Jam The Spokes, Seize The Wheel
We are the monkey wrench in the Trump Machine
Excerpts from Is This a Bonhoeffer Moment?
ARE WE IN a “Bonhoeffer moment” today?
It is common to wonder what we would have done if we lived in history’s most challenging times. Christians often find moral guidance in the laboratory of history — which is to say that we learn from historical figures and communities who came through periods of ethical challenge better than others. Christians who wish to discern faithfulness to Christ often look back to learn how others were able to determine faithful discipleship when their contemporaries could not.
With this in mind, Dietrich Bonhoeffer may help us out today.
Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and pastor who resisted his government when he recognized, very early and very clearly, the dangers of Hitler’s regime. His first warning about the dangers of a leader who makes an idol of himself came in a radio address delivered in February 1933, just two days after Hitler took office.
Despite an abiding Christ-centered peace ethic, a desire to study nonviolent political resistance with Gandhi, and extensive writing about loving one’s enemies, Bonhoeffer eventually became a member of a conspiracy that was responsible for a coup attempt against Hitler. Twelve years after he became one of the first voices in Germany to offer public opposition to the Nazis, Bonhoeffer was executed by them, as a traitor.
By Bonhoeffer’s own account, he and his co-conspirators were living in a time and place in which “the huge masquerade of evil has thrown all ethical concepts into confusion” and in which evil appears in the “form of light, good deeds, historical necessity, [and] social justice.” They were living in a time that required a radical form of ethical discernment, attuned to concrete reality, historical urgency, and the desperate cries of help from victims of the state.
Perpetrators, bystanders, and resisters
We live in a time of moral obscurity. Communities and large demographic groups in this country are divided, both literally and ideologically, by competing truth claims that produce conflict and confusion. The current administration promotes these divisions. In fact, Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency centered on a declaration of building a wall, on the racial scapegoating of Mexicans and Muslims, on messages of ableism and misogyny, and on the denigration of African Americans by employing images of the “iconic ghetto,” as Elijah Anderson put it, especially in his references to violence in Chicago.
His “Make America Great Again” nationalism seeks to close the borders and recover some idealized picture of what America supposedly used to be, a picture steeped in white supremacy and the misguided ideology of “separate but equal.” Disturbingly, large numbers of white evangelical Christians share in this longing for Mayberry.
Since taking office, Trump and his administration have worked to enact a ban on Muslims, severely limited the number of refugees who can enter the country, jeopardized the safety of transgendered individuals serving in the military, declared some members of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups who rallied in Virginia to be “very fine,” and turned a blind eye to police brutality and racial profiling while demonizing those peacefully protesting it. And this list is not even close to exhaustive. Moreover, the administration has acted, and continues to act, with the explicit support of many (primarily) white Christians, and the complicity of many more.
Jamming the spokes: The resisters
… Bonhoeffer wrote that the church has the right and responsibility to ask whether the state is fulfilling its duty to preserve justice and order. He wrote that the church has the right and responsibility to aid victims of the state, even if they are not Christians. And, most famously, he wrote that the church has the right and responsibility to jam the spokes of the wheel of the state if it is creating too much or too little law. Jamming the spokes, he wrote, “is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself. Such an action would be direct political action on the part of the church.”
Finally, we must be careful as we look to Bonhoeffer for guidance. Invoking his resistance, especially his role in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, can lead to nefarious conclusions, if we are not careful to do the arduous work of discernment that pays attention to his context and our own. For example, Dr. George Tiller was an abortion provider who was murdered by an anti-abortion activist in 2009. Tiller’s murderer modeled his action after a distorted interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s legacy.
Some who ask the question “Is this a Bonhoeffer moment?” are asking just that: Is this a time that calls for violence? Violence is not the answer. But even to ask that question is to miss the point of Bonhoeffer’s witness and signals one’s inability to hear the deep truth his life conveys. It is the wrong question.
Bonhoeffer’s life and work and death require us, especially Christians, to ask: Who is Christ for us today? That is a question that honors Bonhoeffer’s legacy.
It forces us to ask ourselves if we recognize Christ in the other. Do we recognize Christ in everyone othered by political structures in ways that push minoritized people to the margins and crush them against walls? Do we acknowledge that God has made from one blood all people that dwell on the Earth? Are we attempting to make ourselves into “good people,” defined by our weekly Sunday morning communities, ones that draw the boundaries of our social responsibilities quite narrowly, or are we looking to serve the Christ we meet in social encounters with real humans every day?
Bonhoeffer’s life and work and death require the church to ask these questions. In the midst of this current political maelstrom, do you individually or collectively want to be a perpetrator, bystander, or resister? Everything is at stake.
