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A Theological-social Reflection on the Elections 2024

After the shock of the election results, I have had to deal with the extreme disappointment and the concomitant fears I have. Listening to then President Obama’s eulogy for the nine persons massacred at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, June 17, 2015 by a white supremacist for my class at UT Austin reminded me painfully of how far we as a nation have fallen since 2015.

Besides listening to Bach, I have turned to Reinhold Niebuhr’s little book, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. It has helped me to sort out what has happened a little. Niebuhr wrote it 1944, but it is still worth re-reading. I find it helpful to step back from the heated and often contradictory attempts at explanation that commentators and analysts all over the political spectrum have been presenting and to try to reach a deeper level of understanding that goes beneath statistics and voting block analysis. This it what Niebuhr offers in this brief, but insightful work.

The children of darkness, he observes, are those “moral cynics, who know no law beyond their will and interest.” The children of light, on the other hand, are “those who believe that self-interest should be brought under the discipline of a higher law.…[,] of a more universal law and in harmony with a more universal good”.[1]

A disconcerting observation – which history and the results of this election bear out – is that the children of darkness are often wiser in their cynicism than the children of light. For the children of light often underestimate or deny the power of self-interest, the depth of human egoism which can erupt in a frenzy of hate. The “demonic fury” he sees in fascist politics shows itself in the MAGA movement as well. Just as “[t]he profounder significance of Nazism lies in the fact that it sought to re-establish a primitive unity in the community….”,[2] the deeper intent of the MAGA movement has been to deny the diversity of American society. It explicitly wants to roll things back to a supposedly better past in which unity prevailed under the domination of society by white men, be it in politics, business, the professions, the church and the academy or wherever. One does not have to be white or male to buy into this myth as the numbers of Hispanic and Black men and women who voted for Trump show.

What Niebuhr’s analysis shows goes far beyond the sharp-eyed analyses of academics and journalists to a deeper level. We are dealing here with the principalities and powers of which we read in Eph 12:6. These powers manifest themselves in the ideologies of resentment and hate, in the discrimination and backlash. This deeper level makes the social struggle so difficult for the children of light and it also makes it so difficult for those seduced by these powers to recognize their seduction.

To be very clear, I am not calling the followers of this reactionary movement evil or wicked. I think some are, but they tend to be at the top. I suspect that many, probably most, do not see themselves this way. I know some personally and they are not bad people. If you were in a jam, they would be there in no time to help as best they can.

Nonetheless, they are wrapped up in and seduced by the powers of darkness. They cannot see how their voting behavior damages themselves and those like themselves. In more extreme cases they see it and support such policies anyway because they have bought into this white-man-first ideology, consciously or unconsciously. They have bought into it so strongly that they prefer to suffer disadvantages, such as poor health care and dying younger than necessary, before they allow the Others – minorities, immigrants – benefits that could lead to more equality and thus threaten their ideological superiority. The superiority is only ideological because they are often just at poor as the African Americans, immigrants, Asian Americans, etc. they want to keep from rising and are equally affected by poor health care, poor schools, loose gun laws, etc.

The political struggle against the forces of reaction is important. It is crucial. My point, however, is that it is about more. The conflict goes much deeper than this or that election result. It is about the soul of the nation. It is about the kind of nation we want to be. It is a spiritual struggle. Do we want to follow the powers and principalities of light or those of darkness?

As for me – I and my house – have chosen the powers of light – and the struggle goes on.

[1] Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics, ed. Elisabeth Sifton (Library of America: New York, 2015), p. 361.

[2] Niebuhr, 422.

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A Very Unpleasant (Re)Discovery and a Disturbing Parallel

These meandering thoughts have arisen in the past couple of weeks (February-April 2024). They belong together because the second part developed organically out of the first. However, if you like, you can read just one part and forget the other. Each part makes sense by itself – more or less. I will be the first to admit that, although I am a trained theologian, I am neither a specialist in New Testament nor a specialist in Church History. I thus scratch only the surface of these topics. If what I write motivates you to think more deeply about these issues and dive into them, then I have accomplished one of my goals in composing these thoughts.

Exegetical-theological

Several weeks ago, for the second time in a couple of days I kept a book that I wanted to return to the library. Two very different books.

Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust is collection of essays by American scholars (with one exception) published 1999, edited by Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel. This is a subject that I thought I knew, although I am by no means a specialist. When I was studying theology in Tübingen and Heidelberg in the mid- and late 1980’s and the early 1990’s, the silence and acquiescence of the German churches as well as fervent support for the “movement of renewal” that many saw in the Nazi movement was a hot topic among theology students. We read a lot about it on the side and discussed it frequently. I was always reminded of the silence of the White churches in the South during Jim Crow and regarding lynchings.

Nonetheless, I had an epiphany reading the book in the tram on the way to the library. During my studies in Tübingen I made the horrendous discovery that brilliant NT scholars bought into the idea that Jesus was Aryan and not a Jew. This was when I read Ericksen’s, Theologians under Hitler: Gerhard Kittel, Paul Althaus and Emmanuel Hirsch, published 1985, a marvelous, disturbing book still worth reading. Gerhard Kittel was professor in Tübingen 1926-1945 and the founding editor the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, a 10-volume work finally completed in 1979. (My brother gave me the English translation, which I still have, as a present when I finished my M.Div. at Vanderbilt Divinity School in 1983.) Kittel joined the NSDAP 1933 and in his research and writing supported the German Christian movement and gave a theological foundation to the Nazi policies against the Jews. This shock was bad enough. Having no answer to the question “Why?” compounded it. Antisemitism alone could not explain this.

