I spent the better part of my academic career studying Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- his theology in its context, with the hopes of articulating a peace-making theology for the twenty-first century. I never intended that study to become pastorally relevant in our own historical context. But it's proven to be.
Today I made the claim that modern America looks nearly identical to Weimar Germany.
For those who don't understand the comparison, first some background.
The Weimar Republic was the short-lived experiment in German democracy between the great wars of the 20th century. It emerged from Germany's loss in World War I, and was brought to a crashing end by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. The Weimar period was marked by political, economic, and social instability, and intense cultural creativity as well as decadence. Weimar was time in which the center didn't hold, and extremism took over the imaginations of many Germans, especially the young.
Hear me clearly, here: I'm not saying America is exactly like the Weimar, but the parallels can't be denied. And must be understood.
The story of 1920s Weimar Germany is the story of a nation in crisis for meaning. The emerging liberal democracy of Weimar Germany couldn't resolve it. Weimar Germany struggled famously with economic crisis. Youth unemployment was through the roof. Young adults in Germany at the time had grown up in a popular culture that celebrated youth in an extraordinary way. They had been conditioned to think of themselves as special. Now, because of the Great War and the subsequent economic crisis, as well as the unavoidable ways that modern industrialization was breaking down stable economic order, they were faced with the disillusioning fact that there would not be a place for many of them in the economic order. The "cult of youth" in prewar Germany had filled the young with a sense of entitlement, and of high hopes for their future. Young men and women who had done all the right things as prescribed by German society now found themselves without hope.
Political extremists of the Left and Right stepped in to provide that meaning and hope. To give their followers a sense of power over the direction of their lives. And their cultural war between the sides had serious ramifications.
The parties of the Right and the Center strongly reacted against modernizing cultural mores, which were popularly associated with Americanization. The parties of the Left considered the resistance to social liberalization to be an intolerable attempt to restrict individual rights and liberties. Neither side was willing to compromise with the other. When they did compromise on legislation, neither side was satisfied, and kept the fight going. The elites ended by being totally discredited in the eyes of many Germans, making way for extremists.
There's no simple explanation for Hitler, but I believe he arose out of just such an environment. Every other industrialized nation felt the pains of modernization, but Germany felt it doubly hard (for historical reasons -- the War and its effects, hyperinflation, etc.). In other words, any country could have gone the way Germany went in the 20s, but those other nations -- including the United States -- had the internal resilience to handle modernization's pressures more-so than Germany. One example: In 1932, the US had 85 suicides per one million inhabitants. Great Britain and France, which had been savaged by the Great War, had, respectively, 133 and 155. And Germany? It had 260 suicides per million.
So what does all that have to do with U.S.?
The United States is now suffering beneath the failure of the success of liberalism (lowercase l). Much of the 60s political movements cut us loose from the foundations of classical politics, set to the tune of John Lennon's "Imagine". With no loyalties of any kind, that liberalism reduced the values that make for human thriving into an amorphous mob dreams -- dreams that cosmopolitanism and neo-conservativism have since attempted to exploit for their own uses. The death of a culture happens when normative commitments fail to offer ideals that we find compelling.
Just think of German Christianity. Why had the churches lost their power to speak meaningfully and counterculturally to the young Germans? If you want to understand Dietrich Bonhoeffer's rise in the 1920s and 30s as a pastor and theologian in Germany, ask just one question: What happens when Christianity doesn't offer real answers to the crises in the lives of real people, but has turned itself into intellectual abstraction, empty formalism, or feelgood-ism? (Folks ask why I'm so critical of the United States. That same question drives me.)
When religion atrophies, when families weaken, other forms of group identity will assert themselves. It really is no surprise to me that Donald Trump has developed the following that he's been able to cobble together. It's also not a surprise that younger generations of Americans have taken to protesting and activism with all the energy of a religious revivalism. Contemporary American folks in their teens and 20s live in John Lennon's utopia -- and they find it a nightmare. We all want a sense of belonging, a ground for a shared good and moral commitments that bring health and vitality for all of us. That "we" there is everyone -- Republican and Democrat. Thing is, they don't see that the divisions that drive us apart are working against the very desires of our hearts. What they want is some grand vision of "God, country and home" (as disgusting as that phrase is to my tongue, thanks to Hitler). Or, to put it another way, we all want to "make American great" -- we simply aren't sure how to accomplish that, or what "great" might even mean, because the powers that be that drive our vocabulary and our reasoning are working to prevent a common good at all.
