look at this fixation and what is to become of us as a result.
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It’s an eerie, profound double anniversary. We’re now marking eighty years since the bombing of Hiroshima, and the final end to six years of global slaughter that swiftly followed. But the day when the sun came to earth and the dead fell like shadows, 6 August, is also the Christian feast of the Transfiguration, when Christ was revealed in glory in a light too clear for human eyes. Make of that grim irony what you will. I take it as a symbol of how, in the twentieth century, one sacred story gave way to another.
Right up to the mid-twentieth century, almost everyone in the western world accepted Christianity, and the example of Jesus Christ in particular, as the basis of their morals. Atheists and agnostics were usually eager to insist on that. But now we’ve got a different ethical reference point: the Second World War, the defining moral event of our age. The most potent moral figure in our culture isn’t Jesus: it’s Adolf Hitler. In our relativist, pluralist times, he is our one fixed reference point, the yardstick by which we know what is evil.
Perhaps we still believe that Jesus is good—but not with the fervor and conviction with which we believe that Nazism is evil. Crosses and crucifixes have lost most of their cultural power. They can be played with, even joked about, and no one really minds. The swastika packs a far greater punch. Play or joke with that, and you make yourself a monster.
The postwar age has been the age of Hitler. Since 1945, the man with the toothbrush moustache has dominated our moral imaginations. I don’t object to demonizing him. If one human being is to stand as our representative of evil, I challenge anyone to find a better candidate. But we should be clear about what we’ve done: We’ve replaced a positive exemplar with a negative one. We’ve taught ourselves that evil looks like a Nuremberg rally, when in fact evil takes many forms. And we’ve persuaded ourselves that we live in an age that has no religion, when in fact we are believers in the myth of World War II.
But now that myth is breaking down, as that war falls off the edge of living memory and the moral, social and political consensus that it forged is crumbling. I think this is the crucial lens we need to understand our culture wars, our values wars. It helps explain why things that we once thought were settled have flared up again, why old taboos are breaking down and why we feel we’ve not got any common ground any more. And I also think it helps to show how all this might play out.
Western culture didn’t switch out a moral system defined by Christianity for one defined by World War II and the Nazis without good reason. Christianity’s moral authority had been decaying for centuries, but its dismal failure to recognise and confront the moral challenge of fascism finished the story. The moral force behind the Allies’ victory in 1945 was not Churchill’s unconvincing talk of ‘Christian civilization’ but Roosevelt’s vision of fundamental freedoms – including freedom of belief – to be asserted and defended ‘everywhere in the world’. The Nazi leaders were put on trial for crimes against humanity. When the United Nations had morphed from wartime alliance to international organisation, in 1948 it issued the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: a statement intended to be binding for all time, in the name of ‘humanity’, the faith of the postwar world.
As we all know if we let ourselves stop to think about it, that faith is built on sand, or rather, in the clouds: we can’t prove that human beings are equal and have rights. We just believe it. The UN Declaration is quite clear about why we believe it: because of the terrible experience of war and genocide in the 1940s, not because of any philosophical insight. And so World War II has become our Trojan War: the story we cannot stop telling ourselves. Not just the endless rehashings of the war itself, but the mythologised versions, from Tolkien to Star Wars and Harry Potter, all these struggles against genocidal Dark Lords. It’s the religion of our age, the story on which we raise our children and that we can’t stop re-telling ourselves: this is what evil looks like, and this is how you defeat it.
Until now, anyway. Now, when the war is finally falling off the edge of living memory: by the time the 90th anniversaries roll around, the very last of those who fought will have gone. Now, when the Right is no longer feeling constrained by a lifetime of taboos against anything redolent of fascism. Now, when the Left is also reassessing its values, with race and imperialism in general crowding out the lessons of Nazism in particular. Now, when on all sides the world’s most ineradicable prejudice, antisemitism, shambles back into life.
It’s a frightening moment: but I am unfashionably optimistic about the outcome. Basing our whole system of values around the Second World War was never a brilliant idea. Yes, fascism is very, very evil. But knowing that doesn’t help us guard against other evils, and it certainly doesn’t tell us what we should positively value. There’s every reason to hope that what will – eventually – come out of this turbulent period of flux is a richer moral order, drawing on our older, deeper traditions as well as on the urgent, painful lessons of the twentieth century. And we will be glad that, finally, we have left the age of Hitler behind us.
– Alec Ryrie
Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University and a Fellow of the British Academy. His previous books include Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019). He lives in rural County Durham.
