One reason I love and respect Christelle is because she challenges my thinking without challenging my humanity. As I look on the public and political events of these past few weeks, I see the angry defiance of a newly elected president, as well as the angry defiance of a newly defeated party. I hear voices of every description filled with vitriol and hatred; I witness violence by left against right and by right against left. I am dismayed at the degree to which anger, hatred and other dark emotions crowd out reasonable and rational discourse. I am reminded of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s quote about racism being “man’s gravest threat to man”: “the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.”
Christelle’s reflection on Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhöffer. Bonhöffer was, in many respects, a great prophet. He ministered to the weak from the beginning of his personal ministry and he recognized the wickedness and evil of the Third Reich, even before it was given formal power. Ultimately, he concluded that only direct action of the most drastic kind would allow the sort of redemptive change that Germany of 1944 needed. He was part of the resistence movement and associated with the July 1944 “Valkyre” plot to assassinate Hitler. Ultimately, he was executed in extraordinarily humiliating circumstances at Flossenburg concentration camp, only three weeks before its liberation by the Soviet Army in April 1945.
Niemöller was different. He had served in the Imperial German Navy during World War I. He was a U-boat commander during the period of unrestricted submarine warfare (a policy that led to the sinking of the Lusitania and the entry of the United States into the war). Following Word War I, he entered the Lutheran ministry. However, like many ministers, Niemöller was suspicious of the Weimar Republic and initially found some degree of common cause with the Nazis. He first opposed the Nazis in 1933, as the Aryan Laws persecuted Jews who had converted to Christianity. Both Bonhöffer and Niemöller were early supporters of the Confessing Church, opposing Nazi state takeover of the state church, though Niemöller was much slower to fully abandon the Nazis. The Nazis confined Niemöller to concentration camps in 1937; he was being transferred from Sachsenhausen, when he was liberated by the American Army in April 1945.
Christelle and I have discussed and wondered aloud what we might have done had we lived in Germany in 1933. Would we have seen the Nazis with the clarity of Bonhöffer? Would we have been seduced to by the idolatrous blandishments of the Nazi state, as Bonhöffer warned? I suspect Christelle would have been among those with such clarity of vision and thought. I flatter myself that I would have been there too. However, I suspect that my native conservatism (general conservatism, not just political conservatism) would have lead me down a path much more like Niemöller’s. The title of Bonhöffer’s most enduring book describes the path of both Martin and Dietrich: The Cost of Discipleship.
Such historical “what-ifs” can be a powerful way to think about personal commitment and flesh out moral, ethical and spiritual commitments. However, such exercises are always a little suspect, to me, until they are tested in the crucible of reality; such exercises are to reality as a stationary bicycle exercise is to an actual bicycle trip through the mountains. So, what do I learn from what Christelle has taught me about Bonhöffer and Niemöller? Here are a few thoughts for our time.
First, angry, attacking emotional appeals have very little persuasive power. President Trump’s election demonstrates that angry, attacking emotional appeal does have tremendous power to confirm existing feelings and to rally people with such feelings to action. Our country is awash in anger. In the words of William Butler Yeats, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” In a democratic republic, it is certainly critical to understand the reasons for anger and frustration. From my perspective, many of the powerful and elite saw no reason to even try to understand their fellow-citizens’ anger. Media and political elites at best ignored it, at worst, ridiculed it.
I didn’t vote or support the election of President Trump, but I do have some understanding of the angry passion that helped elect him. Sharing a philosophical frontier with many of those who did support President Trump, I can try to understand. I am not a powerless or disenfranchised person. I have been a lawyer for nearly twenty-five years. I have held local elected office and functioned in responsible and important public office. My family has always been blessed to be able to call on an ample supply of social capital. When a substantial portion of our country–nearly half of the voting public, as it turns out–feels left behind, we ignore them at our peril. If that lesson applied in 2016, it applies doubly in 2017.
Second, mutual anger and the substitution of passion for reason are among the most non- partisan phenomena I can imagine. The parallel treatment of Merrick Garland and Neil Gorsuch seem to be a fulfillment of Gandhi’s warning that an-eye-for-an-eye only leaves the world blind. Certainly there are many