Eighty years ago Wednesday, Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazis for his dissident activities, which included helping Jews escape Germany and joining an attempt to assassinate Hitler. In a country whose church and people largely stood complicit in the actions of Hitler’s regime, Bonhoeffer was a Christian whose principles led him to oppose Nazism and antisemitism. He was also a brilliant theologian whose writings remain among the most influential texts of modern Christian thought.
As I write this, our universities face funding cuts and threats to academic freedom at the hands of a censorial fascist regime whose numerous evils exceed my understanding. Sometimes, I question how a just and loving God can allow such cruelty to go unpunished. Bonhoeffer inspires me because encountering the depths of human deviancy pushed him closer to God, not further. His faith inspired him towards resistance, not appeasement. In the United States, which grows darker every day with the stains of fascism, today’s Christians must follow in Bonhoeffer’s legacy by defending free thought and human dignity from the U.S. government.
As with the Trump administration’s attack on U.S. universities, Hitler’s regime sought to control German churches for its own purposes and eventually dismantle them. Nazis arrested dissident figures and made disingenuous deals with the church as they planned its elimination. Many Christian leaders submitted to the Nazi regime, with some even sympathizing with its antisemitism. Bonhoeffer was a leading member of a coalition of anti-Nazi churches and ministers known as the Confessing Church, but even among them he was a radical. Unlike others, he stood up for the rights of Jews and used his church contacts to help them escape the country when the Holocaust began.
Bonhoeffer’s courageous activism was underpinned by his theology. In his most influential work, “The Cost of Discipleship,” he teaches that the Christian life entails risk and sacrifice: “Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again… Such grace… is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.”
Bonhoeffer’s resistance culminated in his involvement in the July 1944 plan to assassinate Hitler. Historians have long debated how a Christian pacifist arrived at political violence, but it seems he thought of it as a necessary evil, not an act of righteousness. For this, the Nazis hung him.
Bonhoeffer is venerated by many Christians today as a martyr for justice. But his greatest mistake was that he was too late. He spent most of the interwar period, when the seeds of European fascism were sprouting, traveling instead of organizing. By the time he formed the Confessing Church in 1934, the Nazis were too powerful and too entrenched to be stopped. Let’s not make the same mistake. We need a Confessing Church for 2025.
In today’s America, Trump is following the fascist playbook: Secret police in unmarked vans disappear people off the street for writing op-eds, education and the pursuit of truth are under attack and judges are intimidated and their rulings openly defied. And we’re only 12 weeks in.
Bonhoeffer had a 3-point plan for the antifascist church that today’s Christians can draw from: First, serve as the conscience of the state. Second, aid the victims of state action, Christian or otherwise. Third, “jam the spokes of the wheel” — meaning proactively stop the machinery of oppression.
The American church can also draw on its own history of civil disobedience. We must organize nonviolent resistance campaigns, as the Christians of the Civil Rights Movement did. We must shield people in danger of deportation, as the churches of the Sanctuary Movement did. We must form coalitions with labor unions against corporations, as the Social Gospel movement of the late 1800s did.
Finally, Christians have the most valuable gift of all for social justice: hope. To believe in the resurrection of Christ is to believe that love is the most powerful force in the universe and shall always triumph over evil. Above all, let us remember this as we follow in Bonhoeffer’s footsteps.
