Brief: Antifascist Christianity: Bonhoeffer (Pt 1)
August 30, 2025
Key Takeaways
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s early theological work, while brilliant, was abstract and nationalistic, reflecting a common tendency for established religious institutions to serve dominant culture rather than challenge it.
- Bonhoeffer’s transformative experience in a Black Baptist church in Harlem exposed him to a “black Jesus” of the oppressed, shifting his understanding of faith towards active resistance and “costly grace.”
- The podcast argues that “good religion” or “better religion,” exemplified by figures like Bonhoeffer and the social gospel movement, is a crucial antidote to “bad religion” and authoritarian extremism.
Segments
Bonhoeffer’s Early Life and Theology (00:09:36)
- Key Takeaway: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from an aristocratic and intellectual background, initially pursued a theoretical theology that was nationalistic and detached from pressing social issues, a path his family warned him against.
- Summary: This segment details Bonhoeffer’s privileged upbringing, his early decision to become a theologian, the intellectual and familial influences on his early career, and his initial theological focus which was criticized for being abstract and nationalistic.
Bonhoeffer’s American Experience (00:23:51)
- Key Takeaway: Bonhoeffer’s fellowship at Union Theological Seminary exposed him to the socially engaged “social gospel” movement and figures like Reinhold Niebuhr, challenging his abstract theological views and introducing him to the realities of racial and social injustice.
- Summary: The discussion covers Bonhoeffer’s arrival in America, his initial skepticism towards professors like Reinhold Niebuhr, and his exposure to the social gospel movement and the writings of Black American intellectuals, which began to broaden his perspective.
Transformation at Abyssinian Baptist Church (00:30:01)
- Key Takeaway: Attending Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church profoundly changed Bonhoeffer, revealing the “black Jesus” of the oppressed and demonstrating a living church actively addressing social ills, which contrasted sharply with his previous understanding of religion.
- Summary: This segment focuses on Bonhoeffer’s pivotal experience at Abyssinian Baptist Church, his interactions with pastor Adam Clayton Powell Sr., and how the vibrant faith and social justice work of the congregation opened his eyes to the suffering of others and the concept of “costly grace.”
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[00:01:03.520 --> 00:01:04.400] Hey, everybody.
[00:01:04.400 --> 00:01:13.440] This brief is called Anti-Fascist Christianity, Bonhoeffer, part one, with part two dropping on Monday on Patreon for subscribers.
[00:01:13.440 --> 00:01:14.880] I'm Matthew Remsky.
[00:01:14.880 --> 00:01:25.040] This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
[00:01:25.040 --> 00:01:34.720] You can follow me, and you can follow Derek and Julian as well on Blue Sky, and the podcast is on Instagram and threads under its own handle.
[00:01:34.720 --> 00:01:38.160] And you can also support us on Patreon.
[00:01:38.480 --> 00:01:56.640] This is the first of several episodes I'll be doing on anti-fascist Christianity, and they will kind of fit into the anti-fascist woodshed series where I collect a bunch of useful stories and resources for this extremely shitty time.
[00:01:56.960 --> 00:01:59.840] Why am I turning towards Christians in particular?
[00:02:00.440 --> 00:02:06.680] I mean, they're not our typical beat here, unless we're criticizing something like Christian nationalism.
[00:02:06.680 --> 00:02:25.400] As an ex-Catholic recovering from a high-demand Buddhist group, and then an organized cult around a Course in Miracles, and then 10 years of journalism on abuse and conspiracy theories in spiritual communities, I generally have a lot more to say about bad religion.
[00:02:25.400 --> 00:02:44.360] And it's not hard because everywhere we see patriarchy, repressive doctrines, absurd dogmas, you know, bodily control, intergenerational cycles of clerical abuse, the hoarding of wealth and power, and spiritual rationalizations of harm.
[00:02:44.360 --> 00:02:58.600] Malignant narcissists promise salvation only to lock followers into very toxic attachments, and devotees are easily stripped of or surrender their conscience and political agency.
[00:02:58.920 --> 00:03:09.480] However, I've also come to believe that a key antidote to bad religion is good religion, or at least better religion.
[00:03:09.480 --> 00:03:19.400] And so I've taken an active interest in the religious impulse that has always defined itself as a celebration of resistance against power and cruelty.
[00:03:19.400 --> 00:03:34.840] Now, though we know little about him, we can say that the historical Jesus cut a deep mythical groove into the marble of the Roman Empire and the empires that followed it.
[00:03:34.840 --> 00:03:47.360] And a lot of passion still flows through that groove, especially when things get bleak, when we enter, as the old mystic called it, the dark night of the soul.
[00:03:47.360 --> 00:04:09.360] There are so many examples, from Simon Vey joining the international brigades, to Dorothy Day organizing the Catholic Workers' Party, to the social gospel pioneers of Union Theological Seminary, to Paulo Freire infusing his pedagogy of the oppressed with Christology, to Martin Luther King Jr.
[00:04:09.360 --> 00:04:16.480] and Thomas Merton, and maybe even James Tallarico in the Texas State House today.
[00:04:16.800 --> 00:04:27.920] And let's not forget Zoran Mamdani, who has not been shy about calling on faith in his extremely important campaign.
[00:04:27.920 --> 00:04:33.600] At a primary candidates forum way back on June 5th, hosted in the sanctuary of St.
[00:04:33.600 --> 00:04:40.800] John the Divine, up by Riverside Park, he said, quote, There is no room for hatred in this city.
[00:04:40.800 --> 00:04:43.600] There is no room for hatred in this country.
[00:04:43.600 --> 00:04:52.720] There is no room for anti-Semitism, for Islamophobia, for bigotry of any kind, and we have to root it out in our city.
[00:04:53.040 --> 00:04:57.200] He added that the city's budget should reflect its morals.
[00:04:57.200 --> 00:05:10.080] And then he cited the book of James, chapter 2, verse 14: What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone says he has faith but does not have works?
[00:05:10.080 --> 00:05:12.400] Can that faith save him?
[00:05:13.040 --> 00:05:19.280] Mamdani isn't just throwing his hat in the ring with progressive mystics of the past.
[00:05:19.280 --> 00:05:29.760] He's also coming out of a democratic socialists of America infrastructure in which organizing through religious networks is actually a key strategy.
[00:05:30.120 --> 00:05:42.200] They even have a religion and socialism working group page on which they write: quote: There is a long tradition of religious socialism in the United States that has been ignored or forgotten.
[00:05:42.200 --> 00:05:49.560] The religion and socialism group of DSA refuses to cede the ground of faith to the religious right.
[00:05:49.560 --> 00:05:59.000] Many in faith-based communities hesitate to join a socialist movement because of what they perceive as an anti-religious bias among leftists.
[00:05:59.000 --> 00:06:01.000] We see ourselves as a bridge group.
[00:06:01.000 --> 00:06:06.280] Our work is with and within faith communities as allies and coalition partners.
[00:06:06.280 --> 00:06:16.360] Examples of such work include the New Sanctuary Movement, religion and labor coalitions, reproductive justice, and LGBTQ advocacy.
[00:06:20.200 --> 00:06:32.440] I want to start this stream of episodes with the story of a young hoity-toity, soft nationalist German theologian, at least that's how we started out.
[00:06:32.440 --> 00:06:45.080] His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who discovered the radical soul of anti-fascism by hanging out in a Black Baptist church in Harlem in 1930.
[00:06:45.080 --> 00:06:58.040] I'm going to be offering my commentary throughout, but the bones of this story are well documented in the eight or so really good books on him listed in the show notes, which I really enjoyed going through.
[00:06:58.360 --> 00:07:13.720] And also, there's a lot of baseline understanding that I've gleaned from Eric Martin's The Writing on the Wall, Signs of Faith Against Fascism, which gives solid background on how Christian preachers and activists have battled against fascism over the past century.
[00:07:13.720 --> 00:07:38.880] Now, just a side note for anyone who imagines that approaching anti-fascist resistance through the discourse and the theology of the nation's dominant religion of Christianity, if you think that that offers some kind of protection, well, Eric Martin was dismissed from his position at UCLA after being arrested at an anti-genocide protest in the spring of last year.
[00:07:38.880 --> 00:07:44.160] So here's the story from the Poppy Press, which is the UCLA student newspaper.
[00:07:44.160 --> 00:07:45.520] Quote: Dr.
[00:07:45.520 --> 00:07:52.400] Eric Martin has been a lecturer with UCLA's Center for the Study of Religion for the past six years.
[00:07:52.400 --> 00:07:57.840] He received a notice that UCLA intends to fire him on May 12th.
[00:07:57.840 --> 00:08:06.160] As the Trump administration's threats to withhold federal funds persist, so does UCLA's crackdown on students, faculty, and staff.
[00:08:06.160 --> 00:08:06.560] Dr.
