It's easy to look with hindsight on Germany in the 1930s and wonder how such a bright, well-educated, church-going population could be deceived by Adolf Hitler's propaganda machine.
But a new book released this month by WND Books and best-selling author Ray Comfort, "Hitler, God, and the Bible", shows American society under an equally deadly cloud of delusion created by activists and lawmakers who contend life in the womb is not human, just as Hitler and his minister of propaganda, Josef Goebbels, declared Jews not human.
Comfort, co-host with actor Kirk Cameron of the popular TV series "The Way of the Master", explained to WND that America should use hard facts – not the spin of activists and lawmakers – to determine whether or not abortion should be allowed.
"The abortion issue comes back to whether or not we agree with science that a fetus is a baby at conception – that it is a personality," Comfort said. "Science now tells us that it is."
Therefore, destruction of a fetus at conception is the destruction of a life.
"If we understand that, we can see that more than 50 million Americans have had their lives destroyed because of legislation that says abortion is OK in America," Comfort said.
The book is the first of a series of titles about cultural and political icons. The next, scheduled for later this year, is called "The Beatles, God and the Bible."
Comfort produced a companion movie for "Hitler, God, and the Bible" in which he took his video cameras to the streets and asked what people knew about Hitler. He returned shocked, with footage of 14 people, mainly university students, who didn't know who the German tyrant was.
"It sent me for a loop," Comfort told WND. "I thought, 'On what planet are these people from?' I realized the problem isn't with the students but with the American educational system, which has dropped the ball on this one."
Only five states have mandatory Holocaust education, noted Comfort, who is Jewish.
When he posted the movie on the Internet, it received 2.1 million views in a little more than three months. Since then, hundreds of thousands of copies of the sensational 30-minute documentary "180" have been sold nationwide.
In the "180" movie, Comfort said, "people completely change their minds because they are given knowledge they didn't have before."
"We have an entire nation that's lacking knowledge when it comes to what abortion is, because of the propaganda given to them by the liberal media," he told WND.
Comfort's aim is to point the reader to God's offer of salvation through Jesus Christ.
"When people have that knowledge and don't see [God] as a divine butler or celestial Santa Claus, when they see God in truth, it gives them the ability to change their mind about what Jesus did on the cross," Comfort said. "It helps them see and understand it, because they are given knowledge and find a place of genuine repentance and true conversion."
America's future
Comfort, a native of New Zealand, believes that electing the right political leaders won't be enough to restore America and reverse the damage done by laws that sanction or legitimize homosexuality, same-sex marriage, pornography and abortion.
Hearts must be changed, he said, not just minds, and that comes only through spiritual conversion.
"If the engine is on the right track, the carriages of the worldview will fall right in line," he explained. "And that's the miracle of conversion – that when we become Christians through the new birth, we love that which God loves, we esteem that which God esteems."
He said that as much as he would love to see political leaders who are "men of God, men of righteousness, it's to put the cart before the horse if we put them in power and don't stand up and proclaim the Gospel, as we're commissioned to do by Jesus."
Comfort sees moral relativism creeping into the church – as it did under Germany's Nazi regime – with many church leaders no longer "thundering the Ten Commandments from the pulpit and showing that there is absolute right and absolute wrong."
Meanwhile, in the public square, there has been a concerted effort to get rid of the Ten Commandments, he noted.
"Consequently we have a society that has legalized the murder of children in the womb, ignoring the command you shall not kill," he said. "We have a society that advocates adultery, because they've ignored the seventh commandment. We have become a society that's ignored God, the God of the Bible, and created in our minds a divine butler that is supposed to come running when we click our fingers."
Comfort acknowledged that his book's "pure Gospel presentation" undoubtedly will annoy some readers.
'But that's what's needed," he said. If you want your teeth fixed at the dentist, you've got to allow probing to find out what the problem is. And that's why we entrust ourselves to the dentist and even pay them, because we know there's an end product."
The Christian message is similar, he said.
"It's painful, it probes, but it drills and fills, and the end product is everlasting life."
Media interested in booking Ray Comfort to discuss his new release can email [email protected].