Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 31, Number 3 (Fall 2025)
Letter from the Editors (Fall 2025)
By Mark Ruff, Saint Louis University
Dear Friends,
This issue represents a departure from Contemporary Church History Quarterly’s norm. Instead of providing our usual smorgasbord of scholarly reviews and conference reports, we are providing six reflections on a single theme.
This issue is inspired by the relevance of our journal’s staple to contemporary politics. It offers trenchant commentaries on how the histories of German and European religious institutions in the 1930s and 1940s – what for decades were somewhat misleadingly called the “church struggles” – are being appropriated, used, and abused in ongoing political strife and culture wars around the world, not least in the United States.
In this vein, Victoria Barnett offers insights into how and why Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been transformed into a hero of the Christian nationalist right, while Matthew Hockenos discusses how Martin Niemöller’s famous quotation, “First they came for …” has been weaponized by all sides in ongoing political and cultural struggle. Martina Cucchiara provides a commentary that compares and contrasts the response of the German churches to the persecution and murder of Jews during the Third Reich and to the recent terror attacks by Hamas. Antonius Liedhegener draws comparisons between the Catholic vote in early 1930s Germany and the Catholic votes in recent American elections.
Our last two commentaries reflect on how comparisons are made. In discussing the nature of right-wing populism, Andreas Wirsching probes the challenges of drawing parallels between right-wing movements of different historical eras, even when on the surface similarities jump off the page. Mark Ruff argues that our use of moral categories changes considerably when we suddenly and unexpectedly shift from being judges of the responses by churchmen of the past to participants or bystanders in the struggle against authoritarianism around the world today.
It is noteworthy how many appropriations today of leading figures and lessons from the Nazi past have come from journalists, politicians, activists, and public intellectuals outside the scholarly world. This may be a sign that the scholarly world of German church historians and the liberal Christians who frequently read their works has itself become a bubble.
This issue will accordingly raise questions that will be uncomfortable for many, including for some in our community of readers and scholars. Where does the line fall between scholarship and activism? This question becomes all the more important since activists drawing on German church history can be found on all sides of the political spectrum.
We welcome your feedback on this issue.
On behalf of the editorial team,
Mark Ruff,
St. Louis University