If there's one good thing that Donald Trump has done, it's to shaken the foundations of power by the political elites. The GOP elites obviously have crumbled before him. And the 2016 election proved that the Democratic elites have been discredited.
But, again, is any of that sounding familiar in light of the story I told just a minute ago about the Weimar Republic in Germany?
Sooner or later -- more than likely, sooner, if German history is any indication -- somebody is going to find a way to radicalize all this. The middle class white Americans are already gravitating toward the neo-racist policies of a forgotten age. The point is: Watch these groups of disillusioned, disconnected and disheartened folks. Their hedonistic and individualistic society has failed them. Their families have collapsed. Their churches have been preaching a therapeutic moralistic deism for so long that there's no good-news there. So there are no institutions left with any moral power to stand up to anyone or anything that arises.
Give the United States just one unhealthy shove, head-first, into a major economic crisis, and something very, very ugly will happen. Nothing is inevitable -- even Germany could have avoided what happened in the 1920s and 30s, if it'd had the powers of strong institutions to resist the fascism of Nazism -- but I'm not so sure America will survive that major economic crisis. Adolf Hitler was able to gain control in Germany for all the reasons that someone will be able to do it in America.
What this means, of course, is that we're living in a tumultuous time in American history. For Christians, it means that we're already seeing a crisis in our houses of worship over what it means to confess Jesus as Lord but be asked to bend the knee toward political pressures that underwrite modern American nationalism. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoller and others knew about those pressures first-hand. The Confessing Church vs the German Christians happened as a result. So the question we should be asking is the question that drove Bonhoeffer's 1927 doctoral thesis: What does it mean to be called a "church"?
There are plenty of folks who want to tell me how to answer that question -- each of them with a degree of truth to their answers. But I suspect that some of those answers will come from perspectives that (willingly or unwillingly) want to supplant the power of a faithful answer. Which is why I'm fairly certain we're heading for a "Bonhoeffer moment" in the United States.
Today I made the claim that modern America looks nearly identical to Weimar Germany.
For those who don't understand the comparison, first some background.
The Weimar Republic was the short-lived experiment in German democracy between the great wars of the 20th century. It emerged from Germany's loss in World War I, and was brought to a crashing end by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. The Weimar period was marked by political, economic, and social instability, and intense cultural creativity as well as decadence. Weimar was time in which the center didn't hold, and extremism took over the imaginations of many Germans, especially the young.
Hear me clearly, here: I'm not saying America is exactly like the Weimar, but the parallels can't be denied. And must be understood.
The story of 1920s Weimar Germany is the story of a nation in crisis for meaning. The emerging liberal democracy of Weimar Germany couldn't resolve it. Weimar Germany struggled famously with economic crisis. Youth unemployment was through the roof. Young adults in Germany at the time had grown up in a popular culture that celebrated youth in an extraordinary way. They had been conditioned to think of themselves as special. Now, because of the Great War and the subsequent economic crisis, as well as the unavoidable ways that modern industrialization was breaking down stable economic order, they were faced with the disillusioning fact that there would not be a place for many of them in the economic order. The "cult of youth" in prewar Germany had filled the young with a sense of entitlement, and of high hopes for their future. Young men and women who had done all the right things as prescribed by German society now found themselves without hope.
Political extremists of the Left and Right stepped in to provide that meaning and hope. To give their followers a sense of power over the direction of their lives. And their cultural war between the sides had serious ramifications.
The parties of the Right and the Center strongly reacted against modernizing cultural mores, which were popularly associated with Americanization. The parties of the Left considered the resistance to social liberalization to be an intolerable attempt to restrict individual rights and liberties. Neither side was willing to compromise with the other. When they did compromise on legislation, neither side was satisfied, and kept the fight going. The elites ended by being totally discredited in the eyes of many Germans, making way for extremists.