[00:08:06.560 --> 00:08:17.360] Martin describes his classes as focusing on global liberation theologies, religious fascisms and anti-fascisms, and how the Bible gets used in U.S.
[00:08:17.360 --> 00:08:19.120] justice movements.
[00:08:19.120 --> 00:08:32.880] On May 2nd, 2024, he was arrested alongside 205 other students, faculty, staff, and community members following the brutal police raid of the Palestine Solidarity Encampment.
[00:08:33.200 --> 00:08:47.760] Now, after they sent their notice of dismissal, UCLA Human Resources ordered him to a mandatory investigatory meeting, and he just refused to attend.
[00:08:47.760 --> 00:08:50.560] He wrote to them: I hope you're well.
[00:08:50.560 --> 00:08:55.200] I wanted to let you know I won't be participating in the investigation process.
[00:08:55.200 --> 00:09:14.520] Since UCLA already spent $10 million on handling the protests, I think it'd be a better use of money to investigate the people who beat our students with polls, the police who opened fire on our students, and Gene Bloch and any other administrators who enabled this violence through action or inaction.
[00:09:14.840 --> 00:09:20.920] So, Gene Bloch, referenced there, was the then chancellor of UCLA.
[00:09:21.560 --> 00:09:27.800] I think Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have been very proud of Erich Martin.
[00:09:27.800 --> 00:09:33.160] And let me turn to him because that's who our story is about for these two episodes.
[00:09:36.680 --> 00:09:45.320] On September 14th, 1930, Reichstag elections in Germany handed Hitler his pivotal electoral success.
[00:09:45.320 --> 00:09:52.920] He won over 18% of the vote and 107 seats, making the Nazi Party the second largest party in the German parliament.
[00:09:52.920 --> 00:10:00.040] And I want to underline, as I always do, that Hitler assumed his power democratically.
[00:10:00.040 --> 00:10:12.920] And this should tell us something about the anti-fascist attitude towards persuasion and whether traditional liberal institutions have ever historically met the challenge of fascism, because they haven't.
[00:10:12.920 --> 00:10:16.280] And that's a big part of what this story is about.
[00:10:16.920 --> 00:10:30.440] The very next day, September 15th, Bonhoeffer, then 24 years old, stepped off the gangplank of the SS Columbus at the foot of 58th Street in Brooklyn, New York.
[00:10:30.440 --> 00:10:39.880] He'd sailed from the port of Bremerhaven in northern Germany on a 10-month fellowship to study at Union Theological Seminary.
[00:10:39.880 --> 00:10:57.760] And he arrived with a truckload of his signature white linen suits and silk ties and packets of German tobacco, and also a ton of European baggage as the scion of a long line of aristocrats and upper-middle-class clerics and intellectuals.
[00:10:57.760 --> 00:11:03.600] Bonhoeffer's paternal side was chock full of counts and barons going back generations.
[00:11:03.600 --> 00:11:12.720] His dad Carl was a leading professor of psychiatry and urology in Berlin from 1912 until his death in 1948.
[00:11:12.720 --> 00:11:23.120] And Karl and Paula and their eight children lived in a villa in the prestigious Grunewald neighborhood of Berlin with neighbors like physicist Max Planck.
[00:11:23.120 --> 00:11:34.640] The lifestyle was lavish with chambermaids, housekeepers, a cook, gardener, governesses, a nurse, a receptionist for his father's clinic, and also a chauffeur.
[00:11:34.640 --> 00:11:42.240] Later, during the war, the villa became a surreptitious meeting place for Nazi resistors.
[00:11:42.240 --> 00:11:45.920] But when the kids were young, the vibe was very von trapp.
[00:11:46.240 --> 00:11:50.800] Musical soirees, salons, madrigals, and nature outings.
[00:11:50.800 --> 00:12:07.280] And I want you to put a pin in the music part because little Dietrich became a solid pianist and guitar player, and music became central to many turning points in his life, including the comfort it brought him in his final days in a Nazi prison.
[00:12:07.920 --> 00:12:13.520] Dietrich had decided to become a theologian at the age of 13.
[00:12:13.520 --> 00:12:17.840] Now, this made sense given the religious obsessions of his mother's side.
[00:12:17.840 --> 00:12:22.800] His grandfather had been a chaplain at the court of Emperor Wilhelm II.
[00:12:22.960 --> 00:12:26.400] This is the last German Kaiser of Prussia.
[00:12:26.400 --> 00:12:33.080] And his father before him had been a pre-eminent church historian who'd hung out with Goethe.
[00:12:33.080 --> 00:12:36.680] But these patriarchs weren't uniformly pious.
[00:12:36.680 --> 00:12:49.800] The chaplain pissed off the Kaiser with his liberal views, and the historian actually spent 11 months in the high Asperg prison close to Stuttgart when he ran afoul of the conservative Prussian clergy.
[00:12:49.800 --> 00:12:54.760] Now, Dad did not approve of Dietrich's desire to become a churchman.
[00:12:54.760 --> 00:12:58.280] He was a scientist, after all, a rationalist, a humanist.
[00:12:58.280 --> 00:13:10.920] This was a guy who viewed the emerging discipline of psychoanalysis as a backwards slide into magical thinking away from his scientific investigations into neurology.
[00:13:10.920 --> 00:13:21.880] He thought Freud was a crank, which I think actually is an oversight for a German between the wars trying to understand why his countrymen are going insane, but we'll leave that to the side.
[00:13:21.880 --> 00:13:30.680] But more importantly, Karl feared that his son was retreating from reality into a church life removed from the pressing concerns of the day.
[00:13:30.680 --> 00:13:37.080] And his brothers, one a socialist and one a Weimar liberal, warned him in the same way.
[00:13:37.080 --> 00:13:46.360] They said he was taking the path of least resistance by submitting himself to a boring, petty, and ultimately bourgeois institution.
[00:13:47.000 --> 00:13:52.520] So, why did Dietrich cut his own godly path nonetheless?
[00:13:52.520 --> 00:13:54.760] I think it was in his bones.
[00:13:54.760 --> 00:14:06.040] He had a twin sister, Sabine, with whom he was very close, and she recalled him disappearing as a small child into hiding spaces in their backyard for hours at a time.
[00:14:06.040 --> 00:14:12.040] And there's a family photograph showing Dietrich conducting play baptisms on the lawn.
[00:14:12.040 --> 00:14:16.960] But at night, the twins also played these spiritual games.
[00:14:16.960 --> 00:14:25.520] In Sabine's recollection, they would try to imagine eternity, and Sabine found this very long and gruesome.
[00:14:25.520 --> 00:14:27.760] It was mainly Dietrich's idea.
[00:14:27.760 --> 00:14:31.440] When they got separate bedrooms, they devised a code.
[00:14:31.440 --> 00:14:37.520] Dietrich would drum lightly on the wall to signal that it was time to ponder eternity.
[00:14:37.520 --> 00:14:42.960] And so she would knock back, and they would knock back and forth until one of them fell asleep.
[00:14:42.960 --> 00:14:48.080] And later, Sabine believed that this ritual actually really helped Dietrich.
[00:14:48.080 --> 00:14:53.600] It perhaps even saved him from being devoured by darker thoughts.
[00:14:53.920 --> 00:15:05.760] But also, when Dietrich was 12, his older brother Walter was killed on the Western Front after being wounded in both legs and succumbing to infection in a field hospital.
[00:15:05.760 --> 00:15:16.240] His mother, Paola, descended into a deep depression, and his father, Carl, retreated to his study and was unable to mention Walter's name for years.
[00:15:16.560 --> 00:15:20.160] His other older brother was wounded as well.
[00:15:20.160 --> 00:15:27.840] Quote, death stood at the door of almost every house and called for entrance, Bonhoeffer later wrote.
[00:15:27.840 --> 00:15:37.600] He describes survivor's guilt and a range of other emotions that put him on that threshold of worldly and otherworldly concern.
[00:15:37.600 --> 00:15:54.720] He also recalled the loneliness left by the war and a secret rivalry with the memory of his brother, and he imagined that theology might offer some kind of transcendent pathway and relief, but he would eventually come to view this longing as selfish.
[00:15:54.720 --> 00:16:04.920] But he soared through his studies as a prodigy, completing his first doctoral dissertation at 21, and then his second at 23.
[00:16:05.800 --> 00:16:16.360] But all the while, his brilliance was tarnished by the abstraction of his topics and the projective and compensatory nature of his ideas.
[00:16:16.360 --> 00:16:23.480] I think it really was a case of, you know, some guys will do two doctorates in theology before going to therapy.
[00:16:23.800 --> 00:16:35.560] He was steeped in 19th-century philosophy, and he believed that his major contribution would be the reconciliation of old guard liberal theology with the innovations of dialectics.
