Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 31, Number 3 (Fall 2025)
The Weaponization of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in American Christian Culture
By Victoria J. Barnett, General Editor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works English Edition*
Readers of this journal may be familiar with “Godwin’s Law,” the theory coined by U.S. attorney and author Mike Godwin that the longer any online discussion proceeds, the higher the probability of comparisons to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis. There could be a similar corollary when it comes to American Christian conversations about political and cultural issues: sooner or later, someone will quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As Stephen R. Haynes (an astute observer of Bonhoeffer reception history) notes: “Bonhoeffer’s legacy has suffused American culture to the point that today cataloging it would be a full-time job.” (The Battle for Bonhoeffer (2018), p. 2)
Both insights are instructive for our present moment in the United States, especially the issue of Christian Nationalism. Matthew Taylor, author of The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening our Democracy, defines Christian Nationalism as “the tendency to conflate one’s Christian identity with one’s national identity in an effort to make those cohere.” Christian Nationalism is grounded in redemptive narratives about the unity of God and Nation. Redemptive narratives need enemies and heroes, and the Bonhoeffer story provides both: Christians fighting Nazis. A central component in the “Bonhoeffer as Christian hero” narrative is the identification of his foe: the “symbolic Nazi,” if you will. For American Christian Nationalists, that may include liberal Christians, abortion providers, vaccine advocates, “feminazis” (the late Rush Limbaugh’s epithet against feminism), and defenders of DEI (“Diversity-Equity-Inclusion” programs in education and business contexts).
Bonhoeffer’s prominence as a “Christian hero” was already cemented in the early postwar period, as Germans and Americans alike sought to define the political lessons of his life and theology. For several decades, there was a broad consensus that his legacy consisted of its larger lessons about courage and conscience: his opposition to Nazism, his witness for the Confessing Church, and the ties to the German resistance to Hitler that cost him his life. At the same time, there were already differences in how evangelicals and mainline Protestants understood him. U.S. evangelicals resonated especially with the more conservative theology in his book on Discipleship (originally published as The Cost of Discipleship); more liberal Protestants gravitated toward his late reflections about the failures of Christianity in Letters and Papers from Prison. The same man wrote both books, however. One of the fascinating things about Bonhoeffer is that he did find a language that continues to resonate with Christians around the world.
Nonetheless, as the intersections of religion and politics in the political discourse have become more contentious, these divides have widened. In the 1990s American evangelical leader Chuck Colson compared the pro-life movement to the Confessing Church, and Christian Reconstructionist Paul Hill invoked Bonhoeffer’s example after he murdered a Florida doctor who volunteered at an abortion clinic. While such claims predated the 2010 Bonhoeffer biography by Eric Metaxas (for an overview of the book, see my review), that bestselling biography was a turning point because it coincided with (and perhaps helped spur) the growing radicalization of the religious right and its embrace by a major political party. The Metaxas biography, for example, drew direct parallels between Bonhoeffer’s battle against National Socialism and the evangelical battles of the 1930s against liberal Protestants in the United States. (Metaxas, p. 334) An evangelical Christian, widely published author, and conservative radio host, Metaxas was known several decades ago for engaging a wide range of American Christian voices for his forum, Socrates in the City; he is now a prominent supporter of President Trump.
There is a third alarming component of today’s Christian Nationalism: its defense of violence in its quest for Christian theocracy. At its core, Christian Nationalism is an anti-democratic movement in which “religion” is invoked to justify violence on behalf of the ongoing war against “secularism.” In the theocratic mind, that justifies any number of evils, including the eradication of civil liberties. Despite the limits on state religion in the First Amendment (inspired because so many early Americans arrived fleeing religious oppression elsewhere), Christian Nationalism has a long bloody history in the United States. This role was played by some American churches in the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the late nineteenth century, the fundamentalism wars of the 1920s, and the founding of the Christian Nationalist Party in 1947 by America First advocate, racist, and antisemite Gerald K. Smith. In Christian Nationalist circles, Bonhoeffer’s ties to the German resistance have been used to justify political violence (this was one of the criticisms of the marketing of the recent 2024 Bonhoeffer film, reviewed here).
In other words, Christian Nationalism is nothing new in American political culture. So are its opponents, often overlooked in these discussions: Frederick Douglas, Harriett Tubman, Howard Thurman, and the many other eloquent Black Church voices of the 19th and 20th century who fought against racism; Quaker opponents of slavery; Harry Emerson Fosdick in his battles against fundamentalism (Fosdick, by the way, was also an early critic of the Nazi regime); the American Jewish leaders who combatted twentieth century antisemitism and racism. In comparing present-day Christian Nationalism in this country and the pro-Nazi German Christian Faith Movement in the 1930s, we tend to forget our own history, including the American voices of conscience.
In many respects, American Christian Nationalism in the age of Trump is indeed similar to the German Christian Faith Movement. As editor of the Bonhoeffer Works and a longtime scholar of the German churches, however, I believe that there is a danger in embracing the “Bonhoeffer as Christian hero” narrative, for it is the quintessential redemptive narrative, embraced by Christians across the spectrum that emerged in the early post-Holocaust period. The historical Bonhoeffer was far more complex than most popular works portray him. Just as importantly, his story has obscured equally significant figures in the German Church Struggle. There is a difference between the historical Bonhoeffer and the imaginary “Christian Action Hero” that many people seek.
His theology provides the necessary corrective for such political flights of fancy. The Bonhoeffer we encounter in his theological writings was both devout Christian and humanist. He was trying to discern the relevance of the Bible for a world that had been upended, for citizens of a nation that had lost its way, and for people despairing of the growing instability and violence surrounding them. That began in the 1920s. We often forget that Bonhoeffer spent his entire life—not just the final twelve years—in an era marked by great political and cultural instability. Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 and was executed in 1945. His childhood was shaped by the First World War and the death of his eldest brother in France. Even as he experienced Weimar democracy and studied under some of the great Christian theologians of the early twentieth century, he understood that this world was disintegrating. He flirted in the late 1920s with one of the many nationalist versions of Christianity that sought a return to “traditional Christian values” (although he was never drawn to the German Christians). For that reason, his writings in early 1933 are striking precisely because he recognized the temptations of National Socialism for his generation. Only a week after Hitler’s rise to power, for example, in an essay exploring Hitler’s attraction for younger Germans, he warned them of “leaders” who in their quest for absolute power become “misleaders.”
In his sober recognition of the failures of Christianity and its church to stand up to Nazism, and the equally sober conclusion that any future Christianity had to understand itself differently, Bonhoeffer explicitly rejected redemptive narratives. By the time he was imprisoned, he had recognized that the only way to subvert redemptive history is by listening to the voices of the victims. As Bonhoeffer wrote in 1942, “we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering.”
That shift in emphasis—from hagiography to the recognition of the truths heard only from the victims’ voices —is what gradually changed the narratives of German historiography in the decades after 1945. It is our only hope today for changing what’s happening around us. For that reason, my real fear is that focusing too much on the Bonhoeffer story (and the related redemptive histories about Christianity during the Holocaust) deflects from the gravity of the issues we face. As the examples I gave above illustrate, the brand of Christian Nationalism we are seeing now has emerged out of American history, not German history. The way to confront our own problems today is not through analogy, but through an honest confrontation with our own history. That, in fact, is the underlying point of Godwin’s law.
*The views expressed in this essay are the author’s own.