In her essay in Betrayed, “When Jesus Was an Aryan: the Protestant Church and Antisemitic Propaganda,“ Susannah Heschel offers an explanation. She observed that since the 19th century NT scholars had examined the gospels and what Jesus said in them in the context of first-century Judaism. They discovered that Jesus’s teachings were not new; he repeated ideas that were common among rabbis of that time. This recognition led to a crisis: If Jesus was repeating common rabbinic ideas, what was new and original about Jesus and Christianity? For these theologians, the Nazi racial theory was a gift. It solved their dilemma. They could insist that, although his teachings may have been Jewish, he himself was racially an Aryan. His racial identity was the decisive factor, not the source of his teachings. From this arose a defamatory characterization of Judaism as degenerate. I finally had an answer to “Why?” that makes sense to me.

However, as I read further, I made an even more disturbing discovery. I learned that serious, brilliant biblical scholars, some of whom like Rudolf Bultmann and Ernst Käsemann were in the Confessing Church and opposed the Nazis, who have formed generations of biblical scholars, share this negative characterization of Judaism. It is a Who’s Who of NT scholars I studied and used in the US and in Germany. Kittel and his fellow German Christians, desperately and ingeniously striving to prove that Jesus of Nazareth was racially an Aryan, were only on steroids. The only difference was their radicality, their radical consistency, pursuing this basic perspective to its logical, bitter, absurd end.

This inaccurate characterization, turbocharged by Kittel and his cohorts, carried over into theological research after the war. It allowed a radical juxtaposition of Jesus to a degenerate legalistic, narrow-minded Judaism. This inaccurate, misleading way of thinking survives to this day in too many theological works, highly technical and popular ones, although, to be sure, there are many scholars, also older scholars such as George Foot Moore, who wrote a magisterial three-volume Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: the Age of the Tannaim in the 1920’s, who have not gone down this path. Unfortunately, the other perspective has long dominated. A long list of works in all languages contrasts Jesus’s teachings with the negative foil of a degenerate Judaism. No theological direction is free of this. Liberal, fundamentalist, evangelical, all schools of theological thought are guilty of this sin. Only in the past couple of decades have theological thinkers faced this failure and begun to re-think their theology from top to bottom.

I have not written much, but I have taught and preached a lot. Which caricatures of Judaism have I transported in my own teaching and thinking? Which anti-Jewish stereotypes are buried in my own theology? Betrayal shocked me out my lethargy. I have put aside the books I had planned to read and have turned to exegetical works and church history as a theological re-set, a personal ad fontes, so to speak, back to the roots to re-examine and re-think some of my fundamental theological principles. How do I read the Bible? How do I use Judaism when I try to understand and interpret the New Testament? Now I am starting to analyze my own thought, so I can purge it of these stereotypes.

Historical-theological

However, the scariest part of all of this is recognizing parallels between the German protestant churches in the Third Reich and the years leading up to it and so many of the conservative protestant churches in the US. The parallels between the German Christians and what goes in the US under the broad heading White Christian Nationalism are disconcerting, to put it mildly.

The National Socialist message landed on fertile soil for most protestant Christians in Germany, especially the theologians. They were predominantly very patriotic German nationalists who identified loyalty to the Kaiser and the state and their German identity with their Christian faith. You must remember that Germany did not become a nation until after the Franco-German War in 1871, which the Germans won. As a result, Bismark succeeded in getting the Prussian king accepted as the emperor (Kaiser) of a newly founded Germany. Bismark was protestant. The Kaiser was protestant. The ruling class was protestant. The protestant churches were state churches and had a lot of influence. About two-thirds of the German population was protestant in the 1930’s and these were predominantly Lutherans. Martin Luther and the Reformation were German. All in all, this means that is easy to understand that German protestants identified German culture and history (Deutschtum) with Christianity (Christentum). This left little room for Catholics and practically none for Jews.

After the trauma of losing World War I and the humiliating Treaty of Versailles, all of this was gone – except for the nationalist ideology that identified Deutschtum with Christentum. Not surprisingly, these Christians rejected the Weimar Republic. The Weimar Constitution separated church and state and established a parliamentary democracy. Democracy, being open for and tolerant of different ideas, religions and lifestyles, most of the things that one associates with democracy as a form of government and the open society that accompanies it, did not fit in the world view of these Christians. And, of course, they did not like the separation of church and state; it cost the churches power and influence. Moreover, they hated and were scared of the Social Democrats, who were the largest and strongest political party and officially atheist. It did not help that many Jews supported the Social Democrats and held important party and government positions in the coalition governments. The only group they hated more was the Communists.

Being a good Christian meant being a good German; being a good German meant being a good Christian. Obviously, these German nationalist Christians also defined what being a good Christian and what being a good German meant. There were, of course, others, politically liberal, even socialist Christians, but there were not very many. Interestingly, being liberal theologically made the theologians more susceptible to the Nazi ideology than those theologians with a more conservative theology. Lutherans were also more positively disposed to the Nazi ideology than Reformed Christians who came from Calvin and Zwingli. The stark juxtaposition of Law and Gospel in Lutheran theology and Luther’s theology of two realms, the realm of the church and the realm of the state which are clearly distinguished and should not be mixed, i.e. the state left the inner workings of the church alone and the church did not mess in politics, proved to be problematical in the context of the Third Reich. In identifying being a German with being a Christian, the German protestant church betrayed the Gospel.

