A white nationalist who openly admires Adolf Hitler wants to transform the Lutheran Church into a haven for fascists like himself, according to a report.
Corey Mahler has been denounced as "evil" by Pastor Matt Harrison, the president of the nation’s second-largest Lutheran denomination, and other church leaders who have been fighting his corrosive influence over the conservative organization, reported Rolling Stone.
“Mr. Mahler engages in regular hateful and racist behavior… and promotion of Nazi Germany and its ideals," three pastors wrote to the head of the Knoxville congregation he attended. "He does so in a manner that makes him appear as a sanctioned representative of the LCMS.”
The California native attended Chapman University law school, where Donald Trump's election lawyer John Eastman formerly taught, before moving to Tennessee, and he served for a time as webmaster for the “Book of Concord,” the Lutheran Church’s manual of doctrine, and developed a plan to replace the church's leaders and draw "hardline young men" into the denomination.
“The Millennials who will replace the feckless, spineless, degenerate boomers will be sure to settle accounts and amend the errors of the past century,” Mahler has previously written. “The LCMS will continue to get more and more conservative and more and more traditional — very soon, we will expel the liberals.”
Mahler, who has said he believes Hitler is in Heaven and has ties to "Unite the Right" organizer Jason Kessler, has made inroads into the conservative denomination that opposes reproductive rights and same-same marriage and does not allow women pastors, and he insists he's more of a monarchist than a fascist, although he also believes God's will was for the U.S. to be a white ethnostate.
"[Fascism is] the off-ramp from democracy back to traditional government," he told Rolling Stone. "Monarchy is the goal.”