Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 31, Number 3 (Fall 2025)
Theology, martyrdom and religious resistance – then and now
Mark Edward Ruff, Saint Louis University
Why haven’t Christian churches done more to thwart the rise of authoritarian right-wing movements and regimes around the world? When pondering this loaded question, I remain haunted by an exchange that punctuated a conference on the Holocaust in the early 2000s shortly after the publication of the English-language translation of Wolfgang Gerlach’s book, And The Witnesses were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews.
This exchange was sparked by a paper on the Confessing Church by a meek, elderly confessional Lutheran theologian. In his paper of twenty minutes, the author, argued though this movement of Protestant churchmen had flaws, it was one of the few that offered any sort of resistance to National Socialism. A fellow panelist, roughly twenty-five years younger, more forceful in temperament, and not Lutheran, took umbrage. Too many Confessing Church members had sympathized with National Socialism, many were antisemitic, and others sought merely to defend their institutional churches from the theological heresy of the rabidly nationalistic German Christians. The second panelist’s conclusion was unambiguous: the Confessing Church had “failed” in its moral duty to resist. Somewhat sheepishly, the first author conceded these points. He nonetheless pointed out that one still needed to take into account the nature of life under National Socialism. “We have no idea of what it is like to live under a dictatorship,” he stammered. To this point, the second panelist demonstratively stood up and with raised voice contradicted him by bellowing: “No!”
It is remarkable how the simplistic moral clarity easily won at the academic or theological conference dissolves when we are the ones suddenly and unexpectedly forced into the role of confronting autocracy. From the comfort of their scholarly safe spaces, armchair moralists could for decades easily assail churchmen of yesteryear for their lack of courage and inability to sound clarion calls that proceeded from the reasons deemed morally right with the benefit of hindsight. Their criticism of conservative churchmen was frequently informed by their theologies and politics, both of which tended to steer left.
But what if we are now the ones being asked to show true courage? Our risks come nowhere close to those facing Confessing Church leaders in the 1930s and 1940s. The most outspoken experienced visits by the Gestapo, fines, arrest, incarceration in brutal concentration camps like Dachau, and in the case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, execution under Hitler’s direct orders. But we face risks nonetheless. It is impossible to ignore being doxed and threats of violence to us and our family members. Those of us under a certain age and with families fear losing our jobs, particularly if they should happen to be in government or education. Clergy who use the pulpit to fulminate against the sins of the current regime risk being removed from their parishes and congregations. These threats will only increase in number and scope, as right-wing regimes with autocratic aspirations flex their muscles and meet only with tepid resistance and feckless leaders at the helm of our institutions.
The dilemma facing us is about more than deciding whether we should raise our voices when the crimes of autocratic regimes become too numerous and injurious to life to be ignored. The challenge bedeviling us lies in discerning how to act effectively. How do we bring about real change? If we are to protest, do we protest as individuals or as institutions? On what issues do we protest and why? Do we seek to dissuade a regime from a criminal course of action primarily on one set of crimes, as Cardinal Clemens Graf August von Galen famously did on the issue of euthanasia in the summer of 1941? Or are we seeking something more fundamental like regime change? Or are we simply seeking to expunge our sin, guilt, and shame for not having acted?
Our soul-searching becomes agonizing when our calls and protests go unheeded by those in power or those around us. But how have the calls for mercy for the most vulnerable by Christian leaders like the Episcopalian bishop, Mariann Budde, altered the trajectory of events? Few even remember her sermon from Inauguration Day, 2025. We can thus better understand the sense of helplessness, futility, and paralysis confronting even those churchmen of the 1930s and 1940s inclined towards resistance. I have heard colleagues, friends, and neighbors tell me countless times that they no longer follow the news because they cannot bear to hear the latest installment of the unraveling of democracy. A retreat into what the Germans call “inner emigration” tends to preclude action. Resignation, whether born out of fear or despair, invariably serves the interest of authoritarian states.
This observation of course does not fully account for why so few Christians offered resistance in the 1930s. Too many churchmen sympathized with many of the larger aims of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s regimes for reasons that may or may not generate sympathy today. They were patriots and nationalists who sought to renew the fatherland. Many shared Nazi racial doctrines. They also feared the radical left, knowing how Bolshevik rule had eviscerated Russian churches. Others joined the Nazi bandwagon to – in their ill-fated choice of words – “influence” it. Smelling power, still others sought to grasp and wield it. They sought to rebuild a Christian nation. Their enthusiasm for illiberal regimes and hostility to the left inevitably evokes parallels with the zeal for Trump found in conservative religious circles, where 82 percent of self-identifying evangelicals voted for him in the 2020 and 2024 elections.