The Catholic minority did not share the theological underpinning of the protestant Nazi supporters and sympathizers. However, most of them, the church leadership and the laity, did share the conservative worldview, the suspicion of the Weimar Republic as well as the antisemitic undercurrent in German society and a hysterical fear of the Bolshevists in Russia. In this practical sense, they were not better than their protestant brothers and sisters.

That is the background, crudely summarized. Now let’s look at the parallels. To be very clear, I am talking about parallels, things that remind me of others, things that are similar. I am not saying everything in the US in 2024 corresponds to everything in German in the 1930’s.

However, does not the formula “Being a good Christian meant being a good German; being a good German meant being a good Christian” sound familiar? In any event, that sounds a lot like the environment, the air, in which I grew up. A good (white) American is a good (white) Christian; a good (white) Christian is a good (white) American.

Many Protestants in the US, as individuals and in churches, are identifying being an American with being a Christian. There is, unfortunately, a long tradition of doing this. The current variation is, however, politically much stronger than previous versions, more explicit and extremer. The most recent perversion is the former president’s selling a “God Bless America Bible.” This identification is repeating the same heresy we saw in Germany during the runup to and during the Third Reich. White Christian Nationalism is just the American variation of the German Christian movement

The humiliation of losing World War I and having to sign the Treaty of Versailles fertilized the ground that was already well prepared for a movement like the German Christians.

We see a similar, parallel move in the US. Trump and the MAGA movement constantly maintain that the US is in awful shape despite tons of data that show the opposite. There are even conservative commentators that concede that. To quote Matt Lewis, a conservative commentator, “MAGA (Make America Great Again) isn’t just a message on a red hat, it’s a mantra. And to acknowledge the ways America is currently great (and improving!) is to admit that the country does not, in fact, need a fulminating strongman like Trump to save us from the ashes of our once proud homeland.”[1] The MAGA movement needs this counterfactual narrative to drive its campaign for a new political messiah. Only HE can “save” America from this humiliation. It is easy to see the parallel to Germany.

Another general feature which we can observe on both sides of the political divide is demonizing your opponents, but especially on the MAGA side. Political speech has always been fiery and exaggerated. However, in the last 30-40 years – a shoutout to Newt Gingrich – this has been turbocharged. You no longer have political opponents with whom you may strongly and passionately disagree and try to defeat at the polls. In this atmosphere, after the elections, the two sides licked their wounds, accepted, often begrudgingly, their losses and then tried their best to govern the country. This, of course, meant that the minority tried to stop the majority as best it could using all the parliamentary and political tricks at its disposal, but the two sides also worked out compromises for the good of the country or the state as a whole and sometimes even agreed on some things – and admitted it!

Now, you no longer have opponents; you have enemies who are evil – and you fight them tooth and nail and never compromise. How can you compromise with someone who is the embodiment of evil? Politics descends to a battle between two different ideologies, two diametrically opposed ways of seeing society. You do not argue or discuss with your enemies. You discredit them, insult them, lie about them. You change the rules to your advantage as the Republicans have done everywhere possible in the US with gerrymandering and other tricks. You do everything you can. Morality and legality, much less the truth, are secondary, if not irrelevant. For the MAGA movement as for the NSDAP this is standard operating procedure.

There is, fortunately, no guarantee that the US will go in the direction that Germany did in the 1930’s, but the developments are very disturbing and there to see for all who do not close their eyes and their minds. We have time to prevent this, and one of the best ways to prevent this is to prevent the election of Donald Trump.

[1] Matt Lewis: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-needs-his-maga-followers-to-believe-america-is-screwed? Accessed: 29 March 2024, 6:00 PM

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85 Years Reichspogromnacht – Never Again Is Now

A photo of the Brandenburg Gate on 9 November 2023

Thursday, 9 November 2023, was the 85th anniversary of the Reichspogromnacht, 9 October 1938. With many from the conference on racial justice I was attending in Freiburg, I joined a group of ca. 350 persons at the square where the old synagogue had stood before the Nazis burned it down. Groups of police were stationed around the square, but fortunately no one came to disturb the memorial service. The weather was appropriate for the occasion: cool and rainy. It drizzled and stopped, drizzled and stopped the whole time.

On this night, 85 years ago, more than 1300 Jews were murdered. On this night and in the days immediately following roughly 30,000 Jews were arrested or imprisoned in concentration camps for the crime of being Jews. 1,406 places of worship and assembly were destroyed as were several thousand businesses belonging to Jews.

After having previously introduced discriminatory laws and removed all Jews from government positions including the universities, the Reichspogromnacht tested whether the German people would tolerate explicit violence against Jews. They would. This cleared the way for the so-called “Final Solution” – the murder of more than six million Jews. Altogether considering all of the victims of persecution, the Nazis systematically murdered an estimated six million Jews and an additional 11 million other people (Russian POWs, Sinti and Roma, homosexual men, Communists, etc.) during World War II. (This number does not include deaths on the battle field.)

We remembered and mourned the six million Jews Nazis and their allies murdered in the Shoah and the roughly 1200 Israelis and foreigners the Hamas terrorists murdered on 7 October 2023. More Jews were killed on that day than on any day since the Shoah. Both dates were on everyone’s minds and mentioned in the short speeches. When the cantor from Frankfurt began to sing the Kaddisch, the rain really started to come down; that fit the mood. The memorial service ended as it had begun – with a beautiful, melancholic saxophone solo.

