Lessons from Germany Part 2

On the relationship of faith and politics

Saturday March 22nd. 7AM. On my flight from Frankfurt to Paris I don’t speak a word to my seat mate because I’m exhausted and anticipating a 30 hour day ahead before being able to sleep in my own bed. Still, I read some of Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer while awaiting take off, followed by the complementary coffee and delicious French cookie (which I’m certain was at least 50% butter). After coffee I sleep until landing and while waiting to exit the plane, my seat mate with a French accent, says, ‘Excuse me sir. I confess to reading the things you were highlighting in the book you were reading. Would you be so kind as tell me the title?’ which leads to a lengthy conversation about Bonhoeffer, and Germany, and the Reich, and the current state of things in the world, and in particular the state of things between America and Europe. ‘I’m very concerned that wrong is now being whitewashed and called right. Lies are being called truth. It feels like 1930’s in Germany all over again. Things are unraveling and I need to know what to do about it.’ As we’re about to move, I quickly get his number and call him. He’s French, living in Germany. ‘Now you have my number’ I said. ‘Text me and I will get you the name of the book’ (I didn’t remember the name off the top of my head). By the time I landed, he’d already ordered it.

While in Europe, I had several conversations about the state of the world, and the perception (rightly or wrongly) that the foundations of alliances and democratic values which have informed Europe and America for eighty years are teetering, perhaps already falling apart. People are concerned that the American church seems happy that these old alliances and values are crumbling. ‘The church cheered Hitler too’ someone said to me, ‘only to regret it later.’ I don’t like alarmist comparisons, but its important to look for principles that we can learn from in history so as to avoid repeating the disasters that have befallen other nations and cultures due to blind spots and collective sins.

Conversations with dear German friends have helped me understand a few things about this beautiful country’s past. It’s important to note that I’m not prophesying a descent into the same fates of Germany in the 30’s and 40’s, though its possible. Rather, I offer these observations as more universal truths in hope that they will help you interpret the days in which we’re now living with more wisdom and accuracy.

Lesson 1: Leaders with evil intent exploit people’s feelings of anxiety and powerlessness.

Those who know history won’t be surprised by a the news that Hitler rose to power because of his uncanny ability to tap into the sense of anger, neglect, and malaise which had infected Germany in the wake of her devastating losses after WWI. He made it clear that the Volk were the victims of a bloated and dysfunctional democracy, the encroachments of communists, the rise of unions, and most of all, the perception that Jewish people were power-hungry. In summary, he united people by awakening a common hatred for certain ‘others’, building the case that they were the perpetrators of vast injustices on the German people and that ‘he alone would make it right.’

In America, there’s also a coalition of people feeling marginalized and neglected, as if something had been taken from them. Christians are told, and feel, they’re losing religious freedom. The working class have, at the least, felt mocked (remember the left calling some kinds of people a ‘basket of deplorables’?) neglected (as global trade outsourced manufacturing), threatened (as replacement theory falsely pins the lack of high paying jobs on immigrants who’ve ostensibly taken them), and many have felt that the moral foundation of the culture has been destroyed through changing attitudes toward sexuality and abortion.

All this has created a longing for yesterday’s ’better days’, though in fairness it must be said that the days were never golden in the past if you were black, gay, a woman, or a minority immigrant in a white populace. In fact, some cherish the past precisely because of the privileged position white males had, and that reveals another demographic with grievances: the white supremist movement, which is still alive and well in America.

The current president has done a masterful job building a coalition of angry and frustrated voters by tapping into all these grievances and in essence saying, ‘I see you. I hear you. I feel your pain. I will fix things’. Whether he actually will or not remains to be seen and no answer to that question will be universal or final. Some things will get fixed, for some people, for some period of time. The deeper question is: When leadership is gained by grievance and promises of retribution, eventually finds its fullest expression and runs its course, will the fundamental aspirational values (which stem of Christ values) that framed democracy still be standing?

Lesson 2: We must, and will, respond to the moment, either by challenge, silence, or affirmation.

We know the answer in 1940 Germany (though 20% of American youth are holocaust deniers, which tells us how vital it is to keep teaching real history). We don’t yet know the answer today, and until we do, all of us will be swimming in an ocean of propaganda, accusations, polarizing dialogues, and alarmist predictions. Endless swimming is both exhausting and unhealthy, so lots of people are leaning in to withdrawal: ‘Its baseball season!’ or ‘I can’t watch the news anymore’ or ‘Christians shouldn’t talk about politics’ all of which are forms of escapism and ultimately not helpful for us, individually or collectively. Silence may keep a superficial peace, but it would be far, far better to have healthy dialogue, disagreement, and seek to understand the other, than withdraw. All that’s needed for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

We’ve been granted the rare privilege of living in a democracy, where each of us have an important voice contributing to our collective determination regarding our future as a nation.

Because of this, it falls to all of us to hold both the policies and behaviors of our leaders to account. For Christ-followers, this requires engagement, prayer, and a solid understanding of Christ’s kingdom values, because its those values that we’re called to embody and affirm since they offer the best capacity to bless all people. After all, the prayer Jesus taught us to pray includes, ‘may your will be done on earth as it in heaven’.

