Special Issue: How the Black Churches of Harlem inspired Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Resistance to Adolf Hitler
How the Church must resist oppression
On this Sunday, the day before Donald Trump is to be inaugurated as President of the United States, I am thinking a great deal about Babylon. The results of the 2024 election has left Christians who have not been lured into the false idolatry of Trump and his “Make American Great Again movement” wondering how to act. With an administration destined to rule based on fear, discrimination, and greed; little good can be gleamed from the next few years. As I see it, America is about to go into occupation by a malevolent force. So now I ask myself how one choses to “live in Babylon.”
That I view a Trump Presidency like an occupation shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows me. My disdain for the nationalism that Trump espouses is long documented. My adult life is shaped by an opposition to ultranationalism and any efforts to “other” a collective community.
Trump’s racist ideology and his weaponization of hatred is a direct affront to any notion of Christian principles. I am firmly of the view that he is an unbeliever simply using Christian cover to push his influence. I laid this out most succinctly in my screed against the attacks on Haitian migrants in Ohio back in September of last year.
Trump’s false profession of faith is nothing new. Corrupt and evil leaders have often wrapped themselves in their nation’s flag and a cross to justify their misdeeds and machinations. Sadly, history all to common sees many Christians either fall for these false idols, or sees unscrupulous leaders turn to these men as a common ally against whatever “decadent” or “immoral” cultural trend they see at the moment.
Modern Evangelical leaders who grow close to Trump argue that its more important to stop “the left” and the “evils” of things like LGBT rights, women’s liberation, and other items that “erode” the natural order. While many Christian thought leaders have degraded themselves at the alter of Trump’s godless ideology, other Christians have stood against the MAGA movement - leading to fractures within the conservative religious ecosystem. Such a fracturing in the Christian community is not a historic first. It resembles events eerily and distressingly similar to those that occurred in Germany in the 1930s with the rise of National Socialism.
In Germany, the Christian Church saw many leaders align with Adolf Hitler. However, many also broke away and become part of resistance movements to the authoritarian state. With inauguration day tomorrow, I wanted to dedicate a special Sunday issue to easily the most famous and influential of these leaders - Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
I want to introduce you to a man who is considered one of the essential Christian thought leaders of the 20th century and who set a standard for Christian resistance amid unjust states.
In honor of the fact tomorrow is also Martin Luther King Day, I want to tell you about how Bonhoeffer’s profound NAZI opposition was heavily inspired NOT by his Germanic upbringing - but the Black Churches of the Harlem Renaissance.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Pastor
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born in 1906, is widely considered one of the central pillars of true Christian resistance to the NAZI movement in 1930s Germany. As a young Lutheran Pastor in Germany when Hitler was named Chancellor, he became not only a spiritual leader against National Socialism but also a hands-on member of resistance efforts. His writings are seminal works on Christian thought and how to live as a Christian in the modern world. His own personal journey on Christian ethics would lead him to taking a hands-on role in efforts to undermine the NAZI state.
Bonhoeffer would be an outspoken critic of Hitler from the first days of the Reich. He’d preach and write not only on the dangers of the cult of personality around Hitler, but was also an outspoken opponent of the anti-Semitism that, while already firmly entrenched in much of German society, would ramp up to deadly levels under Hitler’s rule. Two days after Hitler became Chancellor, Bonhoeffer would give a radio address warning about the dangers of Hitler’s cult of personality and his calls for a “glorious past.” The address would be suddenly cut off mid-broadcast.
Bonhoeffer called for direct action from the Church, warning that passive condemnation was not enough. In early 1933, a growing movement within the German protestant church, known as the Deutsche Christen, or German Christian movement, called for conforming church ideology to NAZI views. This included banning Jewish-blooded priests and outright removing the old testament. At this time, German churches were state apparatuses, with legal frameworks and elections. Bonhoeffer would be a major campaigner against the German Christian movement.
In an April 1933 pamphlet of Bonhoeffer’s, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” he rejected the anti-Semitic policies of the Reich. He also laid out the call for the Church to not merely be passive observers to injustice, but to take action. The essay laid out three key pillars for resistance to oppressive states and policies. One was to question the state’s legitimacy and not seed moral authority, two was to aid victims of oppression and injustice and…..
“the third possibility is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself”
The line “spoke in the wheel” has become a phrase synonymous with Bonhoeffer as a call to direct action. This has contradicted Christian thought in many instances, as Biblical passages will often call for adhering to state authority. The questions of when and how the church should intervene is a subject that Bonhoeffer himself struggled with. Here he had a clear sense of the potential need for involvement considering the gravity of the threat Hitler posed. While Modern Christian Nationalists have tried to co-opt Bonhoeffer’s “spoke” for their goals, Bonhoeffer relatives and scholars have denounced these efforts.
In July of 1933, elections for the re-organized German Protestant Church were held under the orders of Hitler, and the results saw pro-NAZI leaders win. This came as Hitler and NAZI leaders, while proclaiming respect for Christian thoughts, were avowed anti-Christians privately. Hitler saying once to Joseph Goebbels
“They will surrender their kind little deity to us. They will give up anything just to preserve their pitiful junk, ranks and incomes.”
As many Christian leaders went along with the NAZI takeover, lured in by calls for returns to conservative principles and away from the “decadence” of Weimar Germany, Bonhoeffer and other leaders resisted aggressively. Bonhoeffer, along with theologians Karl Barth and Hermann Sasse, were key leaders in the “Confessing Church” movement that resisted the NAZI state. In 1933 Bonhoeffer and Sasse would work on the “Bethel Confession” - which was a key document outlying opposition to the state involvement in the Church and rejecting the racial anti-Semitism of the time. Despite these efforts, the newly-NAZIFIED German Church would pass a series of anti-Semitic decrees and practices.
Bonhoeffer would resist the NAZI state through the 1930s and 1940s. He would travel in and out of Germany as a guest preacher and writer. Starting in 1935 he led an underground ministry in Finkenwalde - which trained Confessing Church pastors. When the state suppressed and shut down the ministry, Bonhoeffer would travel through east Germany leading underground seminaries that never stayed in one place. Bonhoeffer became so distrusted by the German state that he was eventually banned from Berlin by the Gestapo.
In 1939, with war looming and under constant harassment by the state, Bonhoeffer took up an offer to visit the United States and ride out the war. However, he quickly came to regret leaving and resolved to return, stating…..
I must live through this difficult period in our national history along with the people of Germany. I will 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 ... Christians in Germany will have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that a future Christian civilization may survive, or else willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization and any true Christianity. I know which of these alternatives I must choose but I cannot make that choice from a place of security.
Back in Germany, and with the outbreak of WWII, Bonhoeffer was barred from speaking in public or publishing. However, Bonhoeffer was eventually able to get a job in Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, thanks to his brother in-law, Hans von Dohnányi. This agency was home to many who wished to overthrow Hitler and became a major hotbed of spies for the allies. Bonhoeffer was able to secure a place on the claim that his wide ecumenical contacts would be of use to Germany. If it seems insane to think Bonhoeffer somehow got this gig, it should highlight how incompetent the NAZI leaders could be at times.
Bonhoeffer would use his post to become a spy, working to undermine the state from within. As Bonhoeffer and others got wind of deportation efforts against Jews, he and others worked to help people flee or go into hiding by securing funds and transports. He and others also worked to let the allies know of deportations. Through this position, Bonhoeffer was aware of the different plots to kill Hitler - most famously the bomb plot - which saw a suitcase bomb detonate under a table, wounding but not killing the Fuhrer.
While not directly involved in planning, he knew people involved in these efforts, so much so that his own mind knew he was a collaborator simply by working with those involved. Bonhoeffer, an avowed pacifist, wrote about the tribulation in his own ethics. Through his work as a spy, the full horrors of the Holocaust became well known to him. Regarding the issue of stopping Hitler via assassination possibly as a way to stop the war and the slaughter, Bonhoeffer still considered such action sinful even if its legitimate in a secular world
"When a man takes guilt upon himself in responsibility, he imputes his guilt to himself and no one else. He answers for it... Before other men he is justified by dire necessity; before himself he is acquitted by his conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace."
The theology here is as such: while in the secular world its perfectly reasonable to be part of the bomb plot against Hitler, it is still a sinful act. However, the faith of Christianity is one of a graceful God, who offers salvation to those who seek it. This is an important clarification because some who site Bonhoeffer will incorrectly state he renounced pacifism or felt God called on him to take violent actions. NONE of that is the case. Bonhoeffer remained firmly committed to the “Costly Grace” he laid out in his wittings - that Christians are called to a higher standard.
Bonhoeffers efforts as a spy led to his arrest in April of 1943. He’s remain imprisoned for two years; writing on Christian thought while in jail. Sympathetic guards smuggled writings out - which are now collected under the book “Letters and Papers from Prison.” Bonhoeffer would eventually be implicated in the plots against Hitler, though to this day his exact knowledge and involvement remains debated, and his execution was ordered. With just weeks before the collapse of the NAZI Reich, Bonhoeffer was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 4th, 1945. In the days leading to his execution, he told fellow prisoner Sigismund Payne Best to relay a message to his friend, fellow pastor George Bell…
"This is the end—but for me it is the beginning of Life!"
Bonhoeffers death makes him one of the seminal Christian martyrs of the last several centuries. His writings and actions have served as key inspiration for resistance movements to state oppression; while also challenging readers on how they conduct their own lives.
What many do not know about Bonhoeffer, however, is how much his views were shaped by his time in the Black Churches of Harmen. In 1930 the young man spent a year in New York City for a fellowship. His time in the Black Churches during the Harlem Renaissance were instrumental in further shaping his religious worldview. Without them, we likely don’t have the Bonhoeffer we got.
That renaissance, however, only comes about due a massive wave of Black residents into the New York City area.
Racial Violence and the Great Migration
When Bonhoeffer showed up in Harlem in 1930, he was coming to an area undergoing massive demographic and cultural changes. For two decades already, American was undergoing what has been termed “The Great Migration.” Over a period from 1910 to 1940, over One Million Black Americans left the American South, largely heading to the Northern cities. This was not only for job opportunities brought on by WWI and immigration slow-downs as a result, but also due to continued racial violence.
For almost all Black residents of the south, the best they could hope for was a life without violence but with little chance for advancement and legal barriers all around. Millions remained in indentured servitude on farms or worked below poverty wages in mills. There was little long-term economic future in the Jim Crow south.
Economic opportunities were critical for making the North a destination for Black citizens looking to leave the South. However, those opportunities beside, the violence and repression of Jim Crow cannot be overstated. Over eight decades, thousands of Black Americans were murdered in the south..
Whether it was the lynching of a single individual, or mass-attacks like the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 or the burning of Black Wall Street of 1921; violence was used to terrorize Black residents and “keep them in line.” With the Ku Klux Klan re-emerging as a formal force in the 1910s, Black Americans continued to seek ways to escape.
To go ahead and put a Florida spin on this, we can see the effects of the Great Migration in the Big Bend. This region of counties was well over 60% Black before the outbreak of WWI - a legacy of the slave plantations that covers North Florida before the outbreak of the Civil War. Florida would experience a population boom around the time of WWI and through the 20th century. However, in the Big Bend from 1910 to 1940, while the white population had a NET increase of 25 thousand people, the Black population declined by 4 thousand.
Counties like Liberty, home to Klan influence and lack of opportunities to advance, saw its Black population decline by more than 50%. Jefferson saw the largest raw decrease of 5,000 Black residents. Even as some counties saw an increase, this was far outpaced by white resident increases - reflecting these counties just seeing broader population booms due to work. Over this period, every county got less Black as a %, with the Big Bend becoming majority white by 1940. Every county has its own story of reasons or Black residents leaving. The long-term trend was that today Gadsden is Florida’s lone majority-Black county.
Black Americans fled the south in droves. Many would go to Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, and of course… New York City.
The Harlem Renaissance
The Great Migration out of the South saw Black residents make homes in many Northern cities. One of these many destinations was the Harlem community of upper Manhattan. This area had originally been a site of middle class white neighborhoods, but a “white flight” of sorts took place as European immigrants flocked into the area. (They weren’t the “right kind” of white). The neighborhood became more heavily Black around the 1910s and through WWI. Black realtor groups and churches sought to buy up land and property to give Black residents a stable place to put down roots.
While we know the Harlem Renaissance well for the arts and culture it inspired, as well as the rise of a new generation of Black political leaders, the role of religion cannot be overstated. Religion was a major driver in the Black community since the days of slavery and this never wavered. Church was a critical part of social life in Harlem, and one of the most famous churches of that community was Abyssinian Baptist Church.
Abyssinian Baptist Church had a long and rich history dating back in 1808. Its name stems from its origin, which saw Ethiopian seamen and free African-American parishioners leave the First Baptist Church of New York over segregated seating. A new Church and Congregation would operate in lower and midtown Manhattan for the next century at different locations.
It was in 1920 when lots on the current church site in Harlem were purchased by the leadership - with members tithing to raise the funds for construction of a new church and community center. This effort was spearheading by Adam Clayton Powell Sr, who turned Abyssinian into the largest Protestant congregation in the country, with 10,000 members Powell is a major historic figure in Black Christian and Black political history. His son, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., would take over as leader of Abyssinian in 1937 and in 1945 would become the first Black man elected to Congress from New York.
