“WE REJECT THE FALSE DOCTRINE”: HOW THE CONFESSING CHURCH INFORMS THEOLOGICAL RESISTANCE TO CHRISTIAN FASCISM
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the twentieth-century pastor, theologian, conspirer against Nazi Germany, and martyr, has been admired since his death by Christians of various traditions. Eric Metaxas’s popular (though poorly-regarded-academically)[1] biography of Bonhoeffer and the recent film[2] based on it have especially succeeded in reinvigorating his legacy among evangelicals. Over the last several years, Metaxas has also repeatedly attempted to invoke Bonhoeffer and the events of World War II in support of Donald Trump and to warn against what he perceives to be the Nazi-like dangers of contemporary leftism.[3]
Now, Metaxas’s attempts to construe Bonhoeffer’s resistance to Nazism as analogous to conservative evangelical opposition to progressivism has been roundly criticized by both Bonhoeffer scholars and Bonhoeffer’s own descendants.[4] But Metaxas is right that a comparison of Bonhoeffer’s broader ecclesiastical and political context with our own has the potential to be tremendously illuminating—if not perhaps in the way that he thinks. In fact, taking a look at the 1930s debates between the Confessing Church and the pro-Nazi German Christians, however, reveals several illuminating historic parallels to the current debates on Christian nationalism or Christian fascism.
How did this conflict between the Confessing Church and the German Christians take shape, and what did each group believe? In early 1933, Hitler (and, with him, National Socialism, i.e., Nazism) came to power in Germany. Not long after, the German “church struggle” (Kirchenkampf) began, in which these two groups—the German Christians, who supported Hitler’s agenda for the church and the country, and the Confessing Church, who resisted Nazism—attempted to hold sway over the German Protestant churches.[5] It is important to note that both of these movements were theological minorities within a broader German Protestantism which, if less fervently pro-Nazi than the German Christians, was generally complicit with or even approved of Hitler.[6]
The German Christians wanted more than just Christian vague support of the Nazi regime, though; for them, the rise of Hitler was an opportunity to radically rethink the dogmatic content, sources of revelation, and moral teachings of the Christian faith. In 1932, German Christian pastor Joachim Hossenfelder issued the Original Guidelines of the German Christian Faith Movement, in which he outlined ten principles, summarizing the ideals of the Nazi-aligned churches.[7] Key principles among these guidelines are the concept of “positive Christianity […] suited to a truly German Lutheran spirit and heroic piety,”[8] rhetoric against “godless Marxism,” opposition to “race-mixing,” and calls for German ethnocentrism.[9] Adapting earlier Lutheran language of the orders of creation for fascist ends, Hossenfelder’s guidelines state that “race, ethnicity [Volkstum], and nation [are] orders of life given and entrusted to us by God, who has commanded us to preserve them.”[10] Additionally, the guidelines cautioned German Protestants against certain kinds of compassion and instructed them to focus on protecting and preserving their own people:
We see in Home Mission, rightly conceived, a living, active Christianity that, in our view, is rooted not in mere compassion but rather in obedience to God’s will and gratitude for Christ’s death on the cross. Mere compassion is charity, which leads to arrogance coupled with a guilty conscience that makes a people soft. We are conscious of Christian duty toward and love for the helpless, but we also demand that the people be protected from those who are inept and inferior.[11]
It is striking to observe some of the parallels between this German Christian document (the theology of which was then reiterated in subsequent German Christian theological works) and current Christian nationalist rhetoric in the United States. First, the concept of “positive Christianity” bears an affinity to MAGA Christian ideals: both seek to return to a more muscular, “heroic,” expression of Christian values wedded with nationalist aims. Kristen Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation posits that the evangelical embrace of Trump and overt display of nationalism was predicated upon evangelicals’ long-standing entrenchment of patriarchy, power, “militant masculinity,” and white supremacy.[12]
Second, the German Christian movement and current Christian nationalism both promote allegiance to a leader who is believed to be facilitating a return to greatness freighted with serious theological meaning. The Godesburg Declaration, a German Christian statement of beliefs which followed the guidelines above and argued against Karl Barth’s work, posited Hitler as “the man who has led our people out of servitude and misery into freedom and true greatness.”[13] Compare this to recent Christian rhetoric hailing Trump as God’s “Chosen One”[14] or as a Cyrus or David-type figure, said to be used by God to guide the nation.
