As a theologian, I get nervous when reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer becomes all too relevant. I’m the kind of theologian who would rather not find myself in what some scholars refer to as a Bonhoeffer moment.
Let me explain. In the lead up to the 2024 election, some conservative religious leaders and influencers drew on Bonhoeffer’s life and writings to claim that Americans were facing a “Bonhoeffer moment,” which they intended as a reference to his alleged involvement in a covert plot to assassinate Hitler. As the International Bonhoeffer Society and relatives from the Bonhoeffer family said at the time, it was an inappropriate and dangerous misuse of his legacy.
The irony of this distortion was that it was used to justify the use of violence if the Democrats were to win in November. In reality, Bonhoeffer played only a very minor role in the conspiracy, and that role didn’t involve guns or explosive devices. Most often, he was a chaplain to the co-conspirators. He prayed with them. He offered Holy Communion. And he helped reflect on the Christian ethical implications of their actions. Spoiler alert: He didn’t think guilt could be avoided, only accepted, writing that the idea that one could “keep himself pure from the contamination arising from responsible action” was a “self-deception.”
I was thinking of all this recently, when I was asked by a group of pastors to help lead a workshop for federal employees who are people of faith and who wanted to discern their ethical responsibilities in these early days of the second Trump administration.
Despite having spent the last decade interviewing people of faith about their working lives, and despite having written a book on the topic, I found myself at a loss for what to say. This was personal. Members of my immediate family are federal employees and contractors. My grandfather spent most of his career in the foreign service, including stints at USAID and Voice of America. My grandmother was a congressional staffer. The value of civil service is sacred to me. But this was different too. Whatever else we might say about the first few weeks of this Trump administration, it sure isn’t business as usual. It doesn’t seem like the typical scripts and strategies that fueled opposition to the first Trump administration will be enough this time around.
Enter Bonhoeffer.
Only a few months before his arrest in April of 1943, Bonhoeffer wrote an essay and gave it to his dear friend Eberhard Bethge, and two leaders in the German resistance: his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi and a military intelligence officer named Hans Oster. As I prepared for our gathering with federal employees, I reread this letter he titles “After Ten Years” and became convinced that Bonhoeffer was more relevant than my own theologies of work.
The following six reflections emerged from my time reading Bonhoeffer with the seventy or so federal employees who showed up for our workshop. They go beyond what I was able to present then because they are shaped by the questions, fears, and faithfulness of those civil servants.
Reclaim Your Private Life
Bonhoeffer begins his letter with a reflection on time. He writes that time can only be lost if one doesn’t learn from the experience of living with both joy and suffering. Reflecting on the 10 years since Hitler had come to power, Bonhoeffer writes, “We have lost much, things far beyond measure, but time was not lost.” One of the key strategies Bonhoeffer offers for ensuring we don’t lose our own time over these next four years, is to find delight and solidarity in one’s private life. In a climate marked by a loss of privacy, threats, and lies, who are your close co-conspirators? Who will you write letters to? Who will you throw dinner parties with? Who will you dance with, make art with? These, too, are acts of protest.
There Are No Ethical Formulas for This
Perhaps the most humbling part of “After Ten Years” is Bonhoeffer’s conclusion that the whole of the Western Protestant ethical tradition he and his fellow conspirators had inherited was bankrupt.
Here’s Bonhoeffer in his own words: “Who stands firm? Only the one whose ultimate standard is not his reason, his principles, conscience, freedom, or virtue; only the one who is prepared to sacrifice all of these when, in faith and in relationship to God alone, he is called to obedient and responsible action. … Where are the responsible ones?” In other words, he’s saying, in times like these, don’t look for ethical formulas or rules. If you know what God requires, do that.
Like Bonhoeffer, I am afraid much of the tradition is spent, unable to empower the kind of everyday discipleship that might stop evil in its tracks. Has it ever been clearer that we need a new kind of Christianity? We need a Christianity that is less concerned with its size, influence, or even its relevance. We need a kind of Christianity that can separate itself from what the tradition sometimes calls “the powers and principalities.”
Forget Freedom From, What Are We Free For?
In his letter to fellow conspirators, Bonhoeffer recalls many acts of bravery and sacrifice during the Nazi regime. What was missing, he argues, was civil courage.
Bonhoeffer is trying to point towards a new kind of freedom: what he calls “free, responsible action.” This kind of freedom has echoes in Bonhoeffer’s Lutheranism, where Christians are called to consider not just what they are free from, but what they are free for. In his tradition, Christians are not just free from condemnation for sin, they are free to do good. In an American context, Responsible freedom is a radical freedom for one’s neighbors, rooted not in what is protected in the Constitution or in even in universal human rights, but rather by what God demands.
Bonhoeffer writes that free, responsible action may even lead us to become guilty along the way. As I listened to the situations several federal employees share in our workshop, I found myself struggling with this idea of civil courage — a practice that I have never had to engage in as a theologian.
For those who find their work impacted by the Trump administration, there is no one way to exercise faithful civil courage. Leaving could be faithful. Staying could be faithful. And everything in between could be faithful — so long as it is done out of a sense of freedom, a sense of free love, and service to others.
Don’t Fight the Stupidity
Bonhoeffer says, “Against stupidity we are defenseless.” Nothing can be done.
By stupidity, he isn’t insulting others’ intelligence. Instead, he is pointing to a deeper psychological condition where ideology and woundedness come together to create something more like a social virus. “Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity … the power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”
There is a real danger in trying to fight this kind of “stupidity” with the typical levers of the democratic process. It is meant to confuse, distract, and exhaust us. Instead, we might take Bonhoeffer’s resolution to heart when he says that without external liberation, there can be no internal liberation for those trapped in stupidity. Until we find new ways to change the material conditions of the working middle class, the MAGA movement is here to stay. It’s unlikely that calling your congress person or showing up at a protest will convert the masses that Trump’s power rests on.
Play the Long Game
The more I read Bonhoeffer, the more convinced I become that things are far worse than I imagined. Genuine resistance seems to call for new ways of acting and new ways of thinking. Bonhoeffer’s letter portrays the grim state of affairs in Germany at the time. To be clear: We do not live in Nazi Germany. But our situation is very grim.
And yet as a new parent, I found a certain kind of hope in Bonhoeffer’s insistence that, “The ultimately responsible question is not how I extricate myself heroically from a situation but [how] a coming generation is to go on living?” It seems odd or even insensitive to jump to the end of all this when so many are being thrust into acute suffering. Yet, it clarifies, that what I decide to do next might hinge on what kind of democratic practices my daughters will need to pick up the pieces of this mess.
A Bonhoeffer Moment?
It turns out a true Bonhoeffer moment is grounded in practices like finding delight in our private lives: throwing dinner parties and writing letters to friends; turning away from the newspapers and radios (today we might add social media) to read more books and engage with art. It looks more like finding our way back to stillness and silence — practices of contemplation.
Toward the end of the letter from 1942, Bonhoeffer framed that moment this way: “We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds. … We have become cunning and learned the arts of obfuscation and equivocal speech. Experience has rendered us suspicious of human beings, and often we have failed to speak to them a true and open word. … Are we still of any use? We will not need geniuses, cynics, people who have contempt for others, or cunning tacticians, but simple, uncomplicated, and honest human beings.”
Turns out Bonhoeffer’s approach to the political was more underground and clandestine than it was public performance art. Maybe those interested in resistance really do find themselves in a Bonhoeffer moment after all.
Tim Snyder is a Lutheran theologian and social researcher. He is the author of Lived Vocation: Stories of Faith and Work. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and twin daughters.
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