Внутри «Войны за нормальность»: как христианская конференция стала продавать нацистскую пропаганду

To a nerdy homeschooled teenager in the deeply churched South, conferences were a normal part of life. I remember singing martial psalms in the Blue Ridge Mountains during an all-day family seminar, being introduced by my pastor-grandfather to Tim Keller at a beachside denominational assembly, and the thunder of fireworks at a Jamestown quadricentennial.

But I would have been shocked, as many were online this week, to discover a conservative protestant conference with a vendor hall table hosted by America’s best-known Neonazi publishing house, stacked with materials glorifying Adolf Hitler. This was reality at the ironically named “The War for Normal” conference in Ogden, Utah. The conference was put on by New Christendom Press, a protestant publishing house associated with a local independent Reformed congregation called Refuge Church. 

Refuge’s senior pastor is no more normal than his conference. An iTunes chart-topping Christian musician, Brian Sauvé’s influence stretches far beyond his congregation. He’s a successful podcaster, alongside his co-pastors Eric Conn and Ben Garrett, the creators behind the massively popular “Haunted Cosmos” show that explores the paranormal and a universe that is “not just stuff,” as their stylish branding states.

Not every pastor would issue an hour-long response to the outcry that erupted over the self-labeled Nazi vendor at his conference and largely defend the books: 

“[I]n terms of a publishing company ... like Antelope Hill publishing those materials, I don't have a problem with them. And I don't have a problem with them knowing that ... a lot of people who read them will come to conclusions whether they are to the left or to the right of me that differ in how they interpret and land the plane. You know, from Hitler was a Christian prince to the cartoon was true and this is all propaganda and what not.”

After watching the recording of Sauvé and Conn, it becomes apparent why the response to the unfolding scandal was not put to paper, because the meandering remarks did not address the largest objection at all: that a Christian family conference was no place for carefully edited, one-sided propaganda pieces like the Nazi Party’s own account of the The Rise of the Reich or The Rise of the NSDAP, originally published by the SS Main Office and sold alongside a biography of an SS officer who led persecution of ethnically Jewish Belgians or a tome extolling the virtues of the Nordic race of peasantry. Both pastors claimed to own the Antelope Hill book The Sword of Christ, which Conn described as “anti-Zionist.” It turns out to be filled with claims about Christianity as racialism and condemnations of race mixing. 

Most conspicuously absent from the response was any mention of the video shared by Executive Pastor Eric Conn’s X account Sunday evening: a musical montage video celebrating “White Boy Summer” with spliced footage featuring a Sieg Heil, a Hitler Youth, the founder of the American Nazi Party — George Lincoln Rockwell, and an elderly man in German military garb being asked if Adolf Hitler was his hero. In documentary footage unearthed by X users, the man responds, “Yes, one hundred percent.” He is Herbert Von Mildenberg, an SS officer who lived out his life attacking Jews as evil. This marks the third year in a row that Refuge Church pastors have posted racially-coded videos from the same creator. 

The response also included false claims that Churchill initiated the bombings of civilians in WWII (spoiler: Hitler did) and that Adolf Hitler received 90% of the German vote, when in fact he never received a majority before the Nazis became the sole legal party. 

Conn and Sauvé did accept full responsibility for a flyer Antelope Hill described as a handout with each purchase, a list of “Pro White” (sic) businesses that ranged from soaps and coffee to swastika jewelry and a homoerotic men’s magazine, which the pair described as “trashy.” They stated they were “grieved” by the inclusion of multiple neopagan resources such as the Cosmotheist Church, which sells books like The Jesus Hoax. 

In explaining their opposition to the resources advertised at their conference, Sauvé stated, “If you’re pro-white you should probably not talk to demons.” Eric Conn’s own Sunday evening upload of the video with Hitler imagery, posted amidst the growing storm over the flyer, included footage of a speech by Jonathan Bowden, a British far-Right figure who embraced paganism and criticized Christianity harshly. His death in 2012 after an involuntary commitment in 2011 is emblematic of the destruction that Nazism continues to produce. 

The ability of someone in the 21st century to embrace the Hitlerian worldview must be of particular delight to Satan because of the eschatological scale and conspicuousness of the ruin it wrought across an entire nation. I grew up in Germany and saw the scars. Some of those scars are personal. My own great-uncle landed at Utah Beach and ultimately died in the Battle of the Bulge, still a teenager, as part of the cost of eradicating Nazism. Two of his brothers became Presbyterian ministers after the war and instilled in our family a Christlike love that was gentle but also fierce when needed. 

I’m grieved to see a church in our Reformed tradition of Christianity host a conference that seemed to have allowed evil in its midst without challenge or confrontation, keynoted by a minister in my own denomination, currently under suspension for unrelated matters. The PCA’s Rev. Garris went further than the Refuge Church ministers in a tweet, stating the books at the Antelope Hill table were “out of step with our Christian beliefs” and that he had “no interest in Nazism or associating with it.”

Another keynote speaker, Stephen Wolfe, author of the controversial Case for Christian Nationalism at the center of the movement Refuge Church has aligned itself with, announced in a Wednesday night stream that while he rejects Nazism, he looks forward to continuing work with Conn and Sauvé and will be at their conference next year. At the conference, he is reported to have denounced ecclesiastical denunciations, speaking days after the Southern Baptist Convention condemned ethnonationalism and racism, and after several Presbyterian denominations, like the Orthodox Presbyterian Church he had affiliated with in the past, condemned racial supremacy. 

The warriors for “normal” should remember that normal is not always moral. 2 Samuel 15:22 instructs us that obedience is more important to God than accomplishment or orchestrating some “normal” outcome. What obedience looks like will vary by context, but it will always follow the objective commandments of our Savior. 

An obedient pastor confronts evil. A minister who believes in the depravity of man does not excuse sin and abandon his sheep to its grip, or worse yet, celebrate it.

A Reformed minister who understood this truth was André Trocmé, who found his normal upended when Adolf Hitler invaded his home of France. According to Yad Vashem, where he and his wife are celebrated as “righteous among the nations,” Trocmé saved an estimated 5,000 people persecuted by the Nazis, mostly Jews. When ordered to depart, he declared,     "[t]hese people came here for help and for shelter. I am their shepherd. A shepherd does not forsake his flock.”