Third, like the German Christian movement, current Christian fascism argues against allowing one’s compassion to be “manipulated” by a “toxic empathy” that would prioritize concerns for marginalized groups such as refugees, transgender individuals, and more.[15] Some Christian nationalist-aligned theologians argue that such empathy is in fact sinful.[16] J.D. Vance’s recent interpretation of the ordo amoris, like the above German Christian guidelines, commends a prioritization of Americans’ inner circles over and above the needs of refugees or potentially dangerous outsiders.[17]
If, then, the above theological resonances between the German Christian movement and current expressions of Christian nationalism or Christian fascism in the United States exist, how might the response of the Confessing Church prompt our own theological resistance to the project of Christian fascism today? After Hossenfelder penned the German Christian movement’s Original Guidelines above, Karl Barth, a theologian of the Confessing Church, responded to the rising German Christian movement with his Theological Existence Today!, and other theologians of the Confessing Church joined Barth in composing the Barmen Declaration (both in 1934). Countering the claims that God’s revelation could be discerned through Nazi ideology, the Confessing Church “reject[ed] the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.”[18] Certainly, Barth allowed, the church believed that God had ordained government. “But the church does not believe in a particular state, and thus not in the German state, nor in a particular kind of state, hence not the National Socialist kind.”[19] Barth’s response, then, called for a return to the Christ proclaimed in Scripture as the only authority for the church’s identity. The church was not to tie itself to a current “movement.”[20] Neither, as the Barmen Declaration argued, was the church to align itself with a particular political leader. The second thesis of Barmen pronounces Jesus Christ to be “God’s mighty claim upon our whole life,” and refutes the doctrine “as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords.”[21] Neither should the church, apart from its ministry belonging to the whole congregation, “give to itself, or allow to be given to it, special leaders vested with ruling powers.”[22]
The Confessing Church’s response to the fascism of its day thus provides us with an example of a theologically motivated resistance to current iterations of fascism. In the face of appeals to prophecies regarding Trump, of Bibles marketed with Trump’s name on them, or of other attempts to baptize Trumpism in scriptural language, the Confessing Church reminds us to be vocal in our disavowal of the idea that the church can or should align itself with a particular political figure. As Barmen emphatically puts it, we must also reject the false doctrine that the goals of the church ought to line up with the goals of Christian fascism, or of any other political ideology: “We reject the false doctrine, as though the church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.”[23]
The confessing Church understood that rejecting Christian fascism did not mean rejecting orthodox Christian theology. Christianity was still bound to Christ and the Scriptures as its source of revelation. Theology, Barth argued, had never been more important, yet
theological existence does not exist for its own sake, just as God himself was not satisfied to be simply for himself, who on the contrary “did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?” (Rom. 8:32) If God in Jesus Christ is wholly and completely for us human beings, so then the church, where his glory dwells, must also be the place that is wholly and completely for humankind.[24]
However, the church was not for the German people in the sense that it was called to endorse erroneous majority decisions, such as approval of Hitler.[25] Neither was it only for the German people in the sense of restricting outsiders from it: rather, the “community of those who belong to the church is not determined by blood and so also not by race, but rather by the Holy Spirit and by baptism.”[26] If the church were to exclude Jewish people (or people of any race), it would no longer be the church.[27] Here, the Confessing Church again provides us with an example of resistance to fascism in the church which is theologically grounded: if the grace of God in Christ is for humans of every race, language, nation, etc., so too must the church be for all of these people. For the church to align itself with the business of excluding people of various races and identities is for the church to forget the radical grace it proclaims.
