Historians, political scientists and philosophers have studied Nazism with a specific focus on its religious and pseudo-religious aspects. It has been debated whether Nazism would constitute a political religion, and there has also been research on the millenarian, messianic, and occult or esoteric aspects of Nazism.

Before 1980, the writers who alluded to the religious aspects of Nazism included Aurel Kolnai, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Romano Guardini, Denis de Rougemont, Eric Voegelin, George Mosse, Klaus Vondung and Friedrich Heer. Voegelin's work on political religion was first published in German in 1938. Emilio Gentile and Roger Griffin, among others, have drawn on his concept.

The Nazi Party program of 1920 included a statement on religion which was numbered point 24. In this statement, the Nazi party demands freedom of religion (for all religious denominations that are not opposed to the customs and moral sentiments of the Germanic race); the paragraph proclaims the party's endorsement of Positive Christianity. Historians have described this statement as "a tactical measure, 'cleverly' left undefined in order to accommodate a broad range of meanings," and an "ambiguous phraseology." However, Richard Steigmann-Gall in The Holy Reich holds that, on closer examination, "Point 24 readily provides us with three key ideas in which the Nazis claimed that their movement was Christian": the movement's antisemitism, its social ethic under the phrase Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz (literally, "public benefit before private benefit") and its attempt to bridge the confessional divide between Catholicism and Protestantism in Germany.

This is a topic of some controversy. Conway holds that The Holy Reich has broken new ground in the examination of the relation between Nazism and Christianity, despite his view that "Nazism and Christianity were incompatible." Conway claims that Steigmann-Gall "is undeniably right to point out how much Nazism owed to German Christian" concepts and only considers his conclusion as "overdrawn".

Hitler admired Martin Luther, the leading figure of the Protestant Reformation. While Luther's antisemitism has been identified as an inspiration for Nazism, surfacing in 1930s works of propaganda, including an antisemitic children's book, others suggest that its role is less significant. For example, Hans J. Hillerbrand asserts that the focus on Luther's influence on Nazism's antisemitism ignores other factors in German history.

The Nazis were aided by theologians, such as Dr. Ernst Bergmann. Bergmann, in his work, Die 25 Thesen der Deutschreligion (Twenty-five Points of the German Religion), expounded the theory that the Old Testament and portions of the New Testament of the Bible were inaccurate. He proposed that Jesus was of Aryan origin, and believed that Hitler was the new messiah.

After Nazi Germany surrendered at the end of World War II in Europe, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services published a report which was titled "The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches". Historians and theologians generally agree that the objective of the Nazi policy towards religion was to remove explicitly Jewish content from the Bible (i.e., the Old Testament, the Gospel of Matthew, and the Pauline Epistles), transforming the Christian faith into a new religion, completely cleansed from any Jewish element and conciliate it with Nazism, Völkisch ideology and Führerprinzip.

Alfred Rosenberg was influential in the development of Positive Christianity. In The Myth of the Twentieth Century, he wrote that: