Why some say an anti-Nazi pastor executed by Hitler has become a hero to today’s White Christian nationalists
By John Blake, CNN
(CNN) — He had just finished leading a worship service when two Gestapo agents approached him. “Prisoner Bonhoeffer — get ready and come with us,” one of them ordered.
It was April 8, 1945, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew what their summons meant. Berlin had been reduced to rubble. Adolf Hitler had retreated to his underground bunker. The Allied and Russian armies were closing in on what was left of the Nazi regime.
But Bonhoeffer knew there would be no rescue for him. He was driven to a nearby concentration camp and held overnight. At dawn, the guards took him from his prison cell and ordered him to strip. They marched him naked to the place of execution, and before climbing the steps to the gallows, Bonhoeffer paused to pray.
“This is the end — for me, the beginning of life,” he reportedly said. A prison doctor who witnessed the execution described Bonhoeffer’s final moments this way:
“In almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”
In at least one way, Bonhoeffer was right — another part of his life was just beginning. This week marked the 80th anniversary of his death. And the Lutheran theologian and pastor, who was executed that day for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler, has become one of the world’s most influential religious thinkers.
Bonhoeffer’s books such as “The Cost of Discipleship” are now considered Christian classics. Everyone from U2’s Bono to the late President Jimmy Carter have cited his influence. He’s also been the subject of critically acclaimed documentaries and a recent dramatic film, “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin,” whose poster shows him carrying a gun like an ecclesiastical version of James Bond.
There are many reasons why people are fascinated by Bonhoeffer. He was a brilliant theologian who took center stage at one of the most dramatic moments in history. One historian said, “Few theologians witnessed the juggernaut of Nazi depravity at closer range than Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
But Bonhoeffer is now being drawn into another battle today: the ongoing debate over White Christian nationalism.
Some of the world’s leading Bonhoeffer scholars and members of his family are warning that he’s being turned into a holy warrior for the White Christian nationalist movement, which uses religious language to cloak hostility to Black people and non-White immigrants while falsely claiming that the US is a Christian nation. One professor of religion has called the movement an “imposter Christianity.” Others argue that the recent Bonhoeffer movie “primes viewers for violence.”
Even conservative scholars and biographers argue the left is distorting their views on Bonhoeffer and ignoring the pastor’s stances on issues like abortion, which he considered murder.
While both the left and right have twisted Bonhoeffer’s views over the years, members of the far Christian right have taken that misappropriation to a dangerous new level, says Charles Marsh, author of “Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” They argue incorrectly that Bonhoeffer was never a pacifist and that he always supported certain types of political violence, Marsh says.
“The Democrats have become the Nazis, and the faithful German anti-Nazi pastors have become Trump Republicans — that’s a tortured reading of history,” Marsh says. “But it has been sold to many sectors of American Christian life as a meaningful reinterpretation of the Bonhoeffer story.”
The origins of today’s Bonhoeffer debate
Some scholars trace this phenomenon to Eric Metaxas, a conservative radio show talk host and the author of the 2009 book, “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy,” which became a New York Times bestseller. A 2024 letter from Bonhoeffer scholars argued that Metaxas “has manipulated the Bonhoeffer story to support Christian nationalism,” and that the German pastor’s story has been “increasingly used to promote political violence.”
The scholars were joined last year by some of Bonhoeffer’s living relatives, who released a statement accusing Metaxas, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, of misrepresenting Bonhoeffer as a fundamentalist evangelical.
They said that Bonhoeffer would never have “never … associated with far-right, violent movements such as Christian Nationalists and others who are trying to appropriate him today. On the contrary, he would have strongly and loudly condemned these attitudes.”
In an interview with CNN, Metaxas called the Bonhoeffer family statement “preposterous” and said his public comments on Bonhoeffer do not give people permission to engage in political violence.
“That’s insanity,” Metaxas says. “That makes me sick that people would say that. Anybody who knows me would know that I don’t believe that.”
Metaxas says the debate over Bonhoeffer’s legacy is not really about a clash between the left and right, but a reflection of how so many different people revere the pastor.
“When you’re dealing with somebody that is so amazing, because everyone agrees that he’s amazing, on some level it’s human nature to project your thinking on that figure.”
The German pastor has been used before to justify political violence
This debate about Bonhoeffer and violence may seem academic. But the German pastor has already been used to justify political violence in the US.
Far-right Christian activists carried out a wave of bombings, arsons and other attacks on reproductive health clinics in the 1980s and early 1990s. Paul Hill, who was executed for gunning down a Florida clinic doctor and a volunteer in 1994, cited Bonhoeffer in viewing the attacks against clinics as a way of preventing a holocaust. A militant anti-abortion group, Missionaries to the Preborn, also likened Hill to Bonhoeffer.
In 2005, Christian televangelist Pat Robertson invoked Bonhoeffer in calling for the assassination of foreign leaders such as Saddam Hussein.
Many Christian nationalists do not condone violence. Yet the movement was deeply involved in a dramatic example of recent political violence: the January 6 insurrection, during which four people died and more than 100 police officers were injured. A 2024 national survey found that 38% of Christian nationalism adherents agreed with the statement, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may need to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
The Christian nationalist movement also shares many beliefs with far-right extremists who cite Bonhoeffer to justify violence, including the notion that Christians are being persecuted.
Bonhoeffer scholars and relatives warn the German pastor is being transformed by varied sources — filmmakers, Metaxas’ writings and statements, and essays from conservative scholars evoking Bonhoeffer to support the MAGA movement — into a Christian nationalist warrior. In their statement last year, the scholars warned that the German’s life and work are increasingly being used to make “false and menacing equations between our present time and the totalitarian Nazi regime. These dangerous narratives are cause for our deep concern.”
Some far-right Christians may also feel emboldened to engage in political violence because Trump inspires an almost messianic devotion among them, says Stephen R. Haynes, author of “The Battle for Bonhoeffer: Debating Discipleship in the Age of Trump.”
He says those far-right Christians may do what others did in the past: cite Bonhoeffer and call their use of violence a “Bonhoeffer moment,” a decision to employ political violence for righteous purposes.
“What happens if the Supreme Court does not agree with ‘God’s anointed’ (Trump)? People are going to oppose it and call it spiritual warfare,” Haynes says. “At some point, spiritual warfare becomes non-spiritual warfare — and that’s scary.”
The debate over Bonhoeffer and political violence takes on added urgency today because of another development: Trump’s recent decision to pardon nearly every rioter who took part in the Jan. 6 attacks. Several extremism experts fear political violence from far-right Christian groups and individuals will be seen as more acceptable in American life because of Trump’s pardons.
Bonhoeffer was an unlikely hero
There was little in Bonhoeffer’s background to hint he’d become a Christian martyr or the subject of ferocious religious debate. He was born into an affluent German family that was not particularly religious. His father was an eminent psychiatrist, and he enjoyed a pampered upbringing: When he told his family at age 13 that he wanted to be a theologian, some of them scoffed at his choice and argued the church was irrelevant.
“In that case, I shall reform it,” Bonhoeffer said in an account taken from one biography.
The bespectacled, bookish Bonhoeffer was a man of refinement whose natural reserve could be interpreted as arrogance, says Marsh, the biographer. He wore elegant suits, drove a convertible and was an intellectual prodigy who earned his doctorate at 21. (Karl Barth, a famous theologian, read Bonhoeffer’s dissertation and said it was a “theological miracle.”)
“He loved life,” Marsh says. “He loved to talk about classical music and literature. He loved to hike and would take long, lush vacations to the North Sea and Baltic Sea.”
Bonhoeffer traveled to US in 1930 and studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He was transformed by his friendship with a Black classmate, and by the time he spent at Abyssinian Baptist Church, a historic Black church in Harlem. He came back to the US in 1939, and as war loomed in Europe, he was advised to sit out the war in America. But he returned to Germany.
“I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany,” he wrote. “I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”
How Christian nationalism swept Nazi Germany
When Bonhoeffer returned to Germany, he encountered a German church that had largely capitulated to the Nazis. Swastika flags adorned the outsides of churches. And the Nazis reinvented Jesus as a muscular Aryan hero who fought Jews.
“By the mid-1930s you could not be a minister in the German church unless you were a member of the Nazi party,” Marsh says. “Baptism rituals would include phrases like ‘May this child grow up to honor the glory of our Lord and our Fuhrer.’ ’’
The German people were psychologically primed for the linking of a militant Christianity with Nazi ideology, historians say. They had been humiliated by their defeat in World War I and the Treaty of Versailles’ punishing terms, along with a devastating depression. Many were alarmed by what they deemed as the spread of permissive sexual attitudes in Germany.