The religious experiences in Harlem were very different from what Bonhoeffer would experience in Germany. For as long as Christian faith had moved through the slave communities, the suffering of Christ was put at the forefront of the lessons. The Black Christian experience was one of understanding the sufferings of Christ and seeing his persecutions in the downtrodden of modern society.
Bonhoeffer scholar Reggie Williams sums this up perfectly in his book, “Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus” - You can get that book here! Excellent read.
In Harlem, African American Christians embraced the story of Jesus, the crucified Christ, whose death they claimed paradoxically gave them life, just as God resurrected Jesus in the life of the earliest Christian community. […]Bonhoeffer found Christ existing as community where historically marginalized and oppressed black people knew Jesus as cosufferer and the gospel spoke authoritatively into all areas of life. Such a Christian experience left its mark on him.” (pages 25-26)
The Black Churches and their focus on the suffering of Christ stood in stark contrast to the nationalistic Christianity that Bonhoeffer had been raised in.
Bonhoeffer: Raised in “The Volk”
The religious experience Bonhoeffer would walk into in Harlem was very different from his own theological education. While Harlem flourished under a Christ-centric Christianity, Bonhoeffer was educated in the standard nationalistic German Christian ideology of the time; an ideology that downplayed Christian ethics and Jesus while inflating nationalism. This upbringing results in a very different Bonhoeffer from the one most well known today. As the “Searching for Bonhoeffer” podcast so perfectly summarizes
He did not start out the hero people remember as the NAZIs executed him after being apart of an assassination plot. No he’s just as woven into that nationalistic fever of post world war Germany. He has expand his imagination to get to the point of someone so many of us find admirable.
Bonhoeffer’s family was not the type to ever go along with the race hatred of Hitler and his supporters, but they still subscribed to a more moderate German nationalistic sentiment that was widespread for the time. Dietrich’s brother, Walter, had died in WWI, a moment that shattered his parents. At the time Dietrich was just 12 years old. This left the family, like much of Germany, resenting the eventual peace that came and the “humiliation’ Germany had suffered.
Bonhoeffer resolved to become a theologian when we was just 14. He had a curious and kind mind, BUT his early education was shaped by the Nationalistic sentiments of German Christianity that emphasized the providence of the Germanic people. This was not just a popular ideology, it was basically state policy. The church system Bonhoeffer was raised in was one where the state oversaw churches and tax dollars went to these institutions.
This state-sanction Christian sentiment was guided by a belief of God ordaining nationalities - or Volk - in different hierarchical levels. Bonhoeffer, like others, would bristle at Germany’s WWI defeat and believed nations had rights to secure glory.
“In 1929, when he had just finished his graduate studies, he had based his concrete ethics on nationalism, like other Lutheran theologians who ended up supporting Hitler. He claimed that God had ordained the nation-state to guide us in politics, war and economics. In our social responsibilities, we should not follow Jesus but the realities of German politics.” (Kingdom Ethics, p.126)
Bonhoeffer was simultaneously a man who recognized an important sense of common humanity, but was also still blinded by his own nationalistic education. While Bonhoeffer would go to Rome and befriend Catholic leaders, as well as go to North Africa and come to enjoy spending time discussing faith with Muslims, he still was bound to a notion of “Volk” and a loyalty to “your people” more so that trying to follow the command of Christ.
In 1928 and 1929, already finished with his dissertation, Bonhoeffer preached and lectured in Barcelona, Spain. A lecture of his titled Basic Questions on Christian Ethics laid out that it was the right of nations to seek glory and success. Not only this, it was evil to oppose your own nation in success. God was framed as the “Lord of History” - a notion tied in with nationalistic sentiment that God had plans for nations and as such wars of expansion and glory were divinely justified.
This sentiment of Bonhoeffer’s, which he would roundly reject in just a few years, came from German theology students being taught that the words of Christ were NOT meant to be taken literal. Ethics, in any Christian sense, did not exist. In his lecture, Bonhoeffer stated “Christianity and Ethics have absolutely nothing to with each other. There is no Christian Ethic.” This sentiment, that the ideal ethics of Christ are not applicable to modern problems, may sound similar to how modern Christian nationalists talk. This was what Bonhoeffer was taught in and for a good deal of time believed.