There's no simple explanation for Hitler, but I believe he arose out of just such an environment. Every other industrialized nation felt the pains of modernization, but Germany felt it doubly hard (for historical reasons -- the War and its effects, hyperinflation, etc.). In other words, any country could have gone the way Germany went in the 20s, but those other nations -- including the United States -- had the internal resilience to handle modernization's pressures more-so than Germany. One example: In 1932, the US had 85 suicides per one million inhabitants. Great Britain and France, which had been savaged by the Great War, had, respectively, 133 and 155. And Germany? It had 260 suicides per million.
So what does all that have to do with U.S.?
The United States is now suffering beneath the failure of the success of liberalism (lowercase l). Much of the 60s political movements cut us loose from the foundations of classical politics, set to the tune of John Lennon's "Imagine". With no loyalties of any kind, that liberalism reduced the values that make for human thriving into an amorphous mob dreams -- dreams that cosmopolitanism and neo-conservativism have since attempted to exploit for their own uses. The death of a culture happens when normative commitments fail to offer ideals that we find compelling.
Just think of German Christianity. Why had the churches lost their power to speak meaningfully and counterculturally to the young Germans? If you want to understand Dietrich Bonhoeffer's rise in the 1920s and 30s as a pastor and theologian in Germany, ask just one question: What happens when Christianity doesn't offer real answers to the crises in the lives of real people, but has turned itself into intellectual abstraction, empty formalism, or feelgood-ism? (Folks ask why I'm so critical of the United States. That same question drives me.)
When religion atrophies, when families weaken, other forms of group identity will assert themselves. It really is no surprise to me that Donald Trump has developed the following that he's been able to cobble together. It's also not a surprise that younger generations of Americans have taken to protesting and activism with all the energy of a religious revivalism. Contemporary American folks in their teens and 20s live in John Lennon's utopia -- and they find it a nightmare. We all want a sense of belonging, a ground for a shared good and moral commitments that bring health and vitality for all of us. That "we" there is everyone -- Republican and Democrat. Thing is, they don't see that the divisions that drive us apart are working against the very desires of our hearts. What they want is some grand vision of "God, country and home" (as disgusting as that phrase is to my tongue, thanks to Hitler). Or, to put it another way, we all want to "make American great" -- we simply aren't sure how to accomplish that, or what "great" might even mean, because the powers that be that drive our vocabulary and our reasoning are working to prevent a common good at all.
If there's one good thing that Donald Trump has done, it's to shaken the foundations of power by the political elites. The GOP elites obviously have crumbled before him. And the 2016 election proved that the Democratic elites have been discredited.
But, again, is any of that sounding familiar in light of the story I told just a minute ago about the Weimar Republic in Germany?
Sooner or later -- more than likely, sooner, if German history is any indication -- somebody is going to find a way to radicalize all this. The middle class white Americans are already gravitating toward the neo-racist policies of a forgotten age. The point is: Watch these groups of disillusioned, disconnected and disheartened folks. Their hedonistic and individualistic society has failed them. Their families have collapsed. Their churches have been preaching a therapeutic moralistic deism for so long that there's no good-news there. So there are no institutions left with any moral power to stand up to anyone or anything that arises.
Give the United States just one unhealthy shove, head-first, into a major economic crisis, and something very, very ugly will happen. Nothing is inevitable -- even Germany could have avoided what happened in the 1920s and 30s, if it'd had the powers of strong institutions to resist the fascism of Nazism -- but I'm not so sure America will survive that major economic crisis. Adolf Hitler was able to gain control in Germany for all the reasons that someone will be able to do it in America.
What this means, of course, is that we're living in a tumultuous time in American history. For Christians, it means that we're already seeing a crisis in our houses of worship over what it means to confess Jesus as Lord but be asked to bend the knee toward political pressures that underwrite modern American nationalism. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoller and others knew about those pressures first-hand. The Confessing Church vs the German Christians happened as a result. So the question we should be asking is the question that drove Bonhoeffer's 1927 doctoral thesis: What does it mean to be called a "church"?
There are plenty of folks who want to tell me how to answer that question -- each of them with a degree of truth to their answers. But I suspect that some of those answers will come from perspectives that (willingly or unwillingly) want to supplant the power of a faithful answer. Which is why I'm fairly certain we're heading for a "Bonhoeffer moment" in the United States.