Sermon by Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge. Preached 9/1/2024 at First Congregational Church UCC Rockford, Michigan. (Combined service with North Kent Presbyterian and Bostwick Lake UCC.)
https://www.youtube.com/live/-YW372SeRzU?feature=shared&t=1999
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 with his twin sister Sabine. He and his sister were the sixth and seventh of the eight children of Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer. The aristocratic Bonhoeffers from Breslau were known to be intelligent. His father Karl was a noted psychiatrist, famous for his criticism of Sigmund Freud, and his mother Paula was a teacher. Dietrich himself was a gifted child. He learned how to play the piano at the age of 8 and was composing songs by age 11. –His family fully expected him to become a concert pianist.
But Deitrich was not drawn to the piano. When he was 14, he announced to his family’s dismay that he was going to become a theologian. By the age of 21, in 1927, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had completed his schooling and earned a doctorate in Theology. Broadening his experience, Bonhoeffer came to Union Seminary in New York in 1930. It was at Union that Dietrich met another Sloan scholar named Albert Fisher. Fisher was black and he introduced Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the African American Church and the racial struggles of the Jim Crow era. When Bonhoeffer returned to Germany in 1931, it was with eyes that could clearly see the racism that was enveloping his home country.
The German people, reeling from the repercussions of World War 1, were falling under the influence of Adolf Hitler, who was a powerful orator. Since 1922, the Nazi party, led by Hitler was running on a platform of anti-communism, antisemitism, and ultranationalism. Hitler weaponized natural human tribal instincts into fear of “the other” in order to gain power. He changed Jesus from a suffering servant for everyone into an Antisemitic warrior. Hitler in 1922 said,
My Christian feeling tells me that my lord and savior is a warrior. It calls my attention to the man who, lonely and surrounded by only a few supporters, recognized what they [the Jews] were, and called for a battle against them, and who, by God, was not the greatest sufferer, but the greatest warrior.
As he gained in power and popularity, his speeches ever more boldly equated Nazism with Christianity. In 1928, Hitler said “We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity. Our movement is Christian.”
By 1933, Hitler had politically maneuvered himself to be appointed the chancellor of Germany. It was his next step to remove Jewish people and other “undesirables” out of positions of power. To do this, the Nazi party introduced changes to the rules for civil service positions and they mandated that organizations change their bylaws to specifically exclude Jews from leadership. Many federations, and political parties adopted these “Aryan paragraphs”. By June of 1933, even being married to a non-Aryan person was enough to remove a person from any position of influence and power.
In the church, there was also a huge struggle for power and control. Those clergymen who were sympathizers with Hitler and his Nazi party won control of the German Protestant church in July of 1933, and by September of 1933, the Nationalist church Synod at Wittenberg voluntarily passed a resolution to apply the Aryan paragraph within the church. This meant that any pastors and church officials of Jewish descent were to be removed from their positions, effective immediately.
By August of 1934, Hitler had consolidated his power to successfully become the Fuhrer, the authoritarian dictator of the German nation. Seeking to harness the power and the influence of the church to his Nazi party, in 1934 Hitler said,
The Church’s interests cannot fail to coincide with ours alike in our fight against the symptoms of degeneracy in the world of to-day, in our fight against the Bolshevist culture, against an atheistic movement, against criminality, and in our struggle for the consciousness of a community in our national life, for the conquest of hatred and disunion between the classes, for the conquest of civil war and unrest, of strife and discord. These are not anti-Christian, these are Christian principles.
-Deitrich Bonhoeffer saw clearly what was happening and he spoke in opposition to the systemic racism of the Nazi’s and their successful appropriation of the power and influence of the German Church. To fight against the Nazi party, Bonhoeffer led about 20 percent of German clergymen to dissent and to create the Confessing Church movement.
In support of this group, the theologian Karl Barth wrote the Barmen Declaration, a theological foundation which insisted that Jesus Christ, and not the Fuhrer, was the head of the church. Bonhoeffer established secret underground seminaries to train more Confessing Church pastors and he worked in London to secure more international support for the Confessing Church movement. But the totalitarian situation in Germany kept getting worse. By 1941, the Nazi party had forbidden Bonhoeffer to print or publish anything. Hitler had also built concentration camps to lock away all Jews, undesirables and political dissenters. Then on April 5, 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested. He spent the next two years in prison, with his writings being smuggled out by his fiancé. But at dawn on April 9th, 1945 just as the Allied forces were advancing through Southern Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging at the concentration camp at Flossenbürg Germany.
This WW2 Nazi expression of White Christian Nationalism is not a new thing. Christianity has also worked with the government to create multiple Inquisitions. The most severe Inquisition began in the late 1400’s, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella gave royal decrees giving Jews and Muslims 3 choices: They could either convert to Catholicism, leave Castile, or face death. This Spanish Inquisition resulted in hundreds of thousands of forced conversions to Christianity. –After the forced conversions, the inquisition sought out heretics and they openly persecuted Jews and Muslims with the full support of the government. Over 150,000 people were charged and between 3,000 to 5,000 were executed for their heretical non-Christian beliefs. The Spanish Inquisition lasted over 300 years, util it was finally was disbanded in 1834.
