{"id":4293,"date":"2024-06-07T14:47:55","date_gmt":"2024-06-07T18:47:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionqanda\/?p=4293"},"modified":"2024-06-09T12:44:19","modified_gmt":"2024-06-09T16:44:19","slug":"how-should-christianity-relate-to-politics-and-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionqanda\/2024\/06\/how-should-christianity-relate-to-politics-and-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"How should Christianity relate to politics and culture?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
<\/a>
Unimaginable: Nazis\u2019 Auschwitz death camp \/ Karsten Winegeart @ unsplash.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>
THE RELIGION GUY\u2019S ANSWER:<\/p>\n
The moving 80th<\/sup> commemoration of D-Day occurred six days after the barely-noticed 90th<\/sup> anniversary of the Barmen Declaration, one of the past century\u2019s most important religious documents. This anti-Nazi protest by German Protestants addresses the vital question of how churches should respond when dangerous social currents arise.<\/p>\n
The Declaration\u2019s authors could not have imagined that, as Britannica.com puts it, the coming decade would bring the \u201cdeadliest and most destructive war in human history\u201d and, with it, genocide that reduced Europe\u2019s Jewish population by some 6 million.<\/p>\n
Contemplation of Barmen is pertinent when, as with the dire situation in the Germany of 1934, disputes among Christians are central to the less threatened but still polarized America of 2024. Liberals accuse conservatives of corrupting the faith by embracing \u201cChristian nationalism\u201d or Donald Trump\u2019s political movement. Conservatives charge liberals with secularized infidelity on issues like sexual morality and abortion. The Left and Right are also tangling over Gaza and antisemitism much else.<\/p>\n
[Note: This article must focus on Protestants and leave aside the equally complex situation faced by Germany\u2019s Catholics.]<\/p>\n
Right and Left<\/h3>\n
The Barmen Declaration was issued on May 31 at an emergency synod in the German city of that name, by delegates who represented the range of Protestant churches. At the start of Nazi rule, they rejected the nation\u2019s long-developing, hard-right nationalism and antisemitism, and the left-wing Christianity that helped foster it. The Declaration insisted that God\u2019s truth, as clearly defined in the Bible and Christian creeds, is absolute and must take precedence over any cultural influences.<\/p>\n
An anniversary tribute by Gene Edward Veith of Indiana\u2019s Concordia Theological Seminary admits the Barmen text was \u201cnot perfect.\u201d In particular, it did not explicitly condemn Adolf Hitler\u2019s persecution of Jews, as in the earlier Bethel Confession, but that was the obvious precipitating reason for Barmen.<\/p>\n
The context: Fearful Germans, reeling from devastating political and economic chaos, gave the flagrantly antisemitic National Socialist party the largest vote in 1932 parliamentary elections. After infighting, Germany\u2019s president appointed the party\u2019s leader, Hitler, as chancellor, on January 30, 1933. That set up the Protestants\u2019 furious Kirchenkampf<\/em> (\u201cChurch Struggle\u201d) between the pro-Nazi \u201cGerman Christian\u201d (GC) movement and opposition \u201cConfessing Church\u201d (CC).<\/p>\n
The Nazis planned to co-opt Protestantism from within for their purposes, under leadership of a puppet bishop, and to boost nationalism by centralizing the loose confederation of 28 Lutheran, Reformed, and United regional church bodies. The GCs quickly organized their first rally in April. By September they managed to control a national Protestant synod, even though William Shirer estimated they represented only 3,000 of the nation\u2019s 18,000 Protestant ministers.<\/p>\n
No Jews Allowed<\/h3>\n
The synod sparked a walkout by approving a church version of the Nazis\u2019 notorious \u201cAryan Paragraph,\u201d which barred government and school employees, and their spouses, if they had \u201cJewish blood.\u201d By November, a prominent GC leader even urged removal of the Old Testament from the German Bible. Later on, GC churchmen would concoct a New Testament stripped of Jewish materials and claim that Jesus was \u201cAryan,\u201d not Jewish.<\/p>\n
In the mounting conflict, respected Lutheran clergyman Martin Niem\u00f6ller (1892\u20131984) organized the Pastors\u2019 Emergency League, which then summoned the CC\u2019s Barmen synod to champion authentic Protestantism. Participants included a young Lutheran theologian at the University of Berlin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), who was to become a hugely influential author.<\/p>\n
Barmen\u2019s prime personality was Reformed thinker Karl Barth (1886-1968), often considered the 20th<\/sup> Century\u2019s most important Protestant theologian. His \u201cNeo-Orthodoxy\u201d opposed sentimental \u201dpositive Christianity\u201d and contended that liberalism on the Bible and doctrine made weakened churches vulnerable to alien cultural influences like nationalism and antisemitism.<\/p>\n
