In 1932, a year prior to Hitler becoming chancellor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a letter to his grandmother in which he gave expression to the coming struggle:
It is becoming increasingly clear to me that what we are going to get is a big, völkisch [ethnic] national church that in its essence can no longer be reconciled with Christianity, and that we must make up our minds to take entirely new paths and follow where they lead. The issue is really Germanism or Christianity, and the sooner the conflict comes out in the open, the better. The greatest danger of all would be in trying to conceal this.
Bonhoeffer, Theological Education, 11
We, who are Christ people in the United States of America, face the same danger Bonhoeffer pointed to, a danger that has long been with us. The issue is Americanism or Christianity, idolatry of nation or worship of the “living and true God” (A phrase St. Paul used to contrast the worship of God to the idolatry of ourselves and our imaginings (our false and therefore dead gods). This issue has been especially true of a White American Christianity with its roots in European American religous history entangled with the establishment of a nation. One of the the outgrowths of this entanglement has been an ethnic nationalism in Christian garb. Beyond the American experience, to one degree or another, the history of Christianity has been a history of ethnonationalism.
In our idolatry of nation, we confuse and subjugate a form of Christianity to nationalist values and agendas. Historically, this has meant that scripture and Christian rationales have been used to support all manner of national decisions and positions: establishment of slavery, removal of indigenous peoples from their land, going to war, who can vote, etc.
A Christianity, subordinate to nationalist ideas, ends up with a distorted usage of its own concepts. As an example, Christians have often mixed American notions of liberty with Christianity. What does it mean, after all, that “if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” The clear meaning of the New Testament is that we are freed to love. In Christ, we are being freed from arrogance and egotism, so that we can experience and live out the unconditional love of God.
Freedom in Christ is not “freedom to do our own thing” in the sense of operating out of our attitudes, prejudices, lusts, and misplaced values. It is the freedom of the love of God which moves us out to others. Among other things, it moves us to care about the freedom of others to live out their own callings and purposes. This liberating love brings healing and deliverance to individuals and societies. It is about compassion (which means to “suffer with”) and mercy (which makes us available to the needs of others).
This unconditional love of God does not bully others. There is no looking for a political “strong man” to side with us. This love has us operating in quite the opposite way, as in St. Paul’s words, this love “is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth (1 Corinthians 13:4-6).”
This love does not judge and condemn others. Jesus, “God’s Anointed,” said he did not come into the world to condemn but to seek and to rescue the lost. He comes revealing God’s love for all.
A Christianity that worries over its own rights rather than the rights of others and seeks a dominant place in society that excludes others is not the Christianity of Christ. It is not expressive of Christ who goes out to all and ministers to all in whatever condition he finds them.
It is hard to imagine that Christ sought to have followers who would spend time trying to secure positions for themselves from which they could dominate and silence the voices of others. And yet this is the way of an ethnonationalist Christianity, for it simply borrows from the ways of a nation with a White supremacist history. Of course, it often does so without recognizing or acknowledging it. Sin incorporates blindness; it chooses blindness.
Far from having a special position and recognition in the world, Jesus let his followers know that (when they are truly following him) they would experience many trials from a world that runs from the God who is Love, a world that forms into clicks, parties, nations, and alliances that prepare for war. In the New Testament, Christians are called out of this kind of world and way of operating.
A Christianity that seeks dominance in the world joins itself to the way the world operates. It takes on the idolatries of the world and its nations. It loses spiritual discernment and therefore loses a witness to Christ. It ends up witnessing to the power of egotism and bullying. It gloats in having supremacy over others rather than serving others. And it adds to the divisions. Rather than, in Bonhoeffer’s words, being a “people for others,” it becomes a people for itself, its religion, and underlying that, its ethnicity.
There clearly is a conflict between an ethnonationalist Christianity and a Christian identity that is being formed in Christ. Growing “in Christ” increasingly frees us from the idolatry of nation, ethnicity and dominance. It frees us to serve others across all self-serving, fear-creating boundaries, for we have entered a life, in Christ, which chooses love over hate, mercy over judgment, peace over war.
Furthermore, in Christ, we have come to acknowledge our broken condition, a condition we share with all humanity. As we grow in this knowledge, we realize we are in no position to be self-righteous and condemning of others.
We also know that nothing about this radical brokenness we experience changes without the transforming grace and mercy of God and that, while we undergo a spiritual conversion, we remain broken. We are on a path of being healed with the knowledge that God is not through with us.
We also recognize others who are undergoing this foundational change and spiritual reorientation. We join with them that we might grow in this reality together. (Some may have no explicit relationship to Christianity whose encountered forms they may have had good reason to flee, but who nevertheless experience the “Christ reality” of “letting go” and trusting themselves to grace and love.)
With this change in our lives and knowing the source of the change, we realize that we must acknowledge and witness against a false Christianity—one we may have been caught up in. We must confess the sin of an idolatrous White supremacist and nationalist Christianity. In Christ, we are coming to know it by its fruit. And, in Christ, there is forgiveness and a new way to walk in.
We must bear witness against this false Christianity, not only for the sake of those who know little or nothing of the Christ reality, but for the sake of those who have come to be in Christ, but who are attached to churches that have radically melded together a form of Christianity with an idolatry of nation and race.
We encourage siblings in Christ, in the nationalist churches of our land, to exercise discernment regarding their church leaders. They will know them by their fruit (which includes their messages). The Spirit will help them recognize what is of Christ and what is not. The Spirit will help them to recognize what messages appeal to their own idolatries and what messages liberate them from their idols. We are all responsible for exercising discernment empowered by the Spirit.
We must discern and then give witness to what God reveals to us.