Before the Spanish Inquisition, the original and most significant pairing of Christianity with the Government was when the Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the mighty Roman Empire in 312 AD. As Constantine was struggling to gain the throne of Rome from his brother, he had a vision of a cross of light in the sky with the words, “In this sign conquer.” He converted to Christianity and created a cross emblem for his troops to follow. Constantine won the battle and became the Roman Emperor. –But the fundamentals of Christianity were forever changed. Christians had learned that partnering with the government to create Christian Nationalism was an easy way to give Christian’s power, position, riches and security. Christian Nationalism ensured that both political and church leaders could together shape society to privilege themselves so that could remain in power and keep other people groups with their alternative religions and cultures under control.
But this is NOT the form of Christianity that Christ taught us. In Luke 4, Jesus is tested by Satan in the wilderness. After tempting Jesus with food, Satan offers Jesus all of the authority and splendor of all of the kingdoms of the world. Imagine it: All of the power and control of the Roman Emperor, all of the riches of every King, Queen or President; all of this the fusing of Christianity with Government was offered to Jesus if he would just worship Satan. But Jesus refused to worship anything but God alone. The temptation of being able to wield power over others was NOT the way of Jesus. Instead, Jesus chose to become a suffering servant. To lead and teach with self-sacrificial agape love. To not go to war, to not overthrow the Romans, and not to pick up a sword and fight for justice. Instead Jesus chose to die in order to demonstrate just how much we are to give in our showing of agape love of others.
So what does this all mean for us here today? Is there an American version of Christian Nationalism? Yes, unfortunately there is. With its roots in the theology of “Manifest Destiny”, White American Christian Nationalism has a long history of racism and white power in the United States. We murdered Native Americans, banned their culture and stole their lands. We stole and enslaved black people from another continent and then forced them to work under whips and chains. And even when the Black slaves were freed, we then rigged our American systems so it was difficult for African Americans to gain wealth or to vote.
Andrew Whitehead is a researching sociologist professor at Purdue. He defines our homegrown Christian Nationalism as a “cultural framework that asserts that all civic life in the United States should be organized according to a particular form of conservative Christianity.” In his research, he finds that American Christian nationalism is “wholly obsessed with power,” “intimately intertwined with fear” and “completely comfortable with, and at times demands, the use of violence.” This is the Christian politics that seeks to demonize immigrants and our LGBTQ neighbors, using them as scapegoats for our problems and backing up their hate filled politics with Biblical arguments. White Christian Nationalism is not a fringe group. Whitehead notes that “close to two-thirds of white American Christians are at least favorable toward Christian nationalism, and that number increases to over 75% if we look solely at white evangelicals.” Today, the acceptance of Christian Nationalist ideology has completely gone mainstream. The wedding of Christianity to one of our political parties is now complete.
On January 6th, 2021; the insurrectionists who stormed the United States Capitol building were following the example of Constantine as Christian Nationalists. They were carrying crosses, Bibles, ‘Jesus is my savior, Trump is my President’ signs and Christian flags with which they beat back the police officers. Once the mob had breached the capitol and broke into the Senate Chamber, Chansley, the Q Anon Shamen, in his horned fur cap suggested that they gather to pray. With bowed heads, they thanked Our Christian Heavenly Father for the opportunity to stand up for God-given unalienable rights, and they thanked God that they “were allowed to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists that this is our nation, not theirs.” This movement to seek power and control and to force others to live and conform to a certain brand of Christian culture is our vivid warning that White American Christian Nationalism is tearing up the democratic foundations of our Country like a Category 5 hurricane. It is happening as we gather here today. But there is a better way to live as a nation and a country, if we choose it.
Galatians 5 says is succinctly. While as Christians we have the complete freedom to indulge ourselves with positions of power, wealth and influence; we are warned against it. Instead, we are called to serve one another in love. We are called to love God and to love our neighbor while loving ourselves. Christianity is NOT intended for “us” to rule over “them.” We are not to set our society up in order to keep White Christians in political positions of power and control. We are not to use Christianity and our government to advance “our white tribe”, and the tenants of our Christian culture over others. My friends, as it says in Mark 12, we are to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind and with all of our strength. As Christians we are called to love each other self sacrificially and to SERVE the world, not to RULE it.
Today, my friends, I am asking each and every one of you this: What will YOU DO about Christian Nationalism in our own community?
Will we stand up and speak out against this dangerous ideology that has crept up through our churches and become drunk with the political power it has gained in the world? Or will we shrug our shoulders in denial and ignore this problem and hope that this disease will simply go away all on its own? Will we be brave enough to cut out this cancer that is killing the church and it’s the witness of love of the Church of Jesus Christ?
Will you join me in doing so? —-I pray it will be so. Amen.
Thank you for this lesson. I am sorry to have missed it at our church on 9/1. I have always enjoyed your messages. I became aware of the issues of Christian Nationalism after reading Jesus and John Wayne. That book, for me, was a real eye opener.