Learning from the failed Confessing Churches

Two days before this week’s catastrophic election, I was asked to do a Q&A with a church that utilized my book as the basis of a sermon series on Jesus’ teaching “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.”

We talked about what it meant to be an enemy to a political “other,” spiritual truth and religious hypocrisy, and I did an introduction to Anabaptism. But then we got to a question that I found intriguing:

Whoever wins, half of the nation will think the other half is their enemy whatever the results. How do we engage with people who voted differently than we did?

I could hear that question ringing into the future. I hoped Harris would win. I left everything on the court to assure Trump would not be elected. And I know this is a racist, sexist country mired in forgetfulness. I asked our intern to plan a post-election prayer service for our church a month ago, sensing this outcome was possible.

I also found the question difficult to answer. When I speak to churches, it isn’t unusual for me to hear them describe partisan factions, both of whom believe they are correct, as the source of our division and animosity. These partisan structures then show up in the church and replicate the exterior divisions. What we need is a way to bring these groups together in worship and conversation under the banner “Jesus is Lord,” which will reveal a new form of life called the church that is neither left nor right.

I think some of this is true but I want to dig down a bit on this claim, and I suggest it would be good idea for all of us to do so before Jan 20, 2025 – the day Donald Trump, an authoritarian, convicted felon, sexual abuser who incited a riot on the Capitol, promised to mass deport both legal and undocumented migrants, to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, end the healthcare of millions of Americans (including my family!), arrest his political opponents, encouraged the murder of journalists, draconian discrimination of trans people, and deploy the US military on US citizens through mass arrest and imprisonment becomes the duly elected President of the United States of America.

Since 2016, the center-right, both inside and outside the church, produced an astounding number of organizations to foster dialogue between the “right” and the “left.” Braver Angels, People’s Supper, Colossians Forum, Untying Knots. And I’ve been skeptical about these movements from their inception. I believe in “understanding where people are coming from” but I am not convinced that interpersonal relationships are enough to dismantle the structural power that keeps enmity in place. But I find it more distressing to describe multi-racial, coordinated efforts working towards community safety and protection in a white supremacist country as “siloed” and “only listening to people who believe what they believe.” At my most honest, I think many people who participate in these programs want to soothe the emotional toll of loving people whose politics they find unconscionable.

I saw a similar sentiment growing in white churches after 2016, an interpretation of “Jesus is Lord” that preserves unity without making political claims or taking action in the world that could splinter these difference. I believe these churches have the best intentions in mind, but I am also wary. I want to turn to the lesson of the rise and fall of the Confessing Churches in Germany as a warning as to why this model of church life will not be enough to sustain our witness in the years to come.

The Confessing Churches were a minority movement in the German church that formed out a shared desire to resist the Nazi regime takeover of the German Church. Members of these churches gathered in Barmen, Germany to affirm the Barmen Declaration, a statement of shared convictions that countered the Nazi platform of “positive Christianity” and heralded an Aryan church.

The Confessing Church has been a significant source of symbolic resistance to churches at odds with tyrannical governments. But it’s also important to be honest about the result. The movement didn’t last long. The churches divided into factions. While several pastors remained outspoken against the Nazi regime, one by one, the confessing churches were absorbed into Christian irrelevence. How could this happen? What went wrong?

Victoria Barnett wrote about the rise and fall of the confessing church, and her assessment of what this happened is instructive for us here on the doorstep of a second Trump presidency. She explains that one feature of Barmen was repudiation of the Nazi state’s interference in the church’s business. Barmen declared independence from all “ideological and political convictions” and instead pledged to hold to the historic confessions and Scriptural truths of the Bible. They also took the step denounce the state’s overreach of power, a specific counter to the Third Reich. But Barmen did not condemn Hitler or even name him.

Barnett describes Barmen as a “potential” statement of political resistance that went mostly unrealized because the statement was read by the participating churches in two directions. The first was a retreat from the politics of the world to a church of inward spiritual fortitude. The second way to read Barmen was as an outward challenge to the state. The “inward” position made what Barnett calls a fatal mistake of believing the church could simply go about its business of being faithful in the midst of Nazi Germany, yet this became the most widespread interpretation of the declaration.

One of the people at the margins of the majority interpretation was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By the time Bonhoeffer returned to Germany from his post in London, the churches of Barmen were crumbling over the inward/outward interpretation. Even the radical churches who formed a counter to the Confessing church at the Dahlem synod were first and primarily committed to keeping their church from splitting and avoiding confrontation with the state. These churches opted for behind the scenes, diplomatic solutions in the shadows of the gas chambers. In the end almost every pastor trained in the illegal Confessing Church seminaries became a Nazi soldier. The Confessing Churches could not shake their anti-Jewish theology. Barnett describes the Confession Church record as “a shameful, tragic, sickening picture of cowardice and complicity in state violence.”

This returns me to Bonhoeffer, who, ironically, was not present at either Barmen or the Dahlem synod. Bonheoffer eventually turned his attention to secular interventions against Hitler but, according to biographer Charles Marsh, he only did so after the failures of the German churches to effectively organize against the Nazis. Because the Confessing Churches were more interested in securing their autonomy than countering Hitler, Bonhoeffer felt he had no choice but to look to those who were actively working to resist the Third Reich. Even then, he was deeply conflicted about that decision, never coming to resolution about the conflict between his pacifism and the perceived need to eliminate Hitler.

In the years to come, churches will need to be clear and committed to our convictions about the Gospel – with sustained urgency. One reason for this is that the coming years will require significant, consequential, and likely illegal actions to assure that vulnerable people in our communities are protected from the Trump administration. What will guide us in these days? A desire to hold the church together and avoid state confrontation, or the realization that “Jesus is Lord” will lead us towards coordinated and organized resistance of the powers that work against God’s beloved? I am planning a life, and counting the costs, for the latter.