[00:16:35.560 --> 00:16:44.200] Now, if that sounds like it has little to do with social care or repairing humanity after a global war, I think you're right.
[00:16:44.200 --> 00:16:49.160] This is a time of soaring inflation and unemployment throughout Germany.
[00:16:49.160 --> 00:16:52.360] People are mixing sawdust into their bread.
[00:16:52.360 --> 00:17:08.920] There are social gospel movements in the German church focused on food provision and housing and economic justice, but the mainstream is hanging on by its nails in the hope of recreating some sense of normality.
[00:17:09.560 --> 00:17:31.080] Bonhoeffer engaged largely in a theoretical theology of nitpicking ideas, and that made him vulnerable to the unseen political swells of the time, namely, how many of the post-war German denominations were increasingly invested in the restabilization project of nationalism.
[00:17:31.400 --> 00:17:58.480] In the words of Reggie Williams in this excellent book from 2014 called Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance, and put a pin in that title, German theology was a, quote, malaise of Lutheranism, social Darwinism, and nationalism fused in a triumphalist view of history described as God's orders of creation, unquote.
[00:17:58.800 --> 00:18:11.280] And that orders of creation concept became the theological support for the Nazi language of blood and soil, of racial superiority, and of a pure folk.
[00:18:12.240 --> 00:18:19.600] So after that first doctorate, Bonhoeffer spent a year as a pastor in a German congregation in Barcelona.
[00:18:19.600 --> 00:18:29.920] And we have his sermons from that time, which, according to Williams, revealed a contradiction between loyalty to Jesus and loyalty to the German folk.
[00:18:29.920 --> 00:18:46.960] He emphasized German patriotic discipleship, arguing loyalty to the superior German peoples or Volcker, and suggesting that a Volk could pursue its divine call even if it disregards the lives of other people.
[00:18:47.280 --> 00:19:02.080] That's not sounding good because this is exactly how so many people came to justify a renewed call for war and the notion that even murder could be sanctified for the sake of the Volk.
[00:19:02.400 --> 00:19:18.800] And all of these were standard, I think, and quite predictable for a brilliant but also somewhat ignorant German churchman seeking a Weimar lane for religion to help rebuild national dignity in a time of crisis.
[00:19:18.800 --> 00:19:27.840] So he was on a really bleak path, but I have to imagine that the warnings of his dad and brothers rang in his ears.
[00:19:27.840 --> 00:19:35.640] He did develop doubts about his ideology and even his personality amidst it all.
[00:19:35.640 --> 00:19:45.160] He worried about his own intellectual vanity and whether he really had taken the easy way out, as his father and brother had warned.
[00:19:45.160 --> 00:19:56.840] Now, this is from the Williams bio: quote: I had not yet become a Christian, but wildly and undisciplined, I was my own master.
[00:19:56.840 --> 00:20:05.000] I know that at that time I took personal advantage of the cause of Christ and served my own vanity.
[00:20:05.640 --> 00:20:10.760] And he found neither his vanity nor his nationalism to be satisfying.
[00:20:10.760 --> 00:20:28.200] His time as a pastor in Barcelona contributed to his growing dissatisfaction with academic theology and made it apparent to him that he did not see any representation of Christ existing as church community within the cultural Protestantism of German churches.
[00:20:28.200 --> 00:20:39.800] In Germany, his desire for difference resulted in a theological and personal deadlock, which was for him a crisis at the beginning of his professional life.
[00:20:40.120 --> 00:20:50.440] Academic theology and pastoral ministry were both at odds with one another for Bonhoeffer, yet at the same time, disturbingly harmonious.
[00:20:50.440 --> 00:20:57.080] He couldn't find concrete responses to Germany's post-war social crises in the church or the academy.
[00:20:57.080 --> 00:21:03.560] He found that both sources offered only popular contradictions and little genuine Christian guidance.
[00:21:03.560 --> 00:21:16.880] Bonhoeffer was in this theological condition when he left Germany for America, still nursing his boyhood war wounds in search of a cloud of witnesses to help solve his theological crisis.
[00:21:14.760 --> 00:21:21.520] So that's from Reggie Williams, Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus.
[00:21:22.400 --> 00:21:36.640] And I want to interject here to say that I kind of believe that Bonhoeffer found himself in what's really the majoritarian position of religious clerics from time out of mind.
[00:21:36.960 --> 00:22:02.320] Max Weber summed it up in his concept of routinization: that when the initiatory phase of any religious revolution has become institutionalized, the function of its passion is turned against itself towards repressive purposes, and it begins to serve the defense of what has become the predominant culture.
[00:22:02.640 --> 00:22:07.440] Christianity now serves the empire instead of challenging it.
[00:22:07.440 --> 00:22:12.720] It now serves the monetary system instead of throwing over the tables in the temple.
[00:22:12.720 --> 00:22:34.480] Its primary function is to provide a release valve, a predictable rhythm of catharsis, and a temporary consolation for the ravages of a society which now must be accepted as given, and which has now been so totalized that it has replaced the concept of God.
[00:22:34.800 --> 00:22:44.240] The cleric's job in this phase is to make a highbrow version of pop music to keep everyone relaxed and somewhat entertained.
[00:22:44.240 --> 00:23:01.000] And I think Bonhoeffer could sniff out that that's what he was up to, that he was stuck in the project of using theology to explain why the world was terrible, instead of using his insight into a terrible world to imagine a new theology.
[00:22:59.920 --> 00:23:05.960] And I imagine this is part of what his dad and brother were getting at with their skepticism.
[00:23:06.920 --> 00:23:20.440] The thing is that this management function of the scholar or the academic or the cleric is not just visible in the flattened quality of routinized religion.
[00:23:20.440 --> 00:23:39.320] The picture that I'm painting, I believe, can also apply to secular liberal institutions as well and the elites that run them, because they perform a similar role in pacifying, justifying, and rationalizing worlds that are ultimately changeable.
[00:23:39.640 --> 00:23:51.800] So Bonhoeffer is feeling very restless, and so he applies for a post-doctoral fellowship at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, hoping to really stretch his mind.
[00:23:51.800 --> 00:24:01.240] Now, at that time, Union was a hotspot for the tail end of the social gospel movement, which at that point was about 40 or 50 years old.
[00:24:01.240 --> 00:24:12.040] And the seminary had a national reputation for integrating Christian ethics with advocacy on issues like labor rights, anti-poverty, civil rights.
[00:24:12.040 --> 00:24:19.800] And this was all very new to Dietrich and potentially humbling for a guy with such a charmed life and presentation.
[00:24:19.800 --> 00:24:23.640] This guy was six foot one, blue eyes, blonde hair.
[00:24:23.640 --> 00:24:24.840] He was tanned.
[00:24:24.840 --> 00:24:26.200] He was athletic.
[00:24:26.200 --> 00:24:28.200] He wore rimless glasses.
[00:24:28.200 --> 00:24:30.600] He smoked expensive tobacco.
[00:24:30.600 --> 00:24:53.360] And with his hyper-confidence, he struck an austere figure as he listened with skepticism to his new professors, especially the self-made theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who didn't have a single doctorate, let alone two, and who seemed in Dietrich's view to be talking about everything but God.
[00:24:54.000 --> 00:24:55.760] But was he really?
[00:24:56.080 --> 00:25:00.080] Niebuhr is the guy who's probably touched your life, actually.
[00:25:00.080 --> 00:25:12.960] Regardless of your faith background or lack thereof, he wrote the serenity prayer: you know, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
[00:25:12.960 --> 00:25:14.720] It's that guy.
[00:25:15.040 --> 00:25:32.880] Niebuhr was a Missouri-born German evangelical pastor out of Detroit, and he'd built a socially engaged ministry at Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit that reached a diverse congregation amidst the city's racial and labor tensions.
[00:25:32.880 --> 00:25:41.440] He was especially well known for his invective against Henry Ford and what he called Ford's model of welfare capitalism.
[00:25:41.440 --> 00:25:50.960] Niebuhr saw the line work as soul-crushing, and he criticized the social and moral costs of industrial efficiency.
[00:25:50.960 --> 00:25:59.200] He castigated Ford for creating this illusion that he cared for workers while perpetuating an oppressive work environment.
[00:25:59.200 --> 00:26:11.040] He really had Ford's number, this idea that if you paid line workers just enough that they could afford to shop at the company store, you'll just kick the can of revolution down the road.
[00:26:11.360 --> 00:26:21.360] Niebuhr was blistering towards Ford, describing him as a false prophet and likening the Ford Motor Company to a devouring god, Baal.
[00:26:21.680 --> 00:26:38.040] He also invited union organizers to speak at his church, so it wasn't all words, and you have to have, you know, real stones to do that in the 1920s in Detroit because Ford employed roving vigilantes and mercenaries to beat the shit out of union men whenever they met.
