[Read all posts about Antifascist Theology by clicking here.]
When telling the story of America, where do you begin? Did the story of America begin in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence’s statement that “all men are created equal”? Or did it begin in 1619, when the first enslaved Africans were brought to our shores, ushering in the start of a decidedly unequal society built on the backs of marginalized people groups? The answer to that question has been hotly debated in recent years, and I don’t plan to address it today, except to say that “it’s complicated.” However, it is crucial that we do think deeply and critically about the past — the good, the bad, and the ugly. Real history requires the study of nuance, of complicated people groups doing complicated actions for complicated reasons.
In contrast, one of the hallmarks of fascism is an oversimplified, often mythologized celebration of a nation’s founding story, which may have little basis in fact. In the first century BCE, the Roman poet Virgil wrote The Aeneid , which linked the founding of Rome to the glorious heroes and demigods of the Trojan War stories. Virgil’s writings helped to prop up and justify the new order of the Pax Romana, the empire led by Caesar Augustus after the fall of the Roman Republic. All past evils and uncomfortable truths were washed away in the glow of the founding story.
Fascists over the centuries have followed suit. Mussolini linked his vision of Italian fascism to the Roman Empire, nearly 1900 years prior, while Hitler’s Nazis concocted a pseudoscientific story about “Aryans” that linked to Norse and Germanic legends. For both Mussolini and Hitler, these stories required a timeless villain that they described as the globalist, unrooted, corrupt, disloyal Jew. We all know what horrors would soon be justified by these fables.
Now, I don’t think there is anything automatically wrong with telling semi-mythical origin stories about one’s people group; humans have been doing it since the invention of language — see the Babylonian Enuma Elish, or the book of Genesis. To the extent that Americans are inspired by a fake story about George Washington chopping down a cherry tree tree, that is probably fine. However, it is bad when those stories are misused to justify evil, oppress marginalized groups, and/or to puff up a sense of false pride and supremacy. What’s even worse is when Christians, who ought to hold ourselves to a higher standard, refuse to acknowledge wrongs done and instead continue to justify sins and evil done in our nations.
So what is the answer? How can we as Christians move forward to tell the truth about previous generations, repent and make amends as needed, and pursue justice in our own time?
Bonhoeffer has much to say about this in his Ethics (pages 134-145), written in the 1940s under the specter of Nazi fascism. As I have written previously, while Bonhoeffer does not use this term, what he is essentially creating in Ethics is a work of antifascist theology. The tendrils of fascism have been creeping up in many places recently and we would be wise to heed Bonhoeffer’s warnings, lest we fall into similar errors.
Bonhoeffer’s Theology of Communal Guilt
I have written before about the idea of communal guilt and communal repentance. It is a deeply biblical idea, but in the West it is often ignored because we are overly focused on individual culpability. In contrast, as Bonhoeffer writes in Ethics, “The church today is [supposed to be] the community of people who, grasped by the power of Christ’s grace, acknowledge, confess, and take upon themselves not only their personal sins, but also the Western world’s falling away from Jesus Christ.” Even if we ourselves do not think we have done wrong, or have done very little, we still must confess: “Even the most secret sin of the individual soils and destroys the body of Christ. Murder, envy, strife, war—all arise from the desire that lies within me (James 4:1). I cannot pacify myself by saying that my part in all this is slight and hardly noticeable…I am guilty of inordinate desire; I am guilty of cowardly silence when I should have spoken; I am guilty of untruthfulness and hypocrisy in the face of threatening violence; I am guilty of disowning without mercy the poorest of my neighbors….what does it concern me if others are also guilty? Every sin of another I can excuse; only my own sin, of which I remain guilty, I can never excuse.”
Bonhoeffer points out that this is not merely something to be confessed by individuals for themselves, but by Christians on behalf of the whole church. “The church was mute when it should have cried out…the church has looked on while injustice and violence have been done, under the cover of the name of Christ.”
Bonhoeffer shares a litany of sins of which the German church was guilty. How many of these are similarly true of the American church today?
