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Bonhoeffer Exposes the Left’s Blindness
Conservatives believe in the institutions shaped by the accumulated experience of humanity.
We know we may be very small, but by standing on the shoulders of those who came before, we can reach very high. Our constitutional law heritage stretches back both to Athens and Jerusalem, our guiding stories wind their way through the history of millennia. We will not let go of the precious gifts we have been given to preserve and augment. We see through the pretense of those revolutionary poseurs who write out great checks on what generations have deposited, but deposit nothing worthwhile of their own.
The example of Bonhoeffer should energize us to risk all when that is what is needed.
But the moment may come when the institutions have become corrupted and the wisdom they preserved poisoned. The law, the government, even the stories we tell ourselves can be taken over and perverted, leaving us bereft of all except what we have internalized and made one with our soul.
To conserve the perverted institutions and the warped narrative they generate would join ourselves to their evil. It is at those times that the true conservative becomes a revolutionary.
The truest conservatism is to preserve the deepest of all things – the connection to God and the purposeful wisdom that orders all meaning and being.
These thoughts are a reflection borne of thinking again and again about Bonhoeffer, the Angel Studio’s movie that I watched on Thanksgiving. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the film’s subject, was a young German Protestant theologian. He was a man of peace and faith who became a conspirator against a monstrously corrupt state and an accomplice in the attempted assassination of a monster who usurped divinity.
Bonhoeffer came to New York to study at the famed Union Theological Seminary in 1930, when a restive Germany was beginning to respond to the siren call of Nazism. The film shows Bonhoeffer as indifferent to what he felt was Union’s musty and detached take on religious life, but alive to the vibrant culture of New York, in particular, to the pulsing life of the Harlem Renaissance, from the worship service of its Abyssinian Baptist Church to the triumphant life of its jazz clubs. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Jordan Peterson Sees the Awesome Power of Stories)
The film shows Bonhoeffer guided by one of his classmates, Albert Franklin Fisher, to experience Harlem and grow. The baneful reality of racism woke Bonhoeffer to a theological awareness of how hatred thwarted the goal of the Bible to bring all together “with one shoulder” in the service of God. He came to understand that racial hatred posed an existential threat to our humanity and blasphemed the divine image in which we are fashioned.
Bonhoeffer returned to Germany, called to testify to this truth. Unlike so many in the German church and outside it, he saw exactly what Hitler stood for and would have none of it. He was uncowed by the violence of Hitler’s supporters, and when Hitler took over the reins of power, he did not let fear of the regime’s terrible enforcement arm silence his voice of protest.
Bonhoeffer eventually had to hide to escape arrest. But his desire to bear witness to his religious calling brought him, in this film’s take, to join a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, which required him to pretend to be a belated convert to Nazism. The plot moved forward, but like every other such plot, did not succeed. Hitler was not killed and Bonhoeffer was eventually exposed due to the tracing back to him of government money he used to bribe guards to allow some Jewish prisoners asylum in Switzerland.
There are some who contest that Bonhoeffer ever involved himself in this assassination plot. What is not debated is his end. Imprisoned, Bonhoeffer was hanged only weeks before Germany surrendered to the Allies in May, 1945.
There has been some sharp criticism of this film surfacing in left-wing outlets. In Slate, for example, Angela Denker bemoaned that right-wingers had spoiled one of her last remaining heroes. Her point seemed to be that if Bonhoeffer (or anyone) could be appreciated by those on the right, then that person was no longer able to serve as her hero, a claim sounding bizarre to anyone who believes, as Moses Maimonides once put it centuries ago, that one should accept the truth wherever one finds it.
After implying that she believed that and was perhaps ashamed of it, Denker spends most of the rest of the article making an orthodox defense of open borders and taking Hitler’s satanic version of nationalism as definitive of any nationalism. To do that, she must ignore both the heroic examples of the self-correcting constitutional republics of the West that fought Hitler by choice (unlike Stalin, who would have preferred to remain Hitler’s ally) as well as the blood-soaked horrors of Communist internationalism that suggest that nationalism per se might not be the problem.
She leaves unmentioned as well the Biblical example of a nation that is a family and that carries forward a distinctive national heritage meant to serve as a model for other nations and so to realize a humankind united under God. Seeing that omission, it is not surprising that she never mentions the violent antisemitism that Bonhoeffer abhorred. The film certainly goes the opposite direction, making his stand against antisemitism as its key take-home message, made explicit at its end.
But for Denker, this merits not a word. Silence in the face of today’s antisemitism shames her as it does so many on today’s left. It did not shame Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Unlike Denker, the film is alive to the core issues of Bonhoeffer’s life, as most of today’s conservatives are, in my experience. Those in pursuit of what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” shy away from nuances and draw invidious distinctions where none exist. This film gives voice to strong, blunt, and precise criticism of American racism and gives powerful emotional expression to its effects and of the courage and character of the black community in the face of its persecution.
Most powerful was its expression of the transformative gift of its music. The film shows the vibrancy of the music, both within the Harlem church and in the clubs, which Fisher tells Bonhoeffer must be understood as churches themselves (a theme the late Phil Lesh would articulate about the music that descends from that inspiration years later). (READ MORE: The Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh Plays On)
Bonhoeffer was an accomplished classical musician, playing chamber music by age eight. In one of the most moving and joyous scenes in the movie, Bonhoeffer, attending a jazz club with Fisher, is invited up by the band leader (who looks and plays a lot like the great Louis Armstrong). He climbs up on stage and begins a classic tune on the piano, the trumpeter takes up the piano theme and swings it, and soon, Bonhoeffer and the band are deep into a wailing, inspired improvisation.
This deep appreciation differentiates him not only from a sterile academic approach to religion but also from the sullen hatred of the Nazis. Good music in every era fights against tyranny by its very beauty and power. It transcends hateful politics, yet it is ignored by those like Denker, who is blind to the power of the music, and blind to her own exclusivist brand of politics-cum religion that seems not to have today’s Jew-hatred as one of its central concerns.
When my father spoke of politics to me when I was little, he would say that, at the extremes, the right and the left converge — they both are the enemies of freedom. He took the conventional view that the Nazis were on the extreme right, which I did not debate as a child.
The point he was making remains true beyond reasonable debate. Yet Denker remains alert only to one sort of oppression, and as a consequence, she must deny that we are allies in her fight. She draws an unnecessary line of exclusion from what is objectively a common cause. She excludes the right as she excludes the Jews from her concerns. Like Stalin, she would fight against Hitler. Like Stalin, no monument would be put up at Babi Yar, for the only story is about the victory of the collectivizing, anti-national left. Identifying Jews and Americans need not apply.
It is not surprising. Antisemitism, so central to the movie, so central to Bonhoeffer in spurring his commitment, is so absent as a concern for so many who ally themselves with organs such as Slate. The predictable result of this screaming omission of concern is the metastasizing of antisemitism in America and in the West. The Bonhoeffer portrayed in this film would not have been silent, would have seen such silence as exactly what hatred needs to flourish — the exact same hatred Bonhoeffer so eloquently and courageously opposed.
We cannot rest in our institutions. That breeds silence. The left has something to say we need to hear, but they have grown lazy and fat, excluding those who challenge them, and seeking to lock in a political, intellectual, and moral monoculture.
Conservatives are not immune to such a temptation. May we continue to resist it. The example of Bonhoeffer should energize us to risk all when that is what is needed, to oppose oppression no matter where it comes from, to embrace truth, and to hold only God as supreme.
And as our tradition tells us, God welcomes our challenges as well, challenging us to model Him.
The post <i>Bonhoeffer</i> Exposes the Left’s Blindness appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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