We left silently. I quickly went off by myself although I saw several people from the conference. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone. Walking away I passed by a wall covered with posters of all the hostages – and slowed down trying to look at every poster. The youngest hostage is four months old and the oldest that I can recall was 81.

Now there is war again in Israel and Palestine. I mourn all the dead. It is all so senseless. The Israelis and the Palestinians shall either live together or die together. There is no other option. A two-state solution, as first proposed by the UN in 1947, is the only solution, even if will take decades for reconciliation and the wounds to heal.

After the Shoah the call went out “Nie wieder!” – “Never Again!” One could hear this every year at the memorial services for the Reichspogromnacht – and when there was another anti-Semitic attack or case of vandalism. It is sad. It is tragic.

Never Again is now.

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Why I Love the Theater

Friday evening, October 13, 2023, reminded me why I love the theater.

Christine and I saw a magnificent production of Don Carlos by Friedrich Schiller in the Staatstheater Stuttgart. It had a very simple, bare stage, practically no props, no ornate palace rooms or background. Everything was reduced to the acting skills of the performers and Schiller’s magnificent, powerful language.

It was a gamble. Everything depended upon the actors and actresses. If they are not good, really good, or if they have a bad night, it will be a long evening. However, they were all magnificent. It was one of the best theater productions I have seen in quite a while.

Theater can never match the movies with its incredible effects. Movies live from their effects. A movie can survive bad acting and a weak script and still entertain. Theater cannot. A lot of contemporary plays, including ones I have seen in Stuttgart, try hard to adopt and to adapt video techniques such as split screen by having actors and actresses perform simultaneously on different parts of the stage, sometimes separated by complex staging, sometimes on different levels, often with videos running in the background. This occasionally works, such as in a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III that divided the stage into two levels, but most often I find it all distracting or irritating. Regardless of the effects and assorted gimmicks, theater lives and dies with the skills of the actors and actresses and the quality of the text.

I love Shakespeare – and have come to love Schiller – because of the power of his language. Others can match or even surpass Shakespeare’s convoluted plots – but not the raw power and grandeur of his language. The same applies to Schiller or Goethe’s Faust, Pinter, G. B. Shaw and others. In the theater I ride on the wave of language, am born away, lose my sense of time and place and find myself again in the world of the play. When I look down and glance at my watch, the play has lost me.

That is why, despite Christine’s complaints, I love sitting in the first row. I want to see the performers sweating, the spit flying from their mouths as they exert themselves to project their voices into the last row. I don’t mind the fake blood spraying onto my white shirt (it washed out) or having to catch a chair that rolled off the stage. Once I almost got hit by a fake eye that was ripped out of prisoner’s eyesocket in a Shakespeare piece and thrown down on the floor – and almost bounced into my lap!

No movie brings the immediacy and the intimacy that a good play in a good production can. I enjoy a good movie. I can even enjoy bad ones if they are funny enough or the effects are really good. However, going to the movies and going to the theater are radically different experiences. The aesthetics are different. During the lockdown, for example, I streamed – or recorded and watched later – excellent plays. As good as they were, as good as the acting and the scripts and the staging were, there was no comparison with live theater. I enjoyed them, but it was different. The immediacy and the intimacy were missing.

I can trace the origin of my perspective back to a specific experience. As a junior at Furman, I went on Foreign Study to England Fall Term 1976. After six weeks in London and two weeks off to travel, we dived into Shakespeare for four weeks in Stratford-upon-Avon. It seems as if we went to the theater almost every night. One evening we went to an experimental Royal Shakespeare Company production of Macbeth at The Other Place, which was just two years old at the time. A young Ian McKellen played Macbeth. It blew me away.

Macbeth was played in the round. The stage was painted black with a white circle. All of the action took place in the circle. The actors who were not on stage sat on crates set up around the circle. The main lighting was one lamp in what looked like a coffee tin hanging over the middle of the circle. At one point Macbeth took it and threw it through the air so that it pendeled back and forth before finally coming to rest. The actors all wore black and their hair was combed back so that one could see their faces clearly. Absolutely everything was focused on their acting and Shakespeare’s language. Their voices, their facial expressions, their gestures carried the play. There was nothing else – except our imagination. I get chills as I think about this evening even now. It was magnificent – and that is saying too little. That is where the theater bug bit me. It was a terminal infection. I have been infected ever since.

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Some Thoughts on Pictures in My Mind

Having grown up in the South in the 1960’s and 1970’s (I don’t really remember the 1950’s), I have pictures of Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in my mind, not just images, old black-and-white newspaper photos or stills from TV news, but also thoughts or views of them. Basically, they are pigeonholes – stereotypes or classifications that sum up who they are and what they stood for and substitute for thinking. I hear the name and – bing! – I know who that is and what he thought and stood for. It is another thing entirely, of course, whether my mental caricatures of these individuals have anything to do with who they really were and what they really said and thought. I have such mental caricatures of innumerable persons who were in the news when I was growing up, athletes, musicians, actors and actresses not just political figures.