- Using the language of “resisting Bolshevism [communism]” to legitimize violence against leftists
- Not resting on the Sabbath
- Exploiting working people beyond the hours of the workweek
- Disrespect towards elders
- Not speaking out against the arbitrary use of brutal violence
- Looking on silently while the poor are exploited, and the strong were enriched
- Not condemning slanderers who tell lies about other people
Clearly, all of these sins have both individual and communal manifestations. In our day, one person’s private sinful inclination can quickly become very mainstream — witness the rise of slander as we share unfounded conspiracy theories and lies on social media — “Oh I’m just asking questions; it’s my freedom of speech.” Or witness the coarse joking of Christians who eagerly express the not-so-hidden desire to kidnap, kill, or rape their political opponents (#FJB anyone?).
Of course in our day, like in Bonhoeffer’s, there are those who would argue that these sins are not so bad, or at least, not so bad as the sins of our opponents. Bonhoeffer responds to these people and writes sarcastically, “Is this going too far? Should a few super-righteous people rise at this point and try to prove that it’s not the church, but all the others are guilty?…to be called as judges of the world, proceed to weigh the mass of guilt here and there and distribute it accordingly?” To these people who engage in such Whataboutism, who argue that the Church’s confession of communal sin is unnecessary when the other side is also bad, Bonhoeffer thunders at them— “Free confession of guilt is not something that one can take or leave; it is the form of Jesus Christ breaking through in the church. Whoever stifles or spoils the church’s confession of guilt is hopelessly guilty before Christ.”
Wow! He is not holding back. For the church to be the church, it must be willing to confess the sins of its people, and its nation. Anyone who tries to oppose such communal confession is “hopelessly guilty!” I think of all the pundits and politicians who are so quick to deny that American Christians have ever done anything wrong, and say that we have nothing to apologize for. Bonhoeffer thinks such people are not only deluded, but practitioners of a false gospel. To deny the existence of any guilt is to deny any possibility of forgiveness, repentance, or redemption.
However, if we do choose the right path, progress is possible. Bonhoeffer writes: “The nations bear the heritage of their guilt. Yet by God’s gracious rule in history it can happen that what began as a curse can finally become a blessing on the nations…to be sure, the guilt is not justified, not removed, not forgiven. It remains, but the wound that is inflicted is scarred over. For the church and for individual believers there can be a full break with guilt and a new beginning through the gift of forgiveness of sin. But in the historical life of nations there can only be a slow process of healing…Continuity with past guilt, which in the life of the church and the believer is broken off by repentance and forgiveness, remains in the historical life of nations…
“What matters is only whether the past guilt is in fact scarred over. If so, then at this point, within the historical conflicts of nations both domestic and foreign, something like forgiveness takes place, though it is only a weak shadow of the forgiveness that Jesus Christ gives to believers. Here the claim to full atonement by the guilty for past injustice is renounced; here it is recognized that what is past can never be restored by human power, that the wheel of history can no longer be rolled back. Not all wounds that were made can be healed; but it is critical that no further wounds be made….Where this does not happen, where injustice rules unchecked and inflicts ever-new wounds, there can certainly be no talk about such forgiveness. Instead, our first concern must be to resist injustice and convict the guilty of their guilt.”
Bonhoeffer clearly makes the distinction between wounds that have slowly been left behind by the passage of time, and wounds that continue to remain open and gaping. In both cases, however, there is the need be a need for Christians to seek forgiveness and healing, not to simply sweep the past under the rug.
Some Case Studies
The idea of communal guilt is a bit vague. What might this look like practically? Let’s take a few case examples.
There are some sins of our own nation that have indeed “scarred over,” and are mostly in the past. For example, Anti-Catholic sentiment used to be one of the biggest forms of discrimination in the US, with legal, social, and ethnic prejudice embedded throughout the nation. Recall that it was a big deal that JFK was the first Catholic President. However, as writer and speaker Eboo Patel has pointed out, anti-Catholic sentiment is very rare nowadays, and systemic and social barriers to Catholics have virtually disappeared. This feels like a good example of Bonhoeffer’s “scarring over”— it doesn’t justify the sins of the past, and the pain may still be there in some ways, but for the most part it is in the past. There are no new wounds being made against Catholics except in the absolute rarest of occasions.