The Barmen Declaration proclaimed that \u201cthe inviolable foundation of the German Evangelical Church is the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it is attested for us in Holy Scripture and brought to light again in the Confessions of the Reformation.\u201d It said the faith was \u201cgrievously imperiled\u201d by the \u201cdevastating\u201d teaching and administration under GC rule.<\/p>\n
\u201cFalse Doctrine\u201d<\/h3>\n
\u201cWe may not keep silent,\u201d delegates stated, in succinct language that affirmed what Christianity has always believed, and on that basis denounced as corrupting \u201cfalse doctrine\u201d these views:<\/p>\n
That there are \u201careas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords.\u201d<\/p>\n
That the Church \u201cwould have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and beside this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God\u2019s revelation.\u201d<\/p>\n
That the church is permitted to abandon its message to accommodate \u201cchanges in prevailing ideological and political convictions.\u201d<\/p>\n
That the State \u201cshould and could become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the Church\u2019s vocation.\u201d<\/p>\n
That \u201cthe Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that the Church \u2018should and could appropriate the characteristics, the tasks, and the dignity of the State, thus itself becoming an organ of the State.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hitler\u2019s Shift<\/h3>\n
Barth was fired by the University of Bonn in 1935 for spurning the required oath of allegiance to Hitler and moved back to his native Switzerland. By 1937, Hitler gave up on his effort to co-opt Protestantism and shifted to persecution of dissent. The Nazis soon arrested some 700 Protestant pastors and executed untold thousands of anti-Nazi operatives, including Bonhoeffer because he knew about the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler., Niem\u00f6ller spent years in concentration camps, but was among the Protestant resistance leaders who survived.<\/p>\n
The Declaration earned a permanent place in Christian history and, Veith writes, \u201carguably put a brake on\u201d the surging German Christians movement, which despite early success at the national level gradually fizzled and never managed to control Protestant grass-roots congregations.<\/p>\n
Resources on this crucial era in church history:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany\u201d (Princeton University) by Susannah Heschel.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945\u201d (Cambridge University) by Richard Steigmann-Gall.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich\u201d (University of North Carolina) by Doris Bergen.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Third Reich and the Christian Churches\u201d (Eerdmans), an anthology of relevant documents edited by Peter Matheson.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
THE RELIGION GUY\u2019S ANSWER: The moving 80th commemoration of D-Day occurred six days after the barely-noticed 90th anniversary of the Barmen Declaration, one of the past century\u2019s most important religious documents. This anti-Nazi protest by German Protestants addresses the vital question of how churches should respond when dangerous social currents arise. The Declaration\u2019s authors could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1275,"featured_media":4302,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[420,435,429,423,432,426],"class_list":["post-4293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-barmen-declaration","tag-bonhoeffer","tag-confessing-church","tag-german-protestants","tag-karl-barth","tag-nazism"],"yoast_head":"\nHow should Christianity relate to politics and culture?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"THE RELIGION GUY'S ANSWER: The moving 80th commemoration of D-Day occurred six days after the barely-noticed 90th anniversary of the Barmen Declaration,\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time\u00a0magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time\u00a0senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed personalities such as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, the late Mother Teresa, and the late Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths, as well as numerous ordinary believers. Ostling was the first correspondent regularly covering religion for a network TV newscast, working part-time with the PBS NewsHour\u00a0and airing CBS Radio religion reports for two decades. He and his late wife Joan coauthored Mormon America: The Power and the Promise (1999, revised 2007, HarperOne), which The New York Times Book Review praised as \"eminently fair\" and \"well-researched.\" Professional distinctions include a Pulitzer Prize nomination; \u00a0the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Religion Newswriters Association (for specialists in the general media), and religion writing honors from the American Academy of Religion, Episcopal Church, and Religion Communicators Council. In one MediaGuide edition, Ostling was the only Time staff member ranked among the nation's \"highest rated journalists.\" He is listed in Who's Who in America. 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