I thought I knew a good bit about Dr. Martin Luther King. As a Christian and a theologian, I have read a lot of Dr. Martin Luther King’s works and heard speeches, and, of course, I have read and heard a lot about him. I have watched speeches on YouTube and taught about him in school, plaguing my German pupils with English language texts and old grainy TV clips. However, I have been developing and growing in understanding and learning in the last months and years – and have realized that we White folks have sanitized and romanticized Dr. Martin Luther King. He was the preacher of non-violence, of love, who spoke of Black and White people living in peace together as equals, the Nobel Peace winner – and died, tragically, as a victim of violence. We have suppressed his radical criticism of American society.

In the same manner, we have demonized Malcolm X. He was, in my caricature, one that I shared with almost all White people, the opposite of Dr. Martin Luther King – a preacher of violence and hate, who spoke of Black and White people, the devils, living in separate worlds – and died, not surprisingly, as a victim of violence.

My caricatures began to wobble when I, embarrassingly late – 2019 –, discovered James Baldwin through the documentary I Am Not Your Negro and started reading his essays and visited the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in January 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic began to find its way into the news in reports about a mysterious virus outbreak in China. I bought book on slave labor after the Civil War, Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon, which I immediately read when I got home. I had begun to read in American history intensely the past couple of years focusing on the Revolutionary War and the founding of the Republic. For one thing, I was trying to find a source of hope in the Trump years and for personal reasons I resuscitated my identity as an American from the South. Combined these experiences were an epiphany for me.

I suddenly realized that I actually knew very little about Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Basically, I only knew the That. My knowledge took a big leap from the Civil War to the New Deal, but even here I knew next to nothing about what Blacks experienced and thought in this period. Somehow, I learned about the Birmingham boycott and soon I was following the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s as I reached school age in 1963 and began watching the news on TV with my parents and reading the newspapers and news magazines to which my mother, the high school history and government teacher, subscribed. Everything became much more real when my class was desegregated for a few months when I was in the 4th grade, but this was paused until the two schools in North were combined by court order. The fourth-graders from Dover Elementary School were back in their old classes by Christmas. They returned with the rest of the Black pupils from Dover High School with the start of the 8th grade.

In Baldwin I discovered a guide to this side of American history. He led me to take another look at Malcolm X and to take a closer look at Dr. Martin Luther King. I stumbled across a documentary on Netflix, Who Killed Malcolm X. That was the first time that I saw old film clips of Malcolm X and heard him speak. I understood immediately why he scared White Americans to death, but I also understood his anger. After watching the documentary with Christine, I pulled my old copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I had bought for a seminar on religious autobiographies, but never read, and read it. I was fascinated and positively surprised.

The man I encountered, especially in the Autobiography, had similarities with my caricature, but showed a man, a human being. I began to understand his anger and his ideas – and his movement away from the Nation of Islam, his turn to orthodox Sunni Islam and the development of his ideas fascinated me – and challenged me.

I am glad that I have begun to move beyond the old pictures in my mind.

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Why Is American Society so Polarized? A Few Thoughts.

Since I first started paying attention to the developments in American society, I have been concerned about the way American society has begun to break up. Reading about recent book-bannings and teachers getting fired for daring to read thought-provoking, challenging books has enraged me and provoked the following thoughts.

Contrary to the yowling on the right, it is not the fault of minorities of all kinds, ethnic, religious, social, sexual, etc., asserting their rights as citizens of a free country and then fighting for those rights when the majority refuses to recognized them. The supposed unity of the past for which reactionary movements yearn was a façade anyway. American society was always diverse. That is one of its strengths. Just in the past one group, the majority of White people, defined its way of thinking, its values, its structures, all of which, of course, favored this group as normal, the correct way. Its interpretation of American history and understanding of what is good and right was what everyone had to accept as good and right. As long as the assorted minorities did that – or at least did not protest –, all was fine. The problems only began – in the perspective of this group – when minorities, regardless of which minority it was, began to question these givens.

However, a massive contribution to the shattering of the shaky unity of American society, the conviction that we all belong to one United States of America, although we fought hard about exactly what that meant, is the deliberate destruction of the public school system. The splintering of the American public school system has accelerated and sustained the splintering of American society that has led to the polarization we are now experiencing.

When I was growing up in North, SC, for example, all of the White kids attended the same segregated school. Private schools were something exotic. We played against one catholic school in high school athletics, but otherwise we mostly knew about them from TV or movies. Then the schools were desegregated when I started the 8th grade. All of a sudden private schools starting popping up all over the place like weeds, segregation academies like Wade Hampton Academy, Willington Academy, Travis Academy, Calhoun Academy. Those were the ones near North, whose names I can remember. They almost always bore the names of Confederate heroes. Others were founded as Christian schools, but research shows that was only a “guise.”[1] It is definitely not an accident that the South Carolina Association of Christian Schools was founded in 1967[2], for example. Some later merged or closed. Wade Hampton Academy and Willington Academy in Orangeburg merged in 1986 and called themselves Orangeburg Preparatory School. All of these private schools are still disproportionately White.

Following this period of resistance to desegregation of the public schools, we have private schools that are overwhelmingly white although these schools now admit and have a few Black and other minority pupils. The same applies to the private Christian schools for the most part. However, the 73 member schools of the South Carolina Association of Christian Schools teach a fundamentalist theology as they confess in their Statement of Faith: “(1) We believe that the Bible alone, in its autographs, is the verbal, plenarily inspired, and only infallible, authoritative Word of God, and that it is the only fit, final rule in all matters of both faith and practice.” Moreover, they explicitly deny membership to “those associated with, members of, or in accordance with the World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches, the Modern Charismatic Movement, or the Ecumenical Movement.”[3] These schools do not educate; they indoctrinate. All of their pupils miss the heated debates with my classmates about religious, theological topics that I had at North High School, even after desegregation.