However, Bonhoeffer wrote at the time that he felt great conflict and unfulfillment in his Christian teaching and writing at the time. Years later, Bonhoeffer would say of this time
"I plunged into my work in a very unchristian way, quite lacking in humility. I was terribly ambitious, as many people noticed, and that made my life difficult and kept from me the love and trust of people around me. I was very much alone and left to my own devices; it was a bad time. Then something happened which has tossed about and changed my life to this day. For the first time I discovered the Bible. Again, that’s a bad thing to have to say. I had often preached, I had seen a great deal of the church, spoken and written about it – but I had not yet become a Christian.
Feeling aimless and unhappy, Bonhoeffer took up the opportunity with to travel to America as a fellow with the Union Theological Seminary
Bonhoeffer: Finding the Black Christ
Bonhoeffer arrived in New York in the fall of 1930. This was part of a one year fellowship that would involve classes and preaching. Bonhoeffer hoped the trip would spark something within him.
Initially his first experiences in the program was not positive. He found the classes and the white churches of the area thoroughly uninspiring. The white churches worked to hold up modern class disparities and racial hierarchies. Little regard was given to Gospel lessons and instead the churches operated more as social clubs. As Bonhoeffer commented - “There is no theology here.”
It was through this fellowship, however, that Bonhoeffer would meet Albert Fischer, a Black preacher that came from the Jim Crow South. Fischer invited Bonhoeffer to Abyssinian Church, where he would be exposed to Clayton Powell and the Black Church services. Bonhoeffer was moved by the style worship, which saw loud singing, dancing, joy, and sorry - all tied around love for Christ. Bonhoeffer would state….
Here one can truly speak and hear about sin and grace and the love of God...the Black Christ is preached with rapturous passion and vision.
Bonhoeffer loved the experiences so much that he asked to teach Sunday school with the church. He was granted this request and would serve with the church for over six months. His experiences in Harlem shaped a new understanding of Christ and humanity. At this time he also became friends with another member of the fellowship, Frenchman Jean Lasserre - an avowed pacifist. It was Lasserre who pushed Bonhoeffer to focus more on the commandments Jesus Christ lays out in the Sermon on the Mount - which STUNNINGLY was not considered a critical component of German Christian thought at the time.
His time in Harlem saw Bonhoeffer exposed to the racial injustices of the American South. During his time, the “Scottsboro Boys” lynching took place. This incident in Alabama saw nine young black men accused of raping two white women. To avoid the headlines of a quick lynching, a show trial was conducted and executions carried out under the false veneer of legitimacy. Bonhoeffer was aghast at the events and wrote back home to Churches in Germany asking them to condemn such an injustice. The churches refused.
Bonhoeffer’s time in Harlem would radically reshape his faith. This was seen in a guest sermon he gave at a Methodist Church in Yonkers….
Come what may, let us never more forget, that our Christian people is the people of God, that if we are in accord, no nationalism, no hate of races or classes can execute its designs, and then the world will have its peace for ever and ever
Bonhoeffer was someone willing to take in new experiences and be moved by them. Its entirely realistic that other more hard-headed German nationalists would have scoffed at what Bonhoeffer saw. However, without these experiences, Bonhoeffer would almost surely not have been such a fast and quick anti-NAZI dissident. Like some other Church leaders that played along with the Reich for awhile, before rejecting it as years went on, Bonhoeffer was in opposition from the start. Years later he wrote about the importance of viewing events “from below”
“We have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short, from the perspective of the suffering.”
Bonhoeffer took away from Harlem the truth of Christianity as religion of the oppressed and the outcasts. A sentiment that reflects the actions of Christ himself in the New Testament.
“In Harlem, Bonhoeffer began learning to embrace Christ hidden in suffering as resistance to oppression. His new awareness of racism gave him unique insight into nationalism as the racialized mixture of God and country embodied in idealized Aryan humanity. […]Harlem provided what he needed to see the world differently and to imagine a different way of being a Christian within it.” (Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus, p.139)
The impact and importance of Harlem I believe is best summarized by this anecdote. One Sunday, after Bonhoeffer returned from a Sunday school session at Abyssinian Church, Myles Horton, another fellowship member, commented how emotional Bonhoeffer was as he described the day’s sermon and teaching.
Perhaps that Sunday afternoon, I witnessed a beginning of his identification with the oppressed which played a role in the decision that led to his death.
That death, while tragic in the human sense, still stands as one of the greatest Christian martyrdoms of the last several centuries. And as Bonhoeffer said - it was the end in one way, but it was also for him “the beginning of Life.”
May God be with us these next four years.
I really appreciate this essay.