Dispatch Faith: A Confessing Church for America’s Weimar Moment, by Paul D. Miller (Georgetown; Google Scholar):
Most American Christians know the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor who heroically defied the Nazis.
He and a small number of other German Protestant leaders gathered, calling themselves the Confessing Church. They issued the Barmen Declaration in 1934, affirming the church’s independence from the Nazi government, which tried to force them to join an official “Reich Church.” They were right to do so, but by then the Nazis were too entrenched, too powerful, and too popular. Most of the Barmen leaders lost jobs, several spent time in the concentration camps, and many were executed for the principled stand against Nazi tyranny. Bonhoeffer himself took part in a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Tragically he was caught, imprisoned, and ultimately martyred in the waning days of World War II.
May we all be as courageous when the Whore of Babylon comes for us.
We rightly applaud Bonhoeffer today. But, if we are allowed to critique our martyrs, can’t we say that heroic as they were, Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church were ultimately too late? Where were Bonhoeffer and the other leaders of the Confessing Church before the Nazis came to power in 1933? Where were they during the days of the Weimar Republic, when they might have made a difference? The answer is that most were members of various centrist political parties, completing their studies and establishing their careers. For all their later heroism, they failed to see the growing threat to the republic when it might still have been saved. By the time they took their principled stand, the die had been cast.
If the Confessing Church was right to assert its independence and public witness against the Nazis in the 1930s, it would have been even better to do so earlier, in the 1920s, before the Nazis came to power but while the republic was tottering under the onslaught of extremists from all sides. The principles of the Confessing Church were not valid only for their moment; they were timeless principles of political theology that should bind the universal church in all times and places.
It’s a relevant question for the American church in 2025. Whether you are on the left or the right, it is tempting to see ourselves as living through Germany in 1933, confronting the moral equivalent of the Nazis on the other side. There is a moral clarity to it, stark lines dividing the good guys from the bad. Our duty is obvious; the only question is whether we can muster the courage.
But the analogy can be misleading, and it excuses us from examining our own side. We should be able to spot injustices from both sides of the political aisle. It is harder, intellectually and spiritually, to confront a different historical analogy. Maybe we’re not living through the Nazi regime in 1933, but through the Weimar Republic of 1923. …
American Christians seem divided over who the good guys and bad guys really are and what the historical analogy should teach us. To some, the secular progressive left is the obvious modern equivalent of the Nazis: allowing a Holocaust on the unborn, fostering an authoritarian culture on campuses and in newsrooms, demanding the state’s validation and endorsement for every excess of the sexual revolution. To others, President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement are the baddies: preaching belligerent nationalism, demanding absolute loyalty to a singular leader, subverting the rule of law, and rewarding political violence.
What if both groups of Christians are right, in a way? It isn’t hard to find bad guys: They’re all around us. But if we recognize that there isn’t a single bad guy, bad group, or bad party—but many of them—we should hesitate before thinking that we are living through 1933. Maybe the calling of the American church today isn’t to mount a heroic resistance unto death against a singular moral evil that unites all people of good conscience in opposition. Maybe the calling of the church today is to recognize injustices and evils all around us, to maintain our independence, and above all to be an advocate: not for one party or the other, but for lawfulness and peace among political tribes. …
[A] Confessing Church will counsel its members not to give their loyalty to a party, especially in times such as this. We may cooperate with a party on narrow issues where possible—such as abortion, crime, or poverty—yet we should refrain from identifying with the party, giving them our allegiance, letting them thrive off our moral support. We should withhold something from them, even if only to teach them that they do not own us. There is no compelling reason to identify yourself as a Republican or a Democrat. Do not give them the dignity of identifying as one of them. …
A Confessing Church for today.
Christians who vote for Republicans are called to be salt and light within the Republican Party. That means being a voice calling the Republican Party to obey the rule of law. Yours should be the loudest voice condemning Trump’s pardon for January 6 rioters and pushing against his challenge to the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain the executive . You should speak up in favor of the poor and powerless and against the culture of cruelty, spite, and vengefulness Trump cultivates. It corrodes our public square and demeans our shared citizenship even as it poses more specific dangers to those targeted by Trump’s weaponization of federal law enforcement. If you do not speak up, you are both credulous and culpable, complicit with the party’s sins—including those yet to come.
If you vote for Democrats, you are called to be salt and light within the Democratic Party. That means calling on the Democratic Party to heed “Nature and Nature’s God.” The secular left sometimes gives off an odor of being godless, rootless, power-hungry moral relativists. They deny transcendent truth one day; the next, they announce a new truth, and their online mob will bully and harass us for failing to jump on their latest cause de jour. Their lack of moral foundation is exactly why they turn into moral authoritarians, certain of their own newfound truths—about race, class, and gender—and impatient for their fellow citizens to catch up. Open, tolerant, classically liberal government cannot survive without foundations, and Thomas Jefferson was right to point to nature and nature’s God as the right ones when he penned the Declaration of Independence. Natural law is transcendent, but not sectarian; it is a shared foundation on which believers in any religion or none can stand together. …
Above all, a Confessing Church would teach its members to discern the times and practice the ethic of self-scrutiny. “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” Jesus asked. “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye,” (Matthew 7:3-5). Practicing self-scrutiny is an important step of obedience to Christ’s command.
There is a style of partisanship that looks at any criticism of one’s side as disloyal, even traitorous. That sort of partisanship on the right adheres to the “no enemies to the right” ethic, which means turning a blind eye to the racists and bigots on their side so long as they show up on Election Day. That same sort of partisanship on the left has no courage for a “Sister Souljah moment” to denounce the extremists in their ranks who chant pro-Hamas slogans or who weaponize DEI as a tool of illiberalism and cancel culture.
A Confessing Church would disciple its members to recognize that kind of partisanship is a form of disobedience to God. If you must be a partisan, be a good partisan, one who is a good gatekeeper, one who scrutinizes your own movement. Not just for the strategic necessity of broadening the base to win elections, but because of the moral necessity of standing for something good.
We live in a moment when political extremists have figured out how to game our system and hijack our parties. They may well be succeeding. A Confessing Church would respond to them with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous aphorism: “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
Political extremism may triumph, but not through us.
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