It is easy to view Nietzsche and Heidegger as heroic atheists. This is a radically incomplete view; in fact, their mortal opposition to liberalism and to everything associated with a liberal philosophy of life forces them to embrace what amounts to a radicalized version of antiliberal theocracy. One can understand why a reader of Nietzsche like George Grant can conceive Nietzsche as “the first great explicit right-wing atheist.” This view, however, does not capture the whole story of Nietzsche's complicated stance toward theism in general or even Christian theism in particular.

If we want to think about Nietzsche in the context of civil-religion theorizing, here is a good puzzle to start with: Why does Nietzsche loathe the Protestant Reformation to the extent that he does (“spiritually unclean and boring,” “spiritually stale,” “lazy,” “a homoeopathy of Christianity,” “a recrudescence of Christian barbarism”)? Furthermore, Nietzsche is hardly in the business of “saving” Christianity by identifying more effete and less effete versions of it; so why does he see the move from Catholic Christianity to Protestant Christianity as a kind of inner corruption of Christian theism (“[a]ctual superiority of Catholicism”)? The short answer is that Nietzsche, like Max Weber after him, sees a decisive connection between Protestantism and modernity, and his hatred of modernity is such that he cannot restrain himself from hating Protestantism as a correlate of modernity – even if Protestantism helps to hurry along the decrepitude of Christianity itself. The purpose of this chapter is to offer a more detailed account of this intriguing, paradox-ridden Nietzschean view of religion.