These confessional schools initiate their pupils into an isolated ecosystem. Pupils from these fundamentalist schools go to fundamentalist colleges and then to fundamentalist graduate schools or seminaries. Where are they going to learn critical thinking that challenges what they have always been taught? Not at these schools, colleges or seminaries. All who teach must subscribe to certain beliefs about the bible, ethics, etc. or they do not get the jobs – and if they change their minds, think a bit farther they get fired.

Instead of public schools that all children in the school district attend in which they experience different perspectives, beliefs, tastes in music and art and literature, forms of behavior that do not correspond to that of the majority, we have little islands of people that encounter people who are different or think differently from themselves as little as possible. They live lives in which what they have always thought and believed is continually reinforced. They may reach a high level of knowledge, and some of them may also be quite intelligent. They may achieve a lot. However, they never truly learn to think for themselves.

Home schooling is the same develpment on steroids. Social media tends to reinforce this as well. You get new info or feeds that correspond to what you already think. If you want other perspectives, you have to look for them and most people do not.

It is thus no wonder that American society is so polarized and splintered. The educational system produces this. Assorted voucher systems or state support for such private schools – see Oklahoma and Arizona, for example – is strengthening this tendency. Worst of all, this is not an accident. It is planned. This splintering into enclaves is precisely what some reactionary or very conservative groups want. It is in their interest that we not learn together, that we not encounter different ways of thinking and believing. When we do that, we will learn to deal with our differences in a constructive manner – and we may learn to see their selfishness and narrowmindedness for what it really is and see through them. They do not want that.

The backbone of democracy is the public school system where all children from diverse financial, social and religious backgrounds can meet and learn together and thus learn to live together in their diversity. This insight is behind the drive for universal public education that arose in the US following independence. It had its ups and downs and blind spots, for example, no schools for free Blacks and enslaved persons, but the impulse was there from the beginning.

Public schools that all attend are schools for democracy in which children encounter children who think differently, belief differently and look different – and learn to deal with these children who are not like they are. Public schools train and teach tolerance and understanding for others.

If it were up to me, I would ban all private schools and home schooling. Religious indoctrination has no place in any school – not even school at home. That belongs in Sunday School, the synagogue or other religious schools – or at the dinner table or in the den. Learning about different religions and, just as important, the different schools of thought in the different religions, on the other hand, has a very important place in education and belongs in schools. This kind of education about religions belongs in every school.

[1] Dyer, Jennifer Eaton (April 12, 2007), The Core Beliefs of Southern Evangelicals: A Psycho-Social Investigation of the Evangelical Megachurch Phenomenon (https://ir.vanderbilt.edu/handle/1803/10763) etd.library.vanderbilt.edu (PhD), Vanderbilt University. p. 23. Retrieved August 10, 2023.

[2] https://christianeducation.org/history. Retrieved August 10, 2023.

[3] https://christianeducation.org/about/statement-of-faith. Retrieved August 10, 2023.

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The Effects of Casteism and Racism on Those at the Top of the Hierarchy

On vacation in the cool and rainy Pfalz, I have finally finished reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. It is a powerful book, surgically clinical in its analysis, but down to earth with innumerable examples and stories that illustrate and support her analysis – masterfully written. If you have not read it, read it! I am still trying to sort out my thoughts and emotions. In the book Wilkerson examines the well-known history of racism and discrimination in the US, the 13 year terror of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany and the age-old caste system in India. In my almost 40 years of living in Germany, I have learned and studied German history, especially recent German history, to try to understand how such a civilized and advanced culture could descend so low. That is a journey on which many of my generation here have also embarked. I just joined them.

As a White male Southerner who grew up and started school under Jim Crow (my school was not desegregated until I started the 8th grade), I soon saw parallels between life in Nazi Germany and life in the Jim Crow South. It is nonetheless chilling to read how Wilkerson develops and explains the parallels. The Nazis studied the American South, the Jim Crow legislation, for example, to help them figure out how to codify their discrimination against Jews, Sinti and Roma and others. In her analysis of casteism, Wilkerson shows convincingly how destructive such discriminatory conceptions also are for those at the top of the caste hierarchy.

Mulling over this book after having finished it much too late one night, I remembered W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin. For these two thinkers have also written on the effect of racism on the racists.

If you have heard of DuBois and can remember one thing he wrote, it is probably The Souls of Black Folk. At least, that is the first book by DuBois I remember hearing about. It is still on my list of books to read in this vacation, summer 2023. However, he also wrote an essay entitled “The Souls of White Folk,” which I have read. It is a playful, amusing, savage deconstruction of the absurdity and brutality of white supremacy. In the midst of his bitterness and anger DuBois lays out the corrosive effect this illusion has on white souls that believe it: “Am I, in my blackness, the sole sufferer? I suffer. And yet, somehow,… there surges in me a vast pity,– pity for a people imprisoned and enthralled, hampered and made miserable for such a cause, such a fantasy!… A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers.”[1]

James Baldwin puts it a bit differently. In all of his work, he combats the “lie of whiteness.” (See, for example his essay, “On Being White… And Other Lies,” Essence, April 1984). The thought that the racists harm themselves shows up repeatedly in his writings in different formulations. The perhaps clearest and directed statement is found in an essay, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in my Mind,” which first appeared in The New Yorker, November 17, 1962, under the title “Letter from a Region in my Mind”: “It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others debases himself. That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one, which is proved by the eyes of any Alabama sheriff….” That was in 1962. We know the old black-and-white photos and news clips and can recognize the debasement there. Sadly, it is still around. If you look into the eyes of the White supremacists in Charlottesville or others you can easily find on cable or YouTube, you will see the same twisted, tortured, dehumanized souls as in one of those sheriffs.

