Over the past few decades, countless “rules” or “laws” have been coined to describe the murmurations of internet behavior. One of the most enduring of these is Godwin’s Law, which holds that as an online discussion continues, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler or the Nazis approaches one. This “law” is as much a joke as a thesis, but the universality of the reductio ad Hitlerum suggests something fundamental to public thought.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, they played the role of Hitler. Ukraine, too, needed to be de-Nazified. On October 7, Hamas recreated the Holocaust. Now Israel is smeared as a génocidaire. Gun control, porn bans, or HOA bylaws—it’s all fascist. Be they strict teachers or world leaders, everyone is someone’s führer. For Alec Ryrie, this rhetorical cliche is proof that the West has chosen Adolf Hitler as its primary moral reference point, replacing Jesus Christ.

This claim was argued in 2021 by another British historian, Tom Holland: “Today, when we ask ourselves ‘what would Hitler have done?’, and do the opposite…our forebearers…wondered ‘what would Jesus have done,’ and sought to do the same.” Ryrie agrees: “Crosses and crucifixes have lost most of their power in our culture. It is possible to play with them, even joke about them, and no one really minds. Not so with swastikas.” Renaud Camus has described Hitler’s role as a moral symbol as his “second career.”

In The Age of Hitler, Ryrie asks the follow-up question: What does it mean to replace a moral exemplar with a moral monster? And Ryrie, despite still holding a Hitler-formed worldview—the book is riddled with echolalic denunciations of right-wing parties and “straight, white, middle-class, middle-aged, cisgendered men”—concludes that our post-war morality is unhealthy. Anti-Nazism is insufficient for the proper ordering of a society; a system limited in reference to the negative is pushing a rope. “[W]e know what we hate, but we do not know what we love.”

In order to make these arguments, Ryrie first sweeps through 20th-century politics and culture before advising, sequentially, “progressive secularists” and “conservative traditionalists” on how they might emerge from the Age of Hitler. Whoever escapes first, he predicts, will reap electoral spoils.

The historical narrative is well worn. Franklin Roosevelt’s invocation of Judeo-Christianity is followed by the United Nations and its declarations; Adolf Eichmann by anti-apartheid activism. Endearingly, Ryrie intersperses this story with cultural history and personal reflection. Some 20 films are invoked with varying levels of commentary. (Nolan’s Dunkirk made him cry.)

Throughout the narrative, there is an interesting subplot wherein the West adjusts the Nazi mythos to better fit its villains du jour and vice versa. In the face of Strom Thurmond and Hendrik Verwoerd, the Nazi evil is racialized. Whereas once warmongering took center stage, race hatred in the Third Reich took its place. And, somewhat illogically, the transatlantic slave trade became “genocidal,” for to deny an evil’s connection to Nazism became akin to denying it is evil at all.

While much of the history is compelling, if too brief, Ryrie’s plan for escaping the Age of Hitler is suspect.

He calls for rooting civilization in tradition while maintaining “our anti-Nazi ethics.” What this synthesis would look like in practice is not made clear, but for the Left it means accepting Jesus as a moral exemplar—not as Christ. “[N]ever mind the doctrines; feel the depth,” he advises. Christianity “has plenty of space for people who…‘can’t believe the mumbo-jumbo.’” Liberal readers needn’t worry, for they can be spiritual, not religious.

At times Ryrie sounds a lot like his doctoral supervisor, eminent church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, who once asserted that “religion has got everything appallingly wrong and it has been terrible for us in sexual terms.” Whereas MacCulloch is preoccupied with sex—his latest book, Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity, came out in April—Ryrie takes a more catholic view of the church’s deleterious effects. (“The ongoing historic evils of the Christian churches…”)

For the Right, however, already grounded in tradition, synthesis means embracing modern values. It must retreat from “issues like sexual ethics, gender identity, and abortion.” It mustn’t browbeat. In Ryrie’s program, concessions are a one-way street, and the ratchet only moves left.

Ryrie exhorts the West to reconsecrate itself to liberalism under the banner of Jesus. But this voting-booth-and-altar vision is dedicated to the Christianity of Tom Holland and Diarmaid MacCulloch; better than paganism, to be sure, but theirs is a savior who does not stray too far from secular liberalism. He is permissive of sexual libertinism, has nothing at all to say about divorce, and loathes those who “pester or harass.” He is a useful god, this savior of theirs—he makes no real demands of his followers that Ryrie, Holland, or MacCulloch would not themselves make.

But just as Ryrie describes anti-Nazi values as thin gruel, Christian love that limits itself to “a few decades of painstaking, punctilious effort” to avoid the risk of appearing “judgmental, hypocritical, [or] crass” is itself pretty thin. It seems likely that whoever picks up after Hitler will have more to say than that.