[00:26:38.680 --> 00:27:01.160] When Bonhoeffer first met Niebuhr at Union Theological, Niebuhr was writing Moral Man and Immoral Society, which came out in 1932, and that was his critique of both individual egoism and collective national pride, with an emphasis on human fallibility and the limits of moral idealism.
[00:27:01.160 --> 00:27:10.040] And as fascism ramped up in Europe, Niebuhr also moved away from pacifism and advocated for active military resistance.
[00:27:10.040 --> 00:27:25.080] The firebombing of Guernica by the Luftwaffe at the request of Franco in 1937 was his red line with regard to pacifism and whether it could adequately resist the fascists.
[00:27:25.080 --> 00:27:44.440] At Union, the influence of Marx's analysis of capitalist logic shone through in Niebuhr's seminars, but he also warned against what he described as communism's messianic promise, which he rejected as an insufficient substitute for grace.
[00:27:44.440 --> 00:27:57.720] Where he landed was on a concept that he called Christian realism, which is the belief that human nature is fundamentally sinful, but also free and morally responsible.
[00:27:57.720 --> 00:28:15.000] It reflected his experiences with the harsh realities of industrial toil in Detroit, with international crises, especially those following the First World War, but also the failures of idealistic approaches during that interwar period.
[00:28:15.600 --> 00:28:27.120] He called for active engagement and struggle against injustice while also keeping an awareness of human sinfulness, the risks of hubris, and the complexity of social and political realities.
[00:28:27.120 --> 00:28:32.000] He was like the OG anti-spiritual bypasser.
[00:28:32.320 --> 00:28:37.920] Now, Niebuhr's reading list for the course that Dietrich was enrolled in included W.E.B.
[00:28:37.920 --> 00:28:43.120] Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, as well as the writings of James Weldon Johnson and Booker T.
[00:28:43.120 --> 00:28:44.400] Washington.
[00:28:44.400 --> 00:28:56.960] And this led at one point, a flummoxed Dietrich to challenge the elder man, asking, Is this a theological school or a school for politicians?
[00:28:57.600 --> 00:29:02.400] It was Bonhoeffer's fellow students who helped him answer that question.
[00:29:02.400 --> 00:29:09.440] One of them was named John Lazaire, a Frenchman who impressed Bonhoeffer with his staunch pacifism.
[00:29:09.440 --> 00:29:13.840] One night they went out to the movie house to watch All Quiet on the Western Front.
[00:29:13.840 --> 00:29:26.320] So here's a German and a Frenchman both studying theology in America, and they're sitting in a darkened theater watching their forebears slaughter each other, but also beg each other for forgiveness.
[00:29:26.960 --> 00:29:33.920] Bonhoeffer's most consequential friendship, however, was with Frank Fisher, a black seminarian.
[00:29:33.920 --> 00:29:37.200] Fisher was a graduate of Howard University in D.C.
[00:29:37.200 --> 00:29:42.720] and the son of the pastor of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
[00:29:42.720 --> 00:29:50.480] By the way, that's the same church that would be firebombed by Klan members in 1963, murdering four girls.
[00:29:51.120 --> 00:30:00.000] Union Theological assigned Frank Fisher to Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church as a pastoral intern for his fieldwork required.
[00:30:01.320 --> 00:30:12.040] And he invited his earnest but somewhat stiff new German friend to come on up with him for Sunday services, which were at 2:30 in the afternoon every Sunday.
[00:30:12.040 --> 00:30:19.720] Now, the sources don't say how they got there, but I can imagine them walking together about two miles uptown and to the east.
[00:30:19.720 --> 00:30:22.840] It would take an hour if they stopped for coffee.
[00:30:22.840 --> 00:30:34.200] They would have a lot to talk about in this morning of their lives, conversations I believe that helped them form their commitments and lock in their destinies as moral revolutionaries.
[00:30:34.840 --> 00:30:40.600] The services at Abyssinian Baptist changed Bonhoeffer's life.
[00:30:40.600 --> 00:30:44.680] He felt like he'd never known a thing about religion before.
[00:30:44.680 --> 00:30:52.520] The congregants were on fire with faith, he wrote in his journal, shouting and rejoicing in the worship and during the sermon, too.
[00:30:53.160 --> 00:31:00.440] Nothing like the churches he had known in Germany and the white Protestant churches he was discovering in New York.
[00:31:00.760 --> 00:31:06.680] Harlem Renaissance historian Reggie Williams offers a potent lens here.
[00:31:06.680 --> 00:31:19.560] He explains that Bonhoeffer arrived in America knowing and worshiping only the white Jesus of European institutions, the religious hero of Western empires.
[00:31:19.560 --> 00:31:39.720] But at Abyssinian, he met the black Jesus of the oppressed and could finally see a framework for how a living church could address the social ills that he had observed with increasing nausea from the ivory tower of his theological education in Berlin.
[00:31:40.040 --> 00:31:53.600] Once he started going to Abyssinian, Dietrich was hooked, and he quickly volunteered to teach Sunday school, and he started to run study meetings on weekday evenings, even though he was still working on his English.
[00:31:53.600 --> 00:32:00.560] Everything he saw at Abyssinian put Niebuhr's work of engaged religion into real life.
[00:32:00.880 --> 00:32:10.160] He found a community that was not merely religious, in his words, but they were real Christians, disciples of the Christ they worshipped.
[00:32:10.160 --> 00:32:18.720] It was from this that he developed his notion of a religionless Christianity lived out in daily life.
[00:32:19.040 --> 00:32:24.560] Also, every Sunday, he listened to the thundering sermons of Adam Clayton Powell the Sr.
[00:32:24.800 --> 00:32:36.640] He was the pastor at Abyssinian Baptist from 1908 to 1937, and he preached a this worldly Christian framework of social justice and the betterment of black lives.
[00:32:36.640 --> 00:32:51.120] This guy was active in the NAACP and the Urban League, and he advocated for black men during the First World War to abstain from enlisting so long as the community was denied full civil rights.
[00:32:51.440 --> 00:33:04.560] He railed against the ongoing persecution of Jim Crow laws in the Deep South, and he also rejected Booker Washington's accommodationist politics as the product of internalized racism.
[00:33:04.560 --> 00:33:16.880] And this deserves a pin because later in life, the question of how strongly one should oppose fascism and how much one should risk, it really defines Bonhoeffer's fate.
[00:33:17.520 --> 00:33:29.760] Powell's Jesus, in the words of Bonhoeffer biographer Charles Marsh, quote, wandered into distressed and lonely places to share the struggles of the poor as a friend and counselor.
[00:33:30.280 --> 00:33:43.320] As the Depression deepened through the 1930s, Abyssinian, under Clayton's directions, ran a free food kitchen and relief bureau that served thousands of meals and distributed food baskets.
[00:33:43.640 --> 00:33:59.080] It was watching this work unfold, along with Abyssinian's broader engagement with the Jim Crow South, that opened Bonhoeffer's eyes to the escalating persecution of Jews back at home in Germany.
[00:33:59.080 --> 00:34:06.120] And this convinced him that the church had a duty to lead the opposition against injustice.
[00:34:06.120 --> 00:34:18.200] It also became central to his life work in developing the concept of what he called costly grace that demanded active engagement and self-sacrifice in following Christ.
[00:34:18.200 --> 00:34:30.440] This concept was at the heart of his major theological work, The Cost of Discipleship, and it became the root of his later practical resistance to Nazism.
[00:34:31.080 --> 00:34:35.720] But it was way more than ideas that Bonhoeffer absorbed.
[00:34:35.720 --> 00:34:39.240] Here's an excerpt from the Marsh biography.
[00:34:39.240 --> 00:34:50.040] As early as October, Bonhoeffer had signed up for an outing to explore the neighborhood under the seminary's program called Trip to Negro Centers of Life and Culture in Harlem.
[00:34:50.040 --> 00:35:00.280] He compiled an extensive biography on the Negro through the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library, and he collected articles on the race issue.
[00:35:00.280 --> 00:35:06.920] Now, Bonhoeffer also immersed himself in the novels and literature of Black America.
[00:35:06.920 --> 00:35:19.040] The sources say he read Langston Hughes, and he was really taken by a poem called The Black Christ by the poet County Cullen, who was a leading Harlem Renaissance writer.
[00:35:19.360 --> 00:35:23.440] The poem echoes strange fruit.
[00:35:23.760 --> 00:35:40.000] God's glory and my country's shame, and how one man who cursed Christ's name may never fully expiate that crime till at the blessed gate of heaven he meet and pardon me out of his love and charity.
[00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:59.040] How God, who needs no man's applause, for love of my stark soul of flaws, composed, seeing it slip, did stoop down to the mire and pick me up, and in the hollow of his hand enact again at my command the world's supremest tragedy.