This fact alone also helps explain why critiques of the churches’ conduct then and today overlook a crucial piece of the puzzle. Resisting radical regimes requires challenging the power not just of the state but of one’s own co-religionists. It means taking on the herculean task of trying to reclaim the mantle of Christianity from the Christian right that seized it decades ago and now increasingly from Christian nationalists. The Protestants in the Confessing Church of the 1930s and 1940s likewise found themselves locked in theological struggle with the German Christians, who ironically often cast themselves as defenders of modern science and champions of beleaguered masculinity.
For liberal Christians today, reclaiming the faith from the religious right is exceptionally difficult, if not impossible. Confronting both co-religionists and the regime requires theological conviction and certainty, a task for which liberal Christianity today is notoriously ill-equipped. In questioning longstanding theological truths, liberal Christians over centuries engaged in unilateral disarmament. Why would you fight for a faith whose basic doctrines and dogmas like original sin and redemption through Christ’s sacrificial death you greet with doubt? If Christianity is little more than a religion of love and God is primarily a God of love, how does one fight back? In the second half of the 20th century, Christian doctrines of non-violence carried tremendous weight. While these still have currency within the religious left, the Christian left is a shell of what it had been during its heyday during the mid-20th century and the Civil Rights era. With little exaggeration, it is a hollowed-out edifice of emptying pews and grey-haired parishioners.
Such liberal doubt was often exacerbated by the exposure of the churches’ shortcomings in the first half of the 20th century, the Nazi years in particular. How can one embrace the faith when religious institutions came up so short during the time of trial? It is the cruelest of ironies that the departure of the disillusioned diminished the capabilities of churches worldwide to mobilize against injustice.
Perhaps because of these weaknesses, religious leaders on the left have often been content to position themselves as “allies” to secular activists whose visions of social justice no longer require theological orthodoxy, a belief in doctrines of original sin and repentance – or religious commitment of any sort for that matter.
Outsourcing resistance to secular movements of progressive activists is not only an admission of impotence. It reminds us of that passage from John 6:66 which observes that followers of Jesus left him after realizing how difficult his teachings were. The Christian martyrs of the past were the ones who most fully understood that religious faith comes with a price. Because of their conviction, they were prepared to die for them. Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer tells us, means allegiance to the suffering Christ. Christians may be called to suffer. Discipleship means seeking what he called “costly grace,” and not the “cheap grace” which offers reassurance with no real commitment required. As Mark 8: 34-35 tells us: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.”
It is no coincidence that bitter controversies about the churches’ response to National Socialism invariably evoked the prospect of martyrdom. In his books and newspaper articles from the 1940s through the 1970s, the pugilistic Catholic journalist and apologist from Berlin, Walter Adolph (1902-1975), extolled the sacrifices of martyrs like Bernhard Lichtenberg who died en route to Dachau after having prayed publicly for the Jews. In 1959, Adolph clashed with Gordon Zahn, a sociologist and pacifist from Loyola University in Chicago who had spent the years of the Second World War in a camp for conscientious objectors in New Hampshire. Zahn had excoriated the Catholic Church’s for its support of “Hitler’s predatory wars.”
Adolph accused Zahn of naivety. He had cast stones with no understanding of the constraints of life under a dictatorship. But as much as they disagreed about whether the Catholic Church had propped up or undermined the Nazi dictatorship, both Zahn and Adolph agreed on something fundamental: resistance likely meant martyrdom. The more power-hungry and ideologically zealous the dictatorship, the greater the likelihood. For both, martyrdom and resurrection were the core of a faith centered on Jesus’s self-sacrifice. His hanging on a tree inspired the lives of the saints who forfeited their lives on this earth to keep them in the next.
It seems that religious resistance to authoritarianism requires a reference point divided nearly equally between this world and the next. It requires recognizing that on the one hand, calls for repentance and justice in this world are an integral part of the faith in the here and now. Any casual glance at minor prophets like Amos and Micah makes this immediately clear. On the other hand, it means believing that this world is also a prelude to the next. Challenging autocracy thus requires religious formation steeped in the relationship between discipleship, the immanent, and the transcendent.
Are there Christians today prepared to follow the path of Bonhoeffer on his path to the gallows or Lichtenberg on his journey to Dachau? Will there be fewer today in an era where religious fervor is increasingly confined to the right side of the political spectrum? Or will it be Christians on the right who use Bonhoeffer’s example to justify their use of extreme measures against their ideological opponents in their bid to establish autocracy?
