The very way the issue is framed furnishes temptation to suppose that history repeats itself in an eventful manner, so that the current American political circumstances are beheld as constituting a recurrence of those in Germany forty years ago and are, in turn, thought to warrant a response analogous to that of the Barmen Confession.
To succumb to this temptation stereotypes history. It reduces history to redundancy. It represents a modified predestinarianism which deprives creatures--both persons and principalities--of responsibility for decisions and actions at the same time that it narrows and ridicules the militant judgment of God in history. It is, as a conception of history, categorically unbiblical, and, furthermore, it is dull.
(1) Barmen as Precedent
For all of that, the present American crisis as a nation is sufficiently bewildering to entice many citizens to treat history in just such a simplistic, imitative manner. In this vein, Nixon is compared with Hitler; America is named fascist; Watergate is equated with the Reichstag fire.
I reject this view of history as false, misleading, escapist. I esteem history as ambiguous, versatile, dynamic.
I do not imply that there are no appropriate comparisons to be ventured or no significant similarities to be noticed. But I find that history “repeats” itself as parable, rather than analogue, and that the edifying similarities are topical rather than eventful having to do with perennial issues embodied in changing circumstances from time to time instead of with any factual duplication transposed from one time to another.
As a practical matter, this means that for some American churchmen today to recall Barmen and to inquire as to its relevance requires as much attention to situational differences and analytical distinctions as to any apparent similarities.
Or--to put this concern in other words, we must not address the question of this convocation in a way which relieves us of making the decisions we must make. It would be a grandiose paradox to recall the Barmen Confession in a way which abets default on our part in America now. Under this rubric, I offer these remarks concerning the American political situation and the church situation today in the United States in reference to the precedent to the Barmen Confession.
(2) The Political Situation
One important distinction between Germany in 1934 and America now is that Germany then was arising as a nation from the calamity of defeat in World War I. She was a nation regaining her vanity after the most profound humiliation of her history. She was on the ascendancy (again) and, indeed, Germany in 1934 was a nation on the verge of blitzkreig, conquest, plunder. And her hope, as fantastic as it may now seem, outreached the glory of triumph in war over enemies that had once subjugated her to attest millennial pretensions of world domination.
The contrast with contemporary America is startling. America is, now, rapidly loosing world preeminence. The nation is in decline--morally, monetarily, culturally, ideationally, militarily, productively, environmentally--in virtually every sense in which such matters are commonly calculated. Her power--her superpower--proves preposterous and ineffectual and is more mocked than feared elsewhere in the world. Her vanity is confounded, the popular myths about her destiny are ridiculed and doubted, her citizens are sullen, bemused, despairing, vulnerable.
In 1934, Germans were becoming excited and enthralled with the Nazi ambition for their country and they were being mobilized in that cause; Americans have lately become demoralized, distracted, apprehensive as to any cause--especially that of the nation--except, perhaps, the purchase or pursuit of individual safety and survival in the most mundane connotations of those terms.
More concretely, in comparing the Nazi totalitarianism and that totalitarianism which threatens America, there is, here, official propaganda and heavy deception but there is not the pervasive ideological ambiance such as that which marked the German scene in the thirties. Americans have never been regarded as ideologically sophisticated anyway, but now technology has practically displaced the political function of ideology. In contrast to the Nazi reality, political authority in America has little need to launch indoctrination or practice much ideological manipulation because the available means, furnished by technology, of transmitting information have transfixing capabilities to paralyze human comprehension. Even the truth can be dispatched in the American technocracy with such acceleration and redundancy that it stops human beings from hearing or understanding it. Or, as another instance, how can the right of privacy be safeguarded and honored in a society where technology has made surveillance, both private and public, cheap and accessible to virtually any institution or person? Does not the technical capability for ubiquitous surveillance of citizens in itself render a constitutional right of privacy quaint?
Related to the displacement of ideology by technology has been the transplantation in America of the long entrenched commercial ethic into politics. Not only surveillance, but secrecy, manipulation, fabrication, fraud, espionage--all familiar in business practice for generations--have now become politically commonplace. Rationalizing such tactics is a reverence for property as the rudimentary value in society, taking precedence over human life and justifying any expedient abuse of human beings. It is the transfer into politics of the ethic that property bears intrinsic worth, and that human beings have moral significance only as that may be imputed to them because of their relationship to property, that occasions remarks like that of John Mitchell, erstwhile Attorney General of the United States that in the Watergate scandal he was innocent of offense since he had not stolen any property. In much the same way, has Richard Nixon apparently oblivious to constitutional misdemeanors which involve specific aggressions against persons and which, in principle, mean contempt for all persons living under the American government--assured citizens that he is not a crook but has earned whatever property he possesses.
In short, the political implementation of the property ethic in a late technocratic society spawns totalitarianism in America in the seventies, as distinguished from the joinder of ideology and national vanity which characterized the German situation in the thirties. The assault upon human sanity and conscience would seem no less in the American circumstances than in those in Germany, however, and where some sense of human outrage does survive, some similarities between now in America and then in Germany do emerge.
There are relatively few dissenters and resisters, for one thing, and where they speak and act they suffer defamation and persecution. It is not only, in recent years in the United States, political prosecutions, trials and imprisonments which document this, but also the less visible economic coercions, such as those exerted against students and faculty following the Kent State infanticide, which chiefly accomplished the quietism the campuses have suffered ever since.
There is a kind of psychological dividend for a regime, whether Nazi or American, in this state of affairs. For every person politically prosecuted or conformed by coercion, there are numberless others, geometrically accrued, who are enough intimidated by the fate of the more conspicuous victims to acquiesce. This is, precisely speaking, the secret of such success as totalitarianism anywhere, at anytime, attains.
