In recent years, political religion theory has experienced something of a revival, due in part to the end of the Cold War, but also due to the culturalist turn in the human sciences, which has made possible a re-examination of the aesthetics and public ritual of totalitarian regimes that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. However, going against the grain of this trend, this study contends that the cogency of political religion theory today is compromised by the lack of attention to social history as well as an insufficient rooting in empiricism. As a result, particularly in the case of Nazi Germany, political religion theory has done little more than mark a return to the arguments of a prior generation of scholars who maintained that Nazism was literally a 'replacement faith' for a de-Christianised nation. This article argues instead that, far from being a secularist movement replacing Christianity with a new object of worship, Nazism sought to defend German society against secularisation. An examination of the religious views of some of its leaders indicates that the Nazis did not consider themselves to be a political religion and that Nazism is thus to be seen more as a form of 'religious politics'.