[00:35:59.040 --> 00:36:13.120] Until I die, my burden be, how Calvary and Palestine, extending down to me and mine, was but the first leaf in a line of trees on which a man should swing.
[00:36:13.120 --> 00:36:20.240] World without end in suffering, for all men's healing, let me sing.
[00:36:32.800 --> 00:36:41.200] I'm going to pause on that foreshadowing note of trees and men suspended between heaven and earth.
[00:36:41.200 --> 00:36:49.520] In episode two, I'll get into how Bonhoeffer brought all of that experience back to Germany.
[00:36:49.840 --> 00:36:51.040] Thanks for listening.
[00:37:09.640 --> 00:37:11.800] Packages by Expedia.
[00:37:11.800 --> 00:37:16.440] You were made to occasionally take the hard route to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
[00:37:17.400 --> 00:37:19.800] We were made to easily bundle your trip.
[00:37:19.800 --> 00:37:22.360] Expedia, made to travel.
[00:37:22.360 --> 00:37:24.760] Flight-inclusive packages are at all protected.
Prompt 2: Key Takeaways
Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.
Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...".
Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive.
IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}
Prompt 3: Segments
Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.
For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion
IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.
Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
"segments": [
{
"segment_title": "Topic Discussion",
"timestamp": "01:15:30",
"key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
"segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
}
]
}
Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.
Prompt 4: Media Mentions
Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:
Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)
DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names
IMPORTANT:
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.
Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
"media_mentions": [
{
"title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
"category": "Book",
"author_artist": "N/A",
"context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
"context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
"timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
}
]
}
If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}
Full Transcript
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[00:01:03.520 --> 00:01:04.400] Hey, everybody.
[00:01:04.400 --> 00:01:13.440] This brief is called Anti-Fascist Christianity, Bonhoeffer, part one, with part two dropping on Monday on Patreon for subscribers.
[00:01:13.440 --> 00:01:14.880] I'm Matthew Remsky.
[00:01:14.880 --> 00:01:25.040] This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
[00:01:25.040 --> 00:01:34.720] You can follow me, and you can follow Derek and Julian as well on Blue Sky, and the podcast is on Instagram and threads under its own handle.
[00:01:34.720 --> 00:01:38.160] And you can also support us on Patreon.
[00:01:38.480 --> 00:01:56.640] This is the first of several episodes I'll be doing on anti-fascist Christianity, and they will kind of fit into the anti-fascist woodshed series where I collect a bunch of useful stories and resources for this extremely shitty time.
[00:01:56.960 --> 00:01:59.840] Why am I turning towards Christians in particular?
[00:02:00.440 --> 00:02:06.680] I mean, they're not our typical beat here, unless we're criticizing something like Christian nationalism.
[00:02:06.680 --> 00:02:25.400] As an ex-Catholic recovering from a high-demand Buddhist group, and then an organized cult around a Course in Miracles, and then 10 years of journalism on abuse and conspiracy theories in spiritual communities, I generally have a lot more to say about bad religion.
[00:02:25.400 --> 00:02:44.360] And it's not hard because everywhere we see patriarchy, repressive doctrines, absurd dogmas, you know, bodily control, intergenerational cycles of clerical abuse, the hoarding of wealth and power, and spiritual rationalizations of harm.
[00:02:44.360 --> 00:02:58.600] Malignant narcissists promise salvation only to lock followers into very toxic attachments, and devotees are easily stripped of or surrender their conscience and political agency.
[00:02:58.920 --> 00:03:09.480] However, I've also come to believe that a key antidote to bad religion is good religion, or at least better religion.
[00:03:09.480 --> 00:03:19.400] And so I've taken an active interest in the religious impulse that has always defined itself as a celebration of resistance against power and cruelty.
[00:03:19.400 --> 00:03:34.840] Now, though we know little about him, we can say that the historical Jesus cut a deep mythical groove into the marble of the Roman Empire and the empires that followed it.
[00:03:34.840 --> 00:03:47.360] And a lot of passion still flows through that groove, especially when things get bleak, when we enter, as the old mystic called it, the dark night of the soul.
[00:03:47.360 --> 00:04:09.360] There are so many examples, from Simon Vey joining the international brigades, to Dorothy Day organizing the Catholic Workers' Party, to the social gospel pioneers of Union Theological Seminary, to Paulo Freire infusing his pedagogy of the oppressed with Christology, to Martin Luther King Jr.
[00:04:09.360 --> 00:04:16.480] and Thomas Merton, and maybe even James Tallarico in the Texas State House today.
[00:04:16.800 --> 00:04:27.920] And let's not forget Zoran Mamdani, who has not been shy about calling on faith in his extremely important campaign.
[00:04:27.920 --> 00:04:33.600] At a primary candidates forum way back on June 5th, hosted in the sanctuary of St.
[00:04:33.600 --> 00:04:40.800] John the Divine, up by Riverside Park, he said, quote, There is no room for hatred in this city.
[00:04:40.800 --> 00:04:43.600] There is no room for hatred in this country.
[00:04:43.600 --> 00:04:52.720] There is no room for anti-Semitism, for Islamophobia, for bigotry of any kind, and we have to root it out in our city.
[00:04:53.040 --> 00:04:57.200] He added that the city's budget should reflect its morals.
[00:04:57.200 --> 00:05:10.080] And then he cited the book of James, chapter 2, verse 14: What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone says he has faith but does not have works?
[00:05:10.080 --> 00:05:12.400] Can that faith save him?
[00:05:13.040 --> 00:05:19.280] Mamdani isn't just throwing his hat in the ring with progressive mystics of the past.
[00:05:19.280 --> 00:05:29.760] He's also coming out of a democratic socialists of America infrastructure in which organizing through religious networks is actually a key strategy.
[00:05:30.120 --> 00:05:42.200] They even have a religion and socialism working group page on which they write: quote: There is a long tradition of religious socialism in the United States that has been ignored or forgotten.
[00:05:42.200 --> 00:05:49.560] The religion and socialism group of DSA refuses to cede the ground of faith to the religious right.
[00:05:49.560 --> 00:05:59.000] Many in faith-based communities hesitate to join a socialist movement because of what they perceive as an anti-religious bias among leftists.
[00:05:59.000 --> 00:06:01.000] We see ourselves as a bridge group.
[00:06:01.000 --> 00:06:06.280] Our work is with and within faith communities as allies and coalition partners.
[00:06:06.280 --> 00:06:16.360] Examples of such work include the New Sanctuary Movement, religion and labor coalitions, reproductive justice, and LGBTQ advocacy.
[00:06:20.200 --> 00:06:32.440] I want to start this stream of episodes with the story of a young hoity-toity, soft nationalist German theologian, at least that's how we started out.
[00:06:32.440 --> 00:06:45.080] His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who discovered the radical soul of anti-fascism by hanging out in a Black Baptist church in Harlem in 1930.
[00:06:45.080 --> 00:06:58.040] I'm going to be offering my commentary throughout, but the bones of this story are well documented in the eight or so really good books on him listed in the show notes, which I really enjoyed going through.
[00:06:58.360 --> 00:07:13.720] And also, there's a lot of baseline understanding that I've gleaned from Eric Martin's The Writing on the Wall, Signs of Faith Against Fascism, which gives solid background on how Christian preachers and activists have battled against fascism over the past century.
[00:07:13.720 --> 00:07:38.880] Now, just a side note for anyone who imagines that approaching anti-fascist resistance through the discourse and the theology of the nation's dominant religion of Christianity, if you think that that offers some kind of protection, well, Eric Martin was dismissed from his position at UCLA after being arrested at an anti-genocide protest in the spring of last year.
[00:07:38.880 --> 00:07:44.160] So here's the story from the Poppy Press, which is the UCLA student newspaper.
[00:07:44.160 --> 00:07:45.520] Quote: Dr.
[00:07:45.520 --> 00:07:52.400] Eric Martin has been a lecturer with UCLA's Center for the Study of Religion for the past six years.
[00:07:52.400 --> 00:07:57.840] He received a notice that UCLA intends to fire him on May 12th.
[00:07:57.840 --> 00:08:06.160] As the Trump administration's threats to withhold federal funds persist, so does UCLA's crackdown on students, faculty, and staff.
[00:08:06.160 --> 00:08:06.560] Dr.
[00:08:06.560 --> 00:08:17.360] Martin describes his classes as focusing on global liberation theologies, religious fascisms and anti-fascisms, and how the Bible gets used in U.S.
[00:08:17.360 --> 00:08:19.120] justice movements.
[00:08:19.120 --> 00:08:32.880] On May 2nd, 2024, he was arrested alongside 205 other students, faculty, staff, and community members following the brutal police raid of the Palestine Solidarity Encampment.
[00:08:33.200 --> 00:08:47.760] Now, after they sent their notice of dismissal, UCLA Human Resources ordered him to a mandatory investigatory meeting, and he just refused to attend.