Not to be any longer overlooked is the issue of the pathology of political leaders. In retrospect, much significance has been attributed to that in the Nazi principality in Germany, but it is more urgent to consider this aspect contemporaneously. If Christians were earnest about the pathology of Nixon while President, without pretensions toward psycho-biography, they would be attentive peculiarly to the pastoral care and competence of the Christian witness. That is to say, they would be concerned with how guilt becomes arrogant motivation, with how delusive power victimizes a person, with the futility of flagellation, with the reality of truth and the redemptive power which inheres in telling the truth, with healing, with exorcism, with confession, with forgiveness, and, indeed, with God’s own judgment of persons and of nations.
For the Germans and for the Americans, at the center of the profound social changes which they, respectively, have suffered, or suffer, is the relationship of law and authority. If this issue takes many forms, it nevertheless can be succinctly stated: it is the problem of authority usurping the law, of authority merging with the law, of authority superseding the law, of authority become a law unto itself, of criminal authority, of unaccountable authority, of the very premise of government become the exercise of authority per se, of authority abolishing law and coercion substituting for order, and all persons made vulnerable to political aggression.
In this connection, dissimilarities again occur: Nazism is sometimes represented as a revolution for the German nation; whether, analytically, that be the case or not, America has been enduring a counterrevolution for the past quarter century which the Nixon administration has come to epitomize but it did not instigate. It is a counterrevolution with respect to the social ethic of the American Revolution, in which the governing institutions have been usurped or set aside by the power of extra-constitutional agencies (like the CIA, the White House plumbers, the Pentagon, the secret police operations, the industrial-technocratic complex) which have come to function as a secret, second government beyond the reach of public control. It is this which renders the contemporary American political situation chaotic. If then be a sense in which it can be said that Hitler saved Germany from anarchy, it must be said that Nixon feigns to rule where anarchy has become the predominant political reality.
(3) The Church Situation
The churchmen who gathered at Barmen made their confession of the gospel as an exposure of and rebuke to the “doctrinal monstrosities” of Nazism’s so-called positive Christianity.
In America we have nothing so definitive or so self-conscious as “positive Christianity” was in Germany in 1934. The American civil religion has become diffuse and vague. It represents a loose and jumbled collection of memories and myths and other notions permeating the national ethos, but lacking the coherence and formality that the Nazi version of positive Christianity had. Yet that does not imply that the civil religion here is less pernicious or any the less hostile to the gospel. One monstrous doctrine, for example, of American civil religion is the false and uncritical identification of the American churches with incumbent political authority, and, beyond that, with the national vanity claiming a unique or divinely named destiny for America.
Associated with the grossly unbiblical view is the redundant assertion of America’s moral superiority, as among the nations, commonly said to be verified by war and weapons capabilities, productivity and consumerism. And this moral pretension, in turn, requires an endless supply of scapegoats and other victims to explain away whatever goes wrong or otherwise detracts from the supposed national preeminence. Thus we are implicated in constant denials of corporate responsibility in society, as in the casting upon Lt. Calley of the burden of common guilt for the genocide of the Indochina war.
If there are American Christians inclined to utter a new Barmen Declaration, a place to begin is with “doctrinal monstrosities” such as these which remain virtually unchallenged among the American churches.
There was another issue present at Barmen which prompted the Confession there which sharply contrasts with American circumstances. The Nazis had sponsored not only a widespread propagation of their “positive Christianity” but had also engaged in blunt ecclesiastical interference, directly subverting the government of the German churches. The effort was organized under a Reichbishop whom the Nazis foisted upon the churches, and, by the time of the synod at Barmen, more than 800 pastors had been ousted from their pulpits by the regime’s church administration. Here, there is no similar ecclesiastical meddling--perchance because the churches in America are more innocuous--nor does there need to be. Instead of that, there is an elaborate American comity by which political domination of the churches is sanctioned by the status of church property holdings. Thus tax exemption for the churches inhibits a critical political witness by the churches. Thus a presidential assurance of aid to church-related schools can insure the silence of the ecclesiastical hierarchy on certain public issues. In short, the dependence of the American churches upon property renders the churches so utterly vulnerable to political manipulation as to obviate a more direct ecclesiastical interference.
For all of that, if it is concluded that something like a Barmen Confession is appropriate now in America--and, it must be said, confession of the faith is always apropos--there remains a question of how such a confession could happen. Who is there to confess? At the least, at Barmen, the churches had a unity and cohesion sufficient to convene a synod able to speak out. The inherited churches in the United States exist in such disarray, such disunity, such incoherence as to supply the inference that the American churches have, as yet, no capability of confession.
Another Barmen Declaration may be timely, but we cannot overlook the fact that the very idea of such a confession is unAmerican--disruptive of that basic comity thought necessary to the nation’s religious and ecclesiastical pluralism. Nor can we gainsay the depth with which it is embedded in the American mentality that anything like a confession of the faith is a matter of resolute privacy (which is the reason the content confessed typically affirms “Jesus saves” but not “Jesus Christ is Lord”). On the other hand, a doubt lingers as to whether the so-called social activists from the churches in America are able to distinguish between some mere political manifesto and an historic confession of the gospel.
Perhaps the answer to the question about any new Barmen Declaration is to be found in what actually happened to those who signed the Barmen Confession. Every one of them was executed or exiled or imprisoned.
When American church people are ready for such consequences, we will be enabled to confess the faith. Ironically, if we are not able to confess, we will certainly suffer the same consequences--ignominiously.
This article was submitted to the Post American by William Stringfellow. It has also recently appeared in Christianity and Crisis.
When this article appeared, William Stringfellow was an attorney, social critic, and theologian. He has authored many books and articles and was a Contributing Editor to the Post American.
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