In their analyses of racism and casteism Wilkerson, DuBois and Baldwin show how destructive such discriminatory conceptions are for those at the top of the racial or caste hierarchy. You can only maintain these ways of thinking by dehumanizing those below you. The cost of keeping your place at the top of the hierarchy is dehumanizing yourself. Wilkerson’s, DuBois’s and Baldwin’s words radiate a radical humanism. In the midst of their advocacy and struggle for the acceptance of discriminated groups as full members of the human race, they sincerely care for the misguided racists or upper caste discriminators. Reading these words and feeling their passionate, radical humanism humbles me.

These conclusions are not only the result of observation and analysis. Recent empirical confirmation of the negative effects of racism and casteism for those on top comes from Jonathan Metzl. In his book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, published 2019, he shows that more and more White Americans are dying “because white America’s investment in maintaining an imagined place atop a racial hierarchy—that is, an investment in a sense of whiteness—ironically harms the aggregate well-being of U.S. whites as a demographic group, thereby making whiteness itself a negative health indicator.”[2]

However, we must go farther than only fighting “the lie of whiteness,” as Baldwin calls it. Martin Oliver points out that we on the top of the race or caste hierarchy must also confront another, much more seductive lie: “a lie of enlightenment, righteousness, virtue. It is the lie that explains away responsibility and culpability by referring to some proof or evidence of achieved moral high ground.”[3] We use this lie to excuse us, to keep us from having to look deep into our souls. I was at that demonstration. I signed this petition. I can recognize racism and caste discrimination and point it out. I have this degree. I have studied here and there. I attend that church or that synagogue. I pray at that mosque or that temple. It helps us to feel good – and comfortable – because we can point to the unenlightened, uneducated, deplorables down there – and avoid examining ourselves.

And, quite frankly, that is my fear: Do I succumb to this lie? Do I rest in a comfortable self-righteousness that insulates me from having to deal with the whiteness in my own soul? I hope not, but I cannot be sure alone. As Metzl observes, “the larger conversation about the effects of whiteness is the one we, white Americans, badly need to have.”[4]

These thoughts about Wilkerson, DuBois and Baldwin are the little contribution of an old White guy to that conversation.

[1] W.E.B DuBois, Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins, Library of America: New York, 1986, p. 926

[2] Jonathan M. Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, New York: Basic Books, 2019, p. 9

[3] Michael Oliver, “James Baldwin and the “Lie of Whiteness”: Toward an Ethic of Culpability, Complicity, and Confession,” Religions (16 June 2021), published online https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/6/447/htm, accessed August 10, 2023.

[4] Metzl, p. 11.

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Some Thoughts on Reconciling Homosexuality with the Christian Faith

I got an enquiry over Facebook from an old acquaintance about this question sometime back. What follows is the much too short answer I sent her.

Briefly this is how I see it. These are different elements and together the four points do not necessarily make a consistent argument.

  1. To begin with, and this applies to all issues of faith, we grow in understanding, personally and collectively. As individuals we grow in our faith. This is an old insight that Paul had: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child;…” (1 Cor 13:11). John Wesley spoke of growing in grace. That is a variation of this theme. The crucial point here is that this growth never ends. To speak personally, I am 66 years old, have a doctorate in systematic theology and am still learning. We grow in knowledge, learn to appreciate different perspectives and allow ourselves to be challenged. Only when we face challenges can we grow in faith. When we build up our positions as a wall and cower behind it deflecting challenges, our faith not only does not grow, it dries up. It is also arrogant and the sin of hybris. The same goes for the community of the faith, the church. The church does not believe as in the Middle Ages. It does not believe as it did in the 1800’s. It does not believe now as it did in 1974 when I left school and started college. This collective, although split up into innumerable denominations and confessions, also grows in faith. It draws on new insights from all kinds of sources and reflects on these new insights and through hefty, sometimes acrimonious debates, works its way through to a deeper and better understanding of what it means to follow Christ here and now. This means we also discover new aspects of the Bible. As a woman you can understand better than I what it means to have women pastors now, for example. The UMC did not accept women as pastors until 1956. The church had to fight its way through to this – and some are still not that far and others have regressed to old positions, such as the SBC.
  2. Another point is that Paul did not know loving same-sex couples. What he knew were exploitive same-sex relationships in which an elder man took a younger lover. I know several same-sex couples, male and female couples, who are devoted, sincere Christians. One is a clergy couple. Peter, my best friend from my theological studies in Tübingen, shares Paul’s criticism of these exploitive sexual relationships. This criticism applies to all such exploitive sexual relationships, homosexual and heterosexual. However – and this is Peter’s crucial point – “Paul did not know us.”
  3. Furthermore, gay men and lesbian women are all created in the image of God. Gen 1:27 says that man and woman are both made in the image of God. There is no mention of their sexual orientation. In the other creation account, Gen 2:24, there is no mention of sexual orientation either. Sexual orientation is not a choice. That is just the way we are. How we became who we are, why I am attracted to women and why Peter is attracted to men is irrelevant.
  4. Finally, a hermeneutical point. It is about how we read scripture. The Bible is not flat. We do not read every part of the Bible or every story or verse the same. We recognize some as more authoritative than others and read the other Bible verses through these glasses, so to speak. For example, there are many verses that forbid us to charge interest, both in the Hebrew Bible (Ex 22:25, Dt 23:19) and in the New Testament (Mt 25:27, Lk 6:34-35). However, our capitalist society and capitalist Christians do it anyway. In the debate on homosexuality and the Christian faith, Gal 3:28 is for me fundamental: “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, far all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” This tells me that our classifications, the ways we categorize people, divide them into groups, play absolutely no role in the way God sees us. They should not for us either. This teaching of Paul also resonates with what we read in the gospels about how Jesus treated minorities and groups that were discriminated against. Another way to say the same thing is to point out that we are all made in the image of God just the way we are, whether we are male or female, rich or poor, heterosexual or heterosexual, black or white or green,…. the list is endless.

