In 1934, Lutheran, Reformed, and United Protestant churches gathered in Barmen, Germany, to compose and sign a declaration of resistance to Hitler’s nationalization of the churches. The integrity of Christianity was under attack and the purpose of the Barmen Declaration was to assert the independence of the church. The signers were not a group of politically like-minded pastors publicly declaring their convictions about ethics or the constitution, but rather shepherds of a church well on its way to becoming an extension of a partisan platform.
In recent months, I have heard many centrist and left-leaning Christians appeal to the Barmen Declaration as the model for the action that American Christianity, coopted by a perceived radical agenda of the current White House, needs today.
But this is not our Barmen moment.
I say this not because I doubt the seriousness of the constitutional crisis that it seems we are just beginning. Like many around the globe, I am carefully curating my list of trusted journalists to understand what is happening with the balance of powers in the United States, in the various dramas of bullying and acquiescence, and to the free press. It’s not clear that we are yet to a crisis of Nazi proportions; to be fair, though, neither was Germany before the Reichstag fire of 1933.
I also don’t mean to suggest that the ethics of the Trump White House are not problematic from a Christian perspective. Whether these policies are deporting law-abiding residents (only a few clicks less appalling than locking children in cages) or cutting social services to benefit the ruling plutocrats, there is very little that, to my eyes and ears, should be showing up in Christian conversation as anything other than a call for resistance.
But Barmen was different. There they did not gather to affirm democracy, to defend the Constitution, or even to protect the rights of vulnerable people. Christianity in Germany was not merely contested but radically undermined when, in 1933, Hitler federalized the church under a Reich’s Bishop, and eventually under a Ministry of Church Affairs. The theologians and church leaders who gathered at the Gemarker Kirche gathered not to argue a particular Christian ethic, but to insist on the independence of the faith from the control of the state.
But what kind of language would they use for the declaration? That was a key question. Karl Barth, already the world’s most prominent Protestant theologian, argued that faith in the incarnate God always denotes an allegiance that transcends statecraft. For that reason, he said, the church must maintain the privilege of challenging governing bodies. Others pushed back on the language of transcendence, saying that church and state exist more like two independent and autonomous spheres. The point is that they had this generative debate precisely because they refused to defer their theological agency to the Führer.
All of them agreed that they were in Barmen to reject any surrender of church doctrine to “changes in prevailing ideological or political convictions.” The unity of the church is precisely its faithfulness to “the Word of God in faith through the Holy Spirit,” they insisted, not the unity generated through an office of the National Socialist Party.
The signers were clear: they were not gathered out of political conviction with Christianity as an ancillary afterthought but rather as defenders of the church and its integrity.
In the United States today, the independent identity of Christianity is not at risk. Despite his confidence that he would make a great pope, Donald Trump has, so far as I can see, taken no steps to bring American Christianity under his direct control.
What is in question, rather, is the mission, or guiding ethic, of American Christianity. What is an authentic Christian response to current debates about wealth and poverty, immigration and asylum, race and gender?
These are far from simple matters of discernment. To say that Christians should condemn xenophobic nationalism is plain enough. But how and in what ways should Christians respond to emergency immigration when it overwhelms local and regional infrastructure? Likewise, while the marginalization of LGBT people and racial minorities calls for a Christian rejoinder, it is less obvious when and how to assert these identities over, say, the identities formed by neighborhood boundaries, vocational collectives, opt-in interests groups, or tax brackets.
It is possible and often necessary for a church to “get political,” since politics is simply the name for the discipline that discerns the common good of variously bounded human groups. In today’s churches though, politics often simply means partisanship. For many of today’s faith leaders, who see themselves through Barmen-colored glasses, this takes the shape of a democratic-voting preacher who baptizes progressivism and calls it a prophetic sermon.
Such a preacher would be just as guilty as the MAGA evangelist down the road of aligning the identity of the church with “prevailing ideological or political convictions”—the very thing that Barth and company were explicitly rejecting in 1934.
There is, then, a deep irony in the Christian left’s grasping of Barmen as its birthright, since any “new declaration” would in fact shut down the ethical debate the church so desperately needs. Barmen created a Confessing Church that asserted its nonpartisan agency to discern an authentic Christian politics. Today’s prophets, on the other hand, are bent on fashioning a church of the left to stand in opposition to the church of the right.
The hope for the church remains one of defending and celebrating the very integrity that the theologians at Barmen were fighting for, the independence of the church from any political ideology, and then settling down to the hard work of discerning the church’s mission, the appropriate ethic, in these challenging times. The mission of the church is precisely to study and interpret what a later Barthian called “the politics of Jesus” over against all prevailing ideologies. Such a faithful and nonpartisan politics can only be practiced—as Barth is often cited as saying, but likely never did—with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.
Anthony D. Baker, PhD is a Guest Writer. He is Clinton S. Quin Professor of Systematic Theology at Seminary of the Southwest, Austin, Texas. Dr. Baker is the author of several books including Diagonal Advance: Perfection in Christian Theology (Veritas, 2011) and Leaving Emmaus: A New Departure in Christian Theology (Baylor, 2021).