Those kingdom values that are God’s, will include (among many others):

The belief that all humans are worthy of justice, care, and protection

Care for the poor, sick, and marginalized

Humility and honesty

Protection against violence

Care for the earth

Whether it was economics, national pride, a return to simpler times, recovery of a place of masculine strength, or a delight in Arryn supremacy, new priorities were so highly valued that a nation turned a collective blind eye to the arrogance, lies, fear-mongering regarding foreigners, and trouncing of the rule of law, all so that they could recover what they felt they’d lost. That was their collective (though not universal) response. The perspective of kingdom values (in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free) was swept away in an avalanche of new priorities, all baptized in Bible and Christian language. That’s why Hitler rose to power with the blessing and affirmation of the church.

Lesson 3: The church has been a determinant force for cultural good and evil, depending on where she chooses to place her loyalty.

Whatever its failings (which I will address next), its vital to note that Christ-based faith has shaped much of what is best about the West. It gave us schools, academies, universities, hospitals, the Enlightenment, the rise of science, and notions of universal human rights, things that are impossible without Christianity being hardwired into the moral and intellectual DNA of the West. The Magna Carta, meaning’ Great Charter’ is a landmark document signed by King John of England in 1215 establishing the principle that the monarch's power was not absolute and that everyone, including the king, was subject to the laws. This great work was born out of the profound belief, contrarian to all forms of feudalism and the worst of monarchy rule, that all beings are created in God’s image. It’s related to our own faith-based axiom in our Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain rights.’ It’s also true that our constitutional framers, being people faith, believed in the fallen nature of humans and so built three separate and co-equal branches of government so that nobody would ever become a king above the law. These ideas weren’t pulled out of thin air. They were born of a theistic worldview and declared as ideals worth fighting for.

It’s also true that the history of the church is stained with enough blood, corruption, and abuse to make the beauty of Christ nearly impossible to see. 20th century Germany is just one of the more recent examples of institutional Christianity being, not just passively complicit, but active participants in regimes and policies that are rooted in lust for power, xenophobia, and the idols of nationalism (or before the nation state existed, tribalism). These injustices have been around for 1500 years, ever since Christianity was elevated to the state religion in Rome. The worst thing is that the demonizing, silencing, arrest, torture, and execution of people who oppose ‘God’s people’ (read, ‘the church’ or ‘this Christian nation’) is often done in God’s name and sanctioned with Bible verses, grossly misinterpreted. It’s as if church leaders felt God was cheering them on for condemning Galileo as a heretic, murdering female Christ-followers called Beguines, doing witch hunts and inquisitions which led to the murder of tens of thousands, justifying and developing the slave trade based on a faulty reading of Genesis 9, and killing/imprisoning Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, and political opponents in 1930’s Germany.

So please: Don’t affirm a policy or action just because someone baptizes it in Bible verses and prayers. That old trick literally justified the holocaust and slavery. What’s needed is a thorough acquaintance of, and commitment to, the values of God’s good reign.

Lesson 4: Choose Wisely!

The lessons from Germany are simple. Fail to cling to the kingdom of God values given us by our Creator and you will get drawn into a vortex of lies, destruction, and authoritarianism. Everything that is antithetical to freedom, a care for all people based on our common identity as those made in God’s image, peace, mutuality, beauty, and justice will be trampled. They rebuilt on a foundation of caring for all people, and twenty years ago I toasted with a German friend in a Christmas market as we named that our recent ancestors had been enemies, but our nations our now reconciled. ‘Look what God has done!’ we said to each other.

In the 30’s Germany’s nationalistic fervor, her longing to rise up in power and return to the values of an earlier, so-called ‘purer’ time, was so intense that she turned a blind eye when the constitution was suspended, when parliament became functionally emasculated, when the judicial system was vilified and disempowered. This led to unchallenged power concentrated in a single individual, and his rise to a place of unparalleled capacity and strength. The end result was millions dead and Europe an ash heap and pile of rubble.

Where was the church during all this? Mostly, they were saluting Hitler, installing loyalists as Bishops, and cheering, while the value of seeing each person, Jew and Gentile, Aryan and Arab, as made in the image of God and worthy recipients of human rights, went up in flames along with all the books exalting such rights. And all the while the masses were still attending church, but it was the church leaders who must bear the most blame, even as Jesus blamed the religious leaders for his own death much more than he blamed either Pilate or the crowds. The vast majority of the church leaders ranged from silent complicity to outright celebration as the values of Christ’s kingdom were actively destroyed in the culture.

It must be noted that there were dissenters. Sophie Scholl and the White Rose advocated against the Reich through the distribution of literature. Dietrich Bonhoeffer led an underground seminary in hopes of raising up a generation of leaders who would take kingdom ethics seriously. Karl Muth mentored the White Rose leaders from his home in the forest after his magazine was shut down. There were others too, such as the farmer near where I teach in Austria who refused to fly the Nazi flag. But theirs was a narrow road, swimming upstream against culture.

In summary, there was a loud crowd of church goers cheering on the rise of authoritarianism and a small minority of dissenters whose commitment to kingdom values and speaking truth to power was, in many cases, costly. This was the crossroads for Christians in Germany then.

Every person reading this may well face this crossroads, if they’re not already. May you find divine wisdom and courage to choose wisely, for the kingdom values of our Creator will stand forever, and so should we stand with the Creator and his values.

For those interested in learning more about the relationship of faith and politics, I encourage you to read Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies by NT Wright. I am considering hosting a live event at Snoqualmie Pass to discuss the book. Let me know if you’d be interested in that by posting a comment. Thanks!