[00:08:47.760 --> 00:08:50.560] He wrote to them: I hope you're well.
[00:08:50.560 --> 00:08:55.200] I wanted to let you know I won't be participating in the investigation process.
[00:08:55.200 --> 00:09:14.520] Since UCLA already spent $10 million on handling the protests, I think it'd be a better use of money to investigate the people who beat our students with polls, the police who opened fire on our students, and Gene Bloch and any other administrators who enabled this violence through action or inaction.
[00:09:14.840 --> 00:09:20.920] So, Gene Bloch, referenced there, was the then chancellor of UCLA.
[00:09:21.560 --> 00:09:27.800] I think Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have been very proud of Erich Martin.
[00:09:27.800 --> 00:09:33.160] And let me turn to him because that's who our story is about for these two episodes.
[00:09:36.680 --> 00:09:45.320] On September 14th, 1930, Reichstag elections in Germany handed Hitler his pivotal electoral success.
[00:09:45.320 --> 00:09:52.920] He won over 18% of the vote and 107 seats, making the Nazi Party the second largest party in the German parliament.
[00:09:52.920 --> 00:10:00.040] And I want to underline, as I always do, that Hitler assumed his power democratically.
[00:10:00.040 --> 00:10:12.920] And this should tell us something about the anti-fascist attitude towards persuasion and whether traditional liberal institutions have ever historically met the challenge of fascism, because they haven't.
[00:10:12.920 --> 00:10:16.280] And that's a big part of what this story is about.
[00:10:16.920 --> 00:10:30.440] The very next day, September 15th, Bonhoeffer, then 24 years old, stepped off the gangplank of the SS Columbus at the foot of 58th Street in Brooklyn, New York.
[00:10:30.440 --> 00:10:39.880] He'd sailed from the port of Bremerhaven in northern Germany on a 10-month fellowship to study at Union Theological Seminary.
[00:10:39.880 --> 00:10:57.760] And he arrived with a truckload of his signature white linen suits and silk ties and packets of German tobacco, and also a ton of European baggage as the scion of a long line of aristocrats and upper-middle-class clerics and intellectuals.
[00:10:57.760 --> 00:11:03.600] Bonhoeffer's paternal side was chock full of counts and barons going back generations.
[00:11:03.600 --> 00:11:12.720] His dad Carl was a leading professor of psychiatry and urology in Berlin from 1912 until his death in 1948.
[00:11:12.720 --> 00:11:23.120] And Karl and Paula and their eight children lived in a villa in the prestigious Grunewald neighborhood of Berlin with neighbors like physicist Max Planck.
[00:11:23.120 --> 00:11:34.640] The lifestyle was lavish with chambermaids, housekeepers, a cook, gardener, governesses, a nurse, a receptionist for his father's clinic, and also a chauffeur.
[00:11:34.640 --> 00:11:42.240] Later, during the war, the villa became a surreptitious meeting place for Nazi resistors.
[00:11:42.240 --> 00:11:45.920] But when the kids were young, the vibe was very von trapp.
[00:11:46.240 --> 00:11:50.800] Musical soirees, salons, madrigals, and nature outings.
[00:11:50.800 --> 00:12:07.280] And I want you to put a pin in the music part because little Dietrich became a solid pianist and guitar player, and music became central to many turning points in his life, including the comfort it brought him in his final days in a Nazi prison.
[00:12:07.920 --> 00:12:13.520] Dietrich had decided to become a theologian at the age of 13.
[00:12:13.520 --> 00:12:17.840] Now, this made sense given the religious obsessions of his mother's side.
[00:12:17.840 --> 00:12:22.800] His grandfather had been a chaplain at the court of Emperor Wilhelm II.
[00:12:22.960 --> 00:12:26.400] This is the last German Kaiser of Prussia.
[00:12:26.400 --> 00:12:33.080] And his father before him had been a pre-eminent church historian who'd hung out with Goethe.
[00:12:33.080 --> 00:12:36.680] But these patriarchs weren't uniformly pious.
[00:12:36.680 --> 00:12:49.800] The chaplain pissed off the Kaiser with his liberal views, and the historian actually spent 11 months in the high Asperg prison close to Stuttgart when he ran afoul of the conservative Prussian clergy.
[00:12:49.800 --> 00:12:54.760] Now, Dad did not approve of Dietrich's desire to become a churchman.
[00:12:54.760 --> 00:12:58.280] He was a scientist, after all, a rationalist, a humanist.
[00:12:58.280 --> 00:13:10.920] This was a guy who viewed the emerging discipline of psychoanalysis as a backwards slide into magical thinking away from his scientific investigations into neurology.
[00:13:10.920 --> 00:13:21.880] He thought Freud was a crank, which I think actually is an oversight for a German between the wars trying to understand why his countrymen are going insane, but we'll leave that to the side.
[00:13:21.880 --> 00:13:30.680] But more importantly, Karl feared that his son was retreating from reality into a church life removed from the pressing concerns of the day.
[00:13:30.680 --> 00:13:37.080] And his brothers, one a socialist and one a Weimar liberal, warned him in the same way.
[00:13:37.080 --> 00:13:46.360] They said he was taking the path of least resistance by submitting himself to a boring, petty, and ultimately bourgeois institution.
[00:13:47.000 --> 00:13:52.520] So, why did Dietrich cut his own godly path nonetheless?
[00:13:52.520 --> 00:13:54.760] I think it was in his bones.
[00:13:54.760 --> 00:14:06.040] He had a twin sister, Sabine, with whom he was very close, and she recalled him disappearing as a small child into hiding spaces in their backyard for hours at a time.
[00:14:06.040 --> 00:14:12.040] And there's a family photograph showing Dietrich conducting play baptisms on the lawn.
[00:14:12.040 --> 00:14:16.960] But at night, the twins also played these spiritual games.
[00:14:16.960 --> 00:14:25.520] In Sabine's recollection, they would try to imagine eternity, and Sabine found this very long and gruesome.
[00:14:25.520 --> 00:14:27.760] It was mainly Dietrich's idea.
[00:14:27.760 --> 00:14:31.440] When they got separate bedrooms, they devised a code.
[00:14:31.440 --> 00:14:37.520] Dietrich would drum lightly on the wall to signal that it was time to ponder eternity.
[00:14:37.520 --> 00:14:42.960] And so she would knock back, and they would knock back and forth until one of them fell asleep.
[00:14:42.960 --> 00:14:48.080] And later, Sabine believed that this ritual actually really helped Dietrich.
[00:14:48.080 --> 00:14:53.600] It perhaps even saved him from being devoured by darker thoughts.
[00:14:53.920 --> 00:15:05.760] But also, when Dietrich was 12, his older brother Walter was killed on the Western Front after being wounded in both legs and succumbing to infection in a field hospital.
[00:15:05.760 --> 00:15:16.240] His mother, Paola, descended into a deep depression, and his father, Carl, retreated to his study and was unable to mention Walter's name for years.
[00:15:16.560 --> 00:15:20.160] His other older brother was wounded as well.
[00:15:20.160 --> 00:15:27.840] Quote, death stood at the door of almost every house and called for entrance, Bonhoeffer later wrote.
[00:15:27.840 --> 00:15:37.600] He describes survivor's guilt and a range of other emotions that put him on that threshold of worldly and otherworldly concern.
[00:15:37.600 --> 00:15:54.720] He also recalled the loneliness left by the war and a secret rivalry with the memory of his brother, and he imagined that theology might offer some kind of transcendent pathway and relief, but he would eventually come to view this longing as selfish.
[00:15:54.720 --> 00:16:04.920] But he soared through his studies as a prodigy, completing his first doctoral dissertation at 21, and then his second at 23.
[00:16:05.800 --> 00:16:16.360] But all the while, his brilliance was tarnished by the abstraction of his topics and the projective and compensatory nature of his ideas.
[00:16:16.360 --> 00:16:23.480] I think it really was a case of, you know, some guys will do two doctorates in theology before going to therapy.
[00:16:23.800 --> 00:16:35.560] He was steeped in 19th-century philosophy, and he believed that his major contribution would be the reconciliation of old guard liberal theology with the innovations of dialectics.
[00:16:35.560 --> 00:16:44.200] Now, if that sounds like it has little to do with social care or repairing humanity after a global war, I think you're right.
[00:16:44.200 --> 00:16:49.160] This is a time of soaring inflation and unemployment throughout Germany.
[00:16:49.160 --> 00:16:52.360] People are mixing sawdust into their bread.
[00:16:52.360 --> 00:17:08.920] There are social gospel movements in the German church focused on food provision and housing and economic justice, but the mainstream is hanging on by its nails in the hope of recreating some sense of normality.
