Christians made a movie about Dietrich Bonhoeffer that conceals he was gay
A religion doesn’t want to tell a hero’s story
In 1945, a pastor in Germany was executed by the Nazis for trying kill Hitler. In the post-War years, Dietrich Bonhoeffer became a guiding light to Christian people.
There were odd features to his life? He never married. He lived for years with a male ‘friend’. In recent years, scholars put together the case that Bonhoeffer was homosexual. Now a new Christian bio-pic, Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin, puts him back in the closet.
Bonhoeffer’s sexuality was never meant to be disclosed.
His ‘friend’, Eberhard Bethge, went on to oversee the post-War industry of books and conferences dedicated to the religion’s new hero. He published his own biography, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Man of Vision, Man of Courage, with no talk of sexuality.
In 2011, the American Evangelical leader Eric Metaxas published a new biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, on which the new biopic seems to be based. There wasn’t a hint of a “problem.”
All along, many Bonhoeffer scholars had privately believed he was gay.
Charles Marsh, the American religion scholar, has in recent years been telling that story. “I can recall a half dozen occasions when the subject arose in lively exchanges over meals or drinks at conferences,” he writes in his newest book, Resisting the Bonhoeffer Brand: A Life Reconsidered.
Eberhard Bethge had actually been asked about Bonhoeffer’s sexuality at an academic gathering in the mid-80s. He’d replied that “he could not say for sure” but “understood why people might ask such questions.”
He addressed it again years later, saying that “no same-sex friendship is without varying degrees of homoeroticism,” but he and Bonhoeffer were both “quite ordinary” and “normal.”
Bonhoeffer can sort of look…gay?
He was seen in his social circle as very handsome, a stylish dresser, temperamental, and obsessive—and in love with his friend Eberhard.
When Eberhard Bethge died in 2000, he left his papers archived in a public library in Berlin. With that, he might’ve been quietly “outing” his friend, for his papers were now outside of Christian control.
When Charles Marsh went to examine them for a new biography, he found that Bethge had kept the receipts of his years together with Dietrich. They’d shared a bedroom and bank account. They’d signed Christmas cards “Dietrich and Eberhard,” as as Marsh would write, “fussed over gifts they gave together, planned elaborate vacations, and endured numerous quarrels.’”
Bonhoeffer and Bethge had a final phase of their relationship in writing the “letters from prison.”
There was something so familiar about the tone that even in censored form they were read since the 1950s as gay love letters.
A biograpy of Bethge broke the ice.
In 2005, John W. de Gruchy, Daring, Trusting Spirit: Bonhoeffer’s Friend Eberhard Bethge, broached the problem of the “special friendship” between the two men. In a 2014 interview, de Gruchy got a little more specific:
“Bonhoeffer might well have been attracted to other males, but there is also no evidence at all that would suggest anything more than attraction.”
Marsh didn’t want to “out” Bonhoeffer, exactly.
His goal with Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as he would write, was “to reconstruct his homoerotic attraction to Eberhard in its singular and storied particularity.”
But he highlighted many scenes that made one wonder, like Bonhoeffer’s talk of he and Eberhard being in a “spiritual partnership” that he hoped would last into eternity.
Or Bonhoeffer having “a fantasy of strolling along the Promenade de Luc in nothing but his shimmering golden briefs.”
It was left to newspaper reviews to pop the question.
Christian reviewers were horrified.
When the book was published in 2014, Christianity Today did its best to minimize the problem, offering:
“Marsh makes a convincing case that Bonhoeffer harbored feelings for Bethge that extended beyond friendship. Those feelings were unrequited, and Bonhoeffer probably did not consciously acknowledge them.”
But other outlets campaigned against the book. The Gospel Coalition called it “reprehensible,” “unnerving,” and urged Christians not to read it.
Eric Metaxas lobbed a bomb at the book.
Marsh’s biography, he declared, portrayed Bonhoeffer “as a lavender swell mincing and vogue-ing his way through the corridors of the Third Reich…”
He adds: “This lamentable distortion of Bonhoeffer is such an injustice to the memory of one of the bravest — and genuinely manliest — Christians of the last century…”
But the secret was out. In a review in the journal Theology, John H. McCabe noted that they could see a “character one always sensed was there, but never quite had the courage (and evidence) to acknowledge.”
Later scholars found more.
In a 2016 book, The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Diane Reynolds noted Bonhoeffer’s letters had been censored, with strange blanks found, as she puts it, “just at moments where there’s apparently an uncomfortable discussion of love or sexuality.”
Looking over even the surviving text, she finds that “Bonhoeffer went beyond emotional friendship and was in love with him…”
She points to scenes where Bonhoeffer seemed to all but ‘out’ himself.
After reading George Santayana’s early gay novel The Last Puritan, Bonhoeffer wrote to Bethge about its hero: “I have sometimes recognized myself in Oliver. Do you understand that?”
Bonhoeffer was left contemplating his difference in a religion that didn’t allow that inquiry. He took to writing poetry:
“Who am I? This or the Other?
Am I one person today and tomorrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
And before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army
Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?”
His theology of sex was always a little funny.
Diane Reynolds traces how Bonhoeffer was actually articulating a kind of ‘queer theology’ in books like his Ethics, where sexuality is “fulfilled only by its intrinsic claim to joy.”
For years, Bonhoeffer had longed for a Christianity that was somehow different. As he had written to Mahatma Ghandi in 1934:
“Christianity must be something very different from what it has become…”
Was that another expression of queerness?
If read as gay, Bonhoeffer’s story feels different?
His famous talk of “Christian brotherhood” might seem like an effort to be close to men in a religion in which that wasn’t allowed.
After Bethge married in 1943, Bonhoeffer tried to kill Hitler. One might wonder: Was the story really about heartbreak?
The new movie “straightwashes” Bonhoeffer’s life.
In early reviews, the relationship with Bethge isn’t even mentioned. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian hero, is re-assigned heterosexuality.
Viewers will be encouraged to think that Bonhoeffer stood up to Hitler because he was Christian. The reality is that the religion was just as anti-Semitic as Hitler, and greatly assisted his rise to power.
As the historian Christopher J. Probst writes:
“The name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is perhaps so widely known today because of a deeply ironic fact — that so few of his fellow German Protestants, even within the generally Nazi-wary Confessing Church wing, spoke out on their [Jews] behalf.”
I ask myself: Why was Bonhoeffer so unique?
Did he break away from the herd because he was Christian—or because he was gay? 🔶