Faced with the choice of aligning with the majority of German Protestants in affirming Hitler and the Nazi Party’s totalitarian aims, the Confessing Church chose another path, often at great personal cost. Though the distance of some decades reveals ways in which their theological response could’ve been more full-throated, for instance in its condemnation of racism and state violence, it nevertheless provides an instructive example of the power of theology in shaping public behavior and how to form an immanent critique of faulty doctrine. If we are to provide an effective resistance to Christian fascism, the Confessing Church shows us that a rejection of Scripture and theology is not the way to achieve this. Rather, affirming the person and work of Jesus Christ, God’s revelation to us, as the core of the Church’s proclamation is what makes possible a robust rejection of the counterfeit claims of a fascism that would cloak itself in purportedly Christian rhetoric.
Peter Barnes, “Bonhoeffer: Did Metaxas Get Him Right?,” The Reformed Theological Review 75, no. 3 (December 2016): 170–88.
Emma Green, “Eric Metaxas Believes America Is Creeping Toward Nazi Germany,” The Atlantic, February 14, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/02/eric-metaxas-2020-election-trump/617999/. See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZQ9Fvgr8nw.
Bob Smietana, “Stop Taking Bonhoeffer’s Name in Vain, His Relatives and Scholars Warn Eric Metaxas, Project 2025,” RNS (blog), October 21, 2024, https://religionnews.com/2024/10/21/stop-taking-bonhoeffers-name-in-vain-scholars-warn-eric-metaxas-and-other-christian-nationalists/.
Mary M. Solberg, ed., A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement, 1932-1940, trans. Mary M. Solberg (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 19–23.
Solberg, A Church Undone, 23.
Solberg, A Church Undone, 45–46.
“Positive Christianity” was a phrase used by Hitler in the 1920 platform of the NSDAP. Per Solberg, “The phrase means more or less, and with intentional vagueness, ‘an affirmative faith in Christ, one suited to [gemäss] the German Lutheran spirit and heroic piety.’” See Solberg, 49. Positive Christianity came to stand for a sort of muscular, non-effeminate, German nationalist values-driven form of religion.
Joachim Hossenfelder, “The Original Guidelines of the German Christian Faith Movement,” in Solberg, A Church Undone, 48–51.
Hossenfelder, “The Original Guidelines of the German Christian Faith Movement,” in Solberg, A Church Undone, 48–51.
Hossenfelder, The Original Guidelines of the German Christian Faith Movement, in Solberg, A Church Undone, 50.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright Publishing, 2020), 3.
The Godesburg Declaration, in Solberg, A Church Undone, 2015, 443–47.
Sam Kestenbaum, “Life After Proclaiming a Trump Re-Election as Divinely Ordained,” The New York Times, September 19, 2021, sec. Business, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/business/trump-election-prophecy-charisma-media.html.
Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion (New York: Sentinel, 2024).
Thus, for example, Joseph Rigney, The Sin of Empathy (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2025).
“What Is ‘ordo Amoris?’ Vice President JD Vance Invokes This Medieval Catholic Concept,” AP News, February 6, 2025, https://apnews.com/article/jd-vance-catholic-theology-migration-e868af574fb2e742c6ed3d756c569769.
The Theological Declaration of Barmen, in The Book of Confessions, The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (Louisville, KY: The Office of the General Assembly), 249
Karl Barth, Theological Existence Today! in Solberg, A Church Undone, 91.
Barth, Theological Existence Today! in Solberg, A Church Undone, 96–97.
The Theological Declaration of Barmen, The Book of Confessions, 249.
The Theological Declaration of Barmen, The Book of Confessions, 250.
The Theological Declaration of Barmen, in The Book of Confessions, 250.
Barth, Theological Existence Today! in Solberg, A Church Undone, 97.
Barth, Theological Existence Today! in Solberg, A Church Undone, 98.
Barth, Theological Existence Today! in Solberg, A Church Undone, 91.
Barth, Theological Existence Today! in Solberg, A Church Undone, 91.