“The promise made by Hitler was to bring the nation out of the disgrace of the Treaty of Versailles, to be God’s great and chosen nation above all of the other nations,” Marsh says. “It was only a matter of time that that theologians and pastors began to reinterpret the Christian story for the story of Germany.”
Germany’s Christian leaders helped legitimize Hitler, says Haynes, author of “The Battle for Bonhoeffer.” They allowed themselves to believe that Hitler was a pious man chosen by God. And Hitler encouraged their adoration by posing for photographs as he left church and prayed. German church leaders described Hitler as “the instrument of God” and “the liberator of our people from their spiritual misery and division.”
Bonhoeffer didn’t try to reconcile his faith with sanctioning violence
But Bonhoeffer refused to submit to Hitler. He denounced the Nazi Party from the church pulpit. He preached about the dangers of making an idol of a political leader or a nation. He became peripherally involved in an operation to smuggle Jews out of Germany. The Nazis banned his books and barred him from lecturing and preaching.
What Bonhoeffer did after embracing those forms of nonviolent resistance remains controversial today. He supported a plot to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer did not carry a gun or plant a bomb — in fact, he had remained imprisoned by the Nazis for more than a year before the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt — but his decision seemed to mark a dramatic departure from Jesus’ injunction to love one’s enemies and his renunciation of political violence.
So how did Bonhoeffer reconcile his faith with his support for an assassination?
He didn’t, say Bonhoeffer scholars. They say he didn’t try to offer a theological justification for what he did. Although he saw Hitler as an evil that must be stopped, he struggled with the idea that he was betraying his calling, scholars say.
“Bonhoeffer believed that if he joined the conspiracy, he would rightly sacrifice his ordination as a minister of the Word of God,” says Mark DeVine, author of “Bonhoeffer Speaks Today: Following Jesus at all Costs.”
It may be easy to critique Bonhoeffer’s decision from afar, but consider what he was facing: The Nazis were murdering Jews in concentration camps, DeVine says.
“The clock was ticking, the atrocities piling up, and so Bonhoeffer had to make a decision fast.”
His ultimate victory
Time soon ran out for Bonhoeffer as well. The accounts of his last days say he faced the end of his life with courage and conviction. While in prison, he continued to write books, read Plutarch, and preach sermons to fellow prisoners. In one letter from prison, he wrote:
“I have never regretted my decision in the summer of 1939 to return to Germany… If I were to end my life here in these conditions, that would have a meaning that I think I could understand.”
What many fail to understand today is why Bonhoeffer didn’t survive. Why did the Nazis order his execution just two weeks before the war ended?
Todd Komarnicki, the writer-director of last year’s “Bonhoeffer” film, has a theory. Komarnicki says he objected to a poster for his film depicting Bonhoeffer carrying a gun, and that his movie does not endorse Christian nationalism.
“Hitler hated Bonhoeffer for ages and wanted to kill him but his closest advisors always no, this guy is beloved. You cannot take him out. He’s well-known,” Komarnicki says. “Everything is closing in on Hitler and he gets one last opportunity, and he signs a blanket of execution statement for loads of people. I’m sure that he personally underlines Dietrich’s name.”
It’s easy to think of what Bonhoeffer could have become if Hitler hadn’t had his way. He could have married his fiancé (most believed he died celibate) and gone on to even more renown, his abundant intellectual gifts burnished by his heroic resistance to Hitler.
Komarnicki sees it another way.
“If Dietrich had lived and gone to the countryside and written 10 more books and raised kids, we wouldn’t be making a movie about him,” he says. “Hitler thought he won the day and Dietrich lost. But it was Dietrich who won, and Hitler who lost.”
There will likely be more movies and books about Bonhoeffer. He is honored with a statue in London’s Westminster Abbey, where his likeness stands alongside other Christian martyrs such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. His life is a magnet that draws people from all sorts of religious and political backgrounds.
But there could be a dark twist to his story in the years ahead.
If Bonhoeffer’s example is used to justify more far-right Christian violence in America, that would be another tragedy — and a cruel irony that would stain the legacy of a man who gave up everything to confront a tyrant.
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