[00:17:09.560 --> 00:17:31.080] Bonhoeffer engaged largely in a theoretical theology of nitpicking ideas, and that made him vulnerable to the unseen political swells of the time, namely, how many of the post-war German denominations were increasingly invested in the restabilization project of nationalism.
[00:17:31.400 --> 00:17:58.480] In the words of Reggie Williams in this excellent book from 2014 called Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance, and put a pin in that title, German theology was a, quote, malaise of Lutheranism, social Darwinism, and nationalism fused in a triumphalist view of history described as God's orders of creation, unquote.
[00:17:58.800 --> 00:18:11.280] And that orders of creation concept became the theological support for the Nazi language of blood and soil, of racial superiority, and of a pure folk.
[00:18:12.240 --> 00:18:19.600] So after that first doctorate, Bonhoeffer spent a year as a pastor in a German congregation in Barcelona.
[00:18:19.600 --> 00:18:29.920] And we have his sermons from that time, which, according to Williams, revealed a contradiction between loyalty to Jesus and loyalty to the German folk.
[00:18:29.920 --> 00:18:46.960] He emphasized German patriotic discipleship, arguing loyalty to the superior German peoples or Volcker, and suggesting that a Volk could pursue its divine call even if it disregards the lives of other people.
[00:18:47.280 --> 00:19:02.080] That's not sounding good because this is exactly how so many people came to justify a renewed call for war and the notion that even murder could be sanctified for the sake of the Volk.
[00:19:02.400 --> 00:19:18.800] And all of these were standard, I think, and quite predictable for a brilliant but also somewhat ignorant German churchman seeking a Weimar lane for religion to help rebuild national dignity in a time of crisis.
[00:19:18.800 --> 00:19:27.840] So he was on a really bleak path, but I have to imagine that the warnings of his dad and brothers rang in his ears.
[00:19:27.840 --> 00:19:35.640] He did develop doubts about his ideology and even his personality amidst it all.
[00:19:35.640 --> 00:19:45.160] He worried about his own intellectual vanity and whether he really had taken the easy way out, as his father and brother had warned.
[00:19:45.160 --> 00:19:56.840] Now, this is from the Williams bio: quote: I had not yet become a Christian, but wildly and undisciplined, I was my own master.
[00:19:56.840 --> 00:20:05.000] I know that at that time I took personal advantage of the cause of Christ and served my own vanity.
[00:20:05.640 --> 00:20:10.760] And he found neither his vanity nor his nationalism to be satisfying.
[00:20:10.760 --> 00:20:28.200] His time as a pastor in Barcelona contributed to his growing dissatisfaction with academic theology and made it apparent to him that he did not see any representation of Christ existing as church community within the cultural Protestantism of German churches.
[00:20:28.200 --> 00:20:39.800] In Germany, his desire for difference resulted in a theological and personal deadlock, which was for him a crisis at the beginning of his professional life.
[00:20:40.120 --> 00:20:50.440] Academic theology and pastoral ministry were both at odds with one another for Bonhoeffer, yet at the same time, disturbingly harmonious.
[00:20:50.440 --> 00:20:57.080] He couldn't find concrete responses to Germany's post-war social crises in the church or the academy.
[00:20:57.080 --> 00:21:03.560] He found that both sources offered only popular contradictions and little genuine Christian guidance.
[00:21:03.560 --> 00:21:16.880] Bonhoeffer was in this theological condition when he left Germany for America, still nursing his boyhood war wounds in search of a cloud of witnesses to help solve his theological crisis.
[00:21:14.760 --> 00:21:21.520] So that's from Reggie Williams, Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus.
[00:21:22.400 --> 00:21:36.640] And I want to interject here to say that I kind of believe that Bonhoeffer found himself in what's really the majoritarian position of religious clerics from time out of mind.
[00:21:36.960 --> 00:22:02.320] Max Weber summed it up in his concept of routinization: that when the initiatory phase of any religious revolution has become institutionalized, the function of its passion is turned against itself towards repressive purposes, and it begins to serve the defense of what has become the predominant culture.
[00:22:02.640 --> 00:22:07.440] Christianity now serves the empire instead of challenging it.
[00:22:07.440 --> 00:22:12.720] It now serves the monetary system instead of throwing over the tables in the temple.
[00:22:12.720 --> 00:22:34.480] Its primary function is to provide a release valve, a predictable rhythm of catharsis, and a temporary consolation for the ravages of a society which now must be accepted as given, and which has now been so totalized that it has replaced the concept of God.
[00:22:34.800 --> 00:22:44.240] The cleric's job in this phase is to make a highbrow version of pop music to keep everyone relaxed and somewhat entertained.
[00:22:44.240 --> 00:23:01.000] And I think Bonhoeffer could sniff out that that's what he was up to, that he was stuck in the project of using theology to explain why the world was terrible, instead of using his insight into a terrible world to imagine a new theology.
[00:22:59.920 --> 00:23:05.960] And I imagine this is part of what his dad and brother were getting at with their skepticism.
[00:23:06.920 --> 00:23:20.440] The thing is that this management function of the scholar or the academic or the cleric is not just visible in the flattened quality of routinized religion.
[00:23:20.440 --> 00:23:39.320] The picture that I'm painting, I believe, can also apply to secular liberal institutions as well and the elites that run them, because they perform a similar role in pacifying, justifying, and rationalizing worlds that are ultimately changeable.
[00:23:39.640 --> 00:23:51.800] So Bonhoeffer is feeling very restless, and so he applies for a post-doctoral fellowship at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, hoping to really stretch his mind.
[00:23:51.800 --> 00:24:01.240] Now, at that time, Union was a hotspot for the tail end of the social gospel movement, which at that point was about 40 or 50 years old.
[00:24:01.240 --> 00:24:12.040] And the seminary had a national reputation for integrating Christian ethics with advocacy on issues like labor rights, anti-poverty, civil rights.
[00:24:12.040 --> 00:24:19.800] And this was all very new to Dietrich and potentially humbling for a guy with such a charmed life and presentation.
[00:24:19.800 --> 00:24:23.640] This guy was six foot one, blue eyes, blonde hair.
[00:24:23.640 --> 00:24:24.840] He was tanned.
[00:24:24.840 --> 00:24:26.200] He was athletic.
[00:24:26.200 --> 00:24:28.200] He wore rimless glasses.
[00:24:28.200 --> 00:24:30.600] He smoked expensive tobacco.
[00:24:30.600 --> 00:24:53.360] And with his hyper-confidence, he struck an austere figure as he listened with skepticism to his new professors, especially the self-made theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who didn't have a single doctorate, let alone two, and who seemed in Dietrich's view to be talking about everything but God.
[00:24:54.000 --> 00:24:55.760] But was he really?
[00:24:56.080 --> 00:25:00.080] Niebuhr is the guy who's probably touched your life, actually.
[00:25:00.080 --> 00:25:12.960] Regardless of your faith background or lack thereof, he wrote the serenity prayer: you know, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
[00:25:12.960 --> 00:25:14.720] It's that guy.
[00:25:15.040 --> 00:25:32.880] Niebuhr was a Missouri-born German evangelical pastor out of Detroit, and he'd built a socially engaged ministry at Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit that reached a diverse congregation amidst the city's racial and labor tensions.
[00:25:32.880 --> 00:25:41.440] He was especially well known for his invective against Henry Ford and what he called Ford's model of welfare capitalism.
[00:25:41.440 --> 00:25:50.960] Niebuhr saw the line work as soul-crushing, and he criticized the social and moral costs of industrial efficiency.
[00:25:50.960 --> 00:25:59.200] He castigated Ford for creating this illusion that he cared for workers while perpetuating an oppressive work environment.
[00:25:59.200 --> 00:26:11.040] He really had Ford's number, this idea that if you paid line workers just enough that they could afford to shop at the company store, you'll just kick the can of revolution down the road.
[00:26:11.360 --> 00:26:21.360] Niebuhr was blistering towards Ford, describing him as a false prophet and likening the Ford Motor Company to a devouring god, Baal.
[00:26:21.680 --> 00:26:38.040] He also invited union organizers to speak at his church, so it wasn't all words, and you have to have, you know, real stones to do that in the 1920s in Detroit because Ford employed roving vigilantes and mercenaries to beat the shit out of union men whenever they met.
[00:26:38.680 --> 00:27:01.160] When Bonhoeffer first met Niebuhr at Union Theological, Niebuhr was writing Moral Man and Immoral Society, which came out in 1932, and that was his critique of both individual egoism and collective national pride, with an emphasis on human fallibility and the limits of moral idealism.
[00:27:01.160 --> 00:27:10.040] And as fascism ramped up in Europe, Niebuhr also moved away from pacifism and advocated for active military resistance.
[00:27:10.040 --> 00:27:25.080] The firebombing of Guernica by the Luftwaffe at the request of Franco in 1937 was his red line with regard to pacifism and whether it could adequately resist the fascists.