I hope my thoughts can help whoever may read this on her or his journey of faith.

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Some Lenten Thoughts on Understanding Who I Am

Knowing who we are, our identity, precedes what we have to do.

I can only act, live as a Christian – in my case, as a White American Christian – when I have first recognized who I am – one who has and is still benefitting from White Privilege. Only then can I truly live as a Christian. I must first face the consequences of my entwinement in racist, discriminatory structures. This applies not only to racism, but as a man also to sexist structures.

Cone said he was Black before he was Christian.

In rejecting chauvinistic nationalism or Americanism, I have always insisted that I am, my identity is
first, Christian,
second, human,
third, American.

Christian comes first because in accepting Christ, in following him, in seeing the world and all its inhabitants though the eyes of the Good News, I am first able to see, ground and understand our common humanity – as sinners and then as creatures created in the image of God. All the rest comes after that.

Somewhere after American comes, perhaps,
fourth, White,
fifth, Southerner and
sixth, alien, foreigner, outsider, immigrant – something like that.

I live in Germany without German citizenship. Nonetheless, because I am White and look like most native Germans – there are native Germans with non-white skin, children of Africans, Asians,Turks, Arabs, etc. whose parents moved here and who were born and have grown up here – this is not much a problem for me. I am accepted. My foreignness only becomes a problem when it is too obvious, i.e. my accent is difficult to understand or I think and see things differently because of my Southern American background.

Unlike Cone – and according to his analysis – my Whiteness does not define me as strongly, as fundamentally as his Blackness does him and other African Americans. However, my Whiteness may indeed define me as strongly as his Blackness defines him and other African Americans. The difference is that he is conscious of the defining character of his Blackness; whereas I take my Whiteness for granted and do not immediately see the fundamental role it plays for me, my being and my thinking.

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Some Reflections on Feuerbach and Cone

In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Ludwig Feuerbach developed a theory of projection to explain humans´ belief in God. As an atheist, Feuerbach rejected the belief in God. He explains this belief with his theory of projection.

In pursuit of their true destiny, eternal life and transcendence, humans make a crucial mistake. Their desire is frustrated in everyday life. They have to face suffering and death. Therefore, they project their deepest desires into an unlimited being, that they call God. They cut a part of themselves off, throw it at heaven, so to speak, and then, after they have raised it to perfection, receive it again as God.

We humans thus split ourselves in two and leave ourselves only with our weaknesses and feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy. Feuerbach’s project is to pull all of our alienated positive characteristics back down to earth, back to us humans – and to do that he has to eliminate God, or at least the belief in God.

My interest here, however, is not Feuerbach´s criticism. Rather I would like to use his theory of projection in the context of James C. Cone’s criticism of White (racist) Christianity.

Did not white Christians project their whiteness, their racist perspective of Black and society onto their god? You get the god you want?

After re-reading God of the Oppressed, the question remains for me as a White American Christian, Where is a place for me? How can I achieve salvation, i.e., liberation? (Poor wording. I, of course, cannot “achieve,” “earn” salvation; it is a gift.) God of the Oppressed did not shock me or alienate me as it did the first time I read it as divinity school student. Perhaps I am more mature or tired. Nonetheless, it does place me as a sincere, nicht racist White Christian in a very difficult situation.

I must beware of working out the liberation of the oppressors in a manner that has no practical import! This involves more than just getting my heart right. Liberation of the Oppressors – me and other Whites – means at the very least three things:
1) looking at society, all the problems and possibilities, through the eyes of the oppressed, the least of these (Mt 25),
2) recognizing my privileges, and
3) acting to end oppression.

It was not until I re-read Cone, God of the Oppressed, that I understood the deep spirituality that fills liberation. It is so obvious that the interpretations of Black liberation theology as one-sided, Marxist, etc. are SO wrong.

I see three reasons for this wrong-headed interpretation:
1) They do not understand what they are talking about or
2) they do not WANT to understand or
3) they DO understand and fear losing their privileges and power!

In this context it is important for all of us to recognize that most participants in oppression do not actively seek to harm others but are caught up in systems that tend toward the diminishment of others. Our being caught up in these systems makes it so difficult for us to see that and how privilege burdens us with responsibility for injustice and oppression that proceed out of the system. This circumstance enables to enjoy the benefits of these systems and at the same time distance ourselves from the negative effects.