Or take the response of Germany after the Holocaust. After being forced by the Allies to reckon with the evils perpetrated in their name, Germany has embarked in a multi-generational, long-term effort to make amends. Germany has sent reparations checks to individual victims of the Holocaust for decades, as well as billions of dollars of military funding to the Jewish nation of Israel. They have constructed memorials to the Holocaust in ways both big and small, both national and local. And in terms of foreign policy, Germany has accepted over one million refugees fleeing violence, and has been very hesitant to resort to armed violence (as seen in the recent hesitation to get involved in the war in Ukraine). The repentance after WWII in Germany has thoroughly remade both that nation and Europe as a whole-for the better! [In comparison with Germany, Russia never made a serious attempt to repent or make reparations after the collapse of the USSR, and instead allowed bitterness and jealousy to take root. The contrast between modern-day Germany and modern-day Russia is vast.]
Or to look at a negative example, we can look at certain people groups in America and see that some harms never scarred over, or, even if it partially healed, the scar keeps getting picked at and infected. Witness the genocidal removal of Native Americans from their lands and continued overlooking of the problems they face now, particularly in Native reservations. Witness the longstanding mistreatment of African-Americans at all levels of society, from the lack of reparations and justice after slavery, to the continued under-investment in and over-harsh policing of their communities. Or witness the coddling of wealthy corporations while consistently overlooking small farmers and blue collar workers. None of these are new phenomena in America, but we have never truly seen the Church at large confess sins against these groups, nor has the nation sought long-term justice, healing, and progress in them.
Now, it is tempting in some liberal circles at this point to blame “white supremacy” or “capitalism” for all systemic sins in America and in the entire world. However, a view that blames Western ideology for all problems in the entire world actually falls prey to the same Eurocentric mindset it is critiquing. It removes agency from non-Westerners to choose their own paths, and treats them like children whose every choice is ultimately based on the foundations laid by Westerners. Can we blame white supremacy and capitalism for the genocide of Uyghurs in far-west China by the Chinese Communist Party? Should we lay the blame for 1930s Japanese militarism and violence in Korea and China at the feet of Western Europeans, or is it instead appropriate for descendants of those victims to seek justice and apologies from modern-day Japan (as they actually are doing)? Or what about evils that happened around the world centuries ago, before European colonialism started, that still have a legacy today? At the final judgment of the world, the sins of Europeans are indeed vast. Western Christians must deal with them all as quickly and thoroughly as possible lest we ourselves receive judgment. But at best it overstates the case, and at worst engenders unneeded opposition, to lay all the sins of all history at the feet of modern-day Europeans and North Americans. Each community must take proper account of its own actions, right or wrong, justified or unjustified.
On a related note, Bonhoeffer himself is hesitant to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” by rushing straight from the evils of empire into a different mess. He writes, “By renouncing the crown or by surrendering what had been conquered, a ruler could cause even greater disorder and incur even more guilt.” In other words, we must be careful that the unjust systems we seek to tear down are not replaced by something even worse. The French Revolution started with lofty goals but ended with the guillotine and Napoleon. The 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2011 Arab Spring both sought the ends of evil dictatorships but both resulted in bloodshed and violence worse than before. We must not be slow or scared to act against social injustice, but we must be wise in how it gets corrected.
Conclusion
There is a LOT to think about here. And I am still learning and having my theology shaped on the topic of communal repentance. But in the meantime, it leaves me with many questions.
What are the open wounds still open in America and around the world that must be repented of? Or let’s get more local — What about in Central Pennsylvania? What about here in Carlisle? And what would repentance look like?
Of what communal sins should me and my family and church identify ourselves? Of what communal sins are we still guilty of? Are there ancestral or generational curses that we must become aware of in order to break cycles of brokenness?
What if the revival that we Christians are seeking in America can only come through communal repentance? How does one even being to help American Christians see the messy truths about our nation?