[00:27:25.080 --> 00:27:44.440] At Union, the influence of Marx's analysis of capitalist logic shone through in Niebuhr's seminars, but he also warned against what he described as communism's messianic promise, which he rejected as an insufficient substitute for grace.
[00:27:44.440 --> 00:27:57.720] Where he landed was on a concept that he called Christian realism, which is the belief that human nature is fundamentally sinful, but also free and morally responsible.
[00:27:57.720 --> 00:28:15.000] It reflected his experiences with the harsh realities of industrial toil in Detroit, with international crises, especially those following the First World War, but also the failures of idealistic approaches during that interwar period.
[00:28:15.600 --> 00:28:27.120] He called for active engagement and struggle against injustice while also keeping an awareness of human sinfulness, the risks of hubris, and the complexity of social and political realities.
[00:28:27.120 --> 00:28:32.000] He was like the OG anti-spiritual bypasser.
[00:28:32.320 --> 00:28:37.920] Now, Niebuhr's reading list for the course that Dietrich was enrolled in included W.E.B.
[00:28:37.920 --> 00:28:43.120] Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk, as well as the writings of James Weldon Johnson and Booker T.
[00:28:43.120 --> 00:28:44.400] Washington.
[00:28:44.400 --> 00:28:56.960] And this led at one point, a flummoxed Dietrich to challenge the elder man, asking, Is this a theological school or a school for politicians?
[00:28:57.600 --> 00:29:02.400] It was Bonhoeffer's fellow students who helped him answer that question.
[00:29:02.400 --> 00:29:09.440] One of them was named John Lazaire, a Frenchman who impressed Bonhoeffer with his staunch pacifism.
[00:29:09.440 --> 00:29:13.840] One night they went out to the movie house to watch All Quiet on the Western Front.
[00:29:13.840 --> 00:29:26.320] So here's a German and a Frenchman both studying theology in America, and they're sitting in a darkened theater watching their forebears slaughter each other, but also beg each other for forgiveness.
[00:29:26.960 --> 00:29:33.920] Bonhoeffer's most consequential friendship, however, was with Frank Fisher, a black seminarian.
[00:29:33.920 --> 00:29:37.200] Fisher was a graduate of Howard University in D.C.
[00:29:37.200 --> 00:29:42.720] and the son of the pastor of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
[00:29:42.720 --> 00:29:50.480] By the way, that's the same church that would be firebombed by Klan members in 1963, murdering four girls.
[00:29:51.120 --> 00:30:00.000] Union Theological assigned Frank Fisher to Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church as a pastoral intern for his fieldwork required.
[00:30:01.320 --> 00:30:12.040] And he invited his earnest but somewhat stiff new German friend to come on up with him for Sunday services, which were at 2:30 in the afternoon every Sunday.
[00:30:12.040 --> 00:30:19.720] Now, the sources don't say how they got there, but I can imagine them walking together about two miles uptown and to the east.
[00:30:19.720 --> 00:30:22.840] It would take an hour if they stopped for coffee.
[00:30:22.840 --> 00:30:34.200] They would have a lot to talk about in this morning of their lives, conversations I believe that helped them form their commitments and lock in their destinies as moral revolutionaries.
[00:30:34.840 --> 00:30:40.600] The services at Abyssinian Baptist changed Bonhoeffer's life.
[00:30:40.600 --> 00:30:44.680] He felt like he'd never known a thing about religion before.
[00:30:44.680 --> 00:30:52.520] The congregants were on fire with faith, he wrote in his journal, shouting and rejoicing in the worship and during the sermon, too.
[00:30:53.160 --> 00:31:00.440] Nothing like the churches he had known in Germany and the white Protestant churches he was discovering in New York.
[00:31:00.760 --> 00:31:06.680] Harlem Renaissance historian Reggie Williams offers a potent lens here.
[00:31:06.680 --> 00:31:19.560] He explains that Bonhoeffer arrived in America knowing and worshiping only the white Jesus of European institutions, the religious hero of Western empires.
[00:31:19.560 --> 00:31:39.720] But at Abyssinian, he met the black Jesus of the oppressed and could finally see a framework for how a living church could address the social ills that he had observed with increasing nausea from the ivory tower of his theological education in Berlin.
[00:31:40.040 --> 00:31:53.600] Once he started going to Abyssinian, Dietrich was hooked, and he quickly volunteered to teach Sunday school, and he started to run study meetings on weekday evenings, even though he was still working on his English.
[00:31:53.600 --> 00:32:00.560] Everything he saw at Abyssinian put Niebuhr's work of engaged religion into real life.
[00:32:00.880 --> 00:32:10.160] He found a community that was not merely religious, in his words, but they were real Christians, disciples of the Christ they worshipped.
[00:32:10.160 --> 00:32:18.720] It was from this that he developed his notion of a religionless Christianity lived out in daily life.
[00:32:19.040 --> 00:32:24.560] Also, every Sunday, he listened to the thundering sermons of Adam Clayton Powell the Sr.
[00:32:24.800 --> 00:32:36.640] He was the pastor at Abyssinian Baptist from 1908 to 1937, and he preached a this worldly Christian framework of social justice and the betterment of black lives.
[00:32:36.640 --> 00:32:51.120] This guy was active in the NAACP and the Urban League, and he advocated for black men during the First World War to abstain from enlisting so long as the community was denied full civil rights.
[00:32:51.440 --> 00:33:04.560] He railed against the ongoing persecution of Jim Crow laws in the Deep South, and he also rejected Booker Washington's accommodationist politics as the product of internalized racism.
[00:33:04.560 --> 00:33:16.880] And this deserves a pin because later in life, the question of how strongly one should oppose fascism and how much one should risk, it really defines Bonhoeffer's fate.
[00:33:17.520 --> 00:33:29.760] Powell's Jesus, in the words of Bonhoeffer biographer Charles Marsh, quote, wandered into distressed and lonely places to share the struggles of the poor as a friend and counselor.
[00:33:30.280 --> 00:33:43.320] As the Depression deepened through the 1930s, Abyssinian, under Clayton's directions, ran a free food kitchen and relief bureau that served thousands of meals and distributed food baskets.
[00:33:43.640 --> 00:33:59.080] It was watching this work unfold, along with Abyssinian's broader engagement with the Jim Crow South, that opened Bonhoeffer's eyes to the escalating persecution of Jews back at home in Germany.
[00:33:59.080 --> 00:34:06.120] And this convinced him that the church had a duty to lead the opposition against injustice.
[00:34:06.120 --> 00:34:18.200] It also became central to his life work in developing the concept of what he called costly grace that demanded active engagement and self-sacrifice in following Christ.
[00:34:18.200 --> 00:34:30.440] This concept was at the heart of his major theological work, The Cost of Discipleship, and it became the root of his later practical resistance to Nazism.
[00:34:31.080 --> 00:34:35.720] But it was way more than ideas that Bonhoeffer absorbed.
[00:34:35.720 --> 00:34:39.240] Here's an excerpt from the Marsh biography.
[00:34:39.240 --> 00:34:50.040] As early as October, Bonhoeffer had signed up for an outing to explore the neighborhood under the seminary's program called Trip to Negro Centers of Life and Culture in Harlem.
[00:34:50.040 --> 00:35:00.280] He compiled an extensive biography on the Negro through the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library, and he collected articles on the race issue.
[00:35:00.280 --> 00:35:06.920] Now, Bonhoeffer also immersed himself in the novels and literature of Black America.
[00:35:06.920 --> 00:35:19.040] The sources say he read Langston Hughes, and he was really taken by a poem called The Black Christ by the poet County Cullen, who was a leading Harlem Renaissance writer.
[00:35:19.360 --> 00:35:23.440] The poem echoes strange fruit.
[00:35:23.760 --> 00:35:40.000] God's glory and my country's shame, and how one man who cursed Christ's name may never fully expiate that crime till at the blessed gate of heaven he meet and pardon me out of his love and charity.
[00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:59.040] How God, who needs no man's applause, for love of my stark soul of flaws, composed, seeing it slip, did stoop down to the mire and pick me up, and in the hollow of his hand enact again at my command the world's supremest tragedy.
[00:35:59.040 --> 00:36:13.120] Until I die, my burden be, how Calvary and Palestine, extending down to me and mine, was but the first leaf in a line of trees on which a man should swing.
[00:36:13.120 --> 00:36:20.240] World without end in suffering, for all men's healing, let me sing.
[00:36:32.800 --> 00:36:41.200] I'm going to pause on that foreshadowing note of trees and men suspended between heaven and earth.
[00:36:41.200 --> 00:36:49.520] In episode two, I'll get into how Bonhoeffer brought all of that experience back to Germany.
[00:36:49.840 --> 00:36:51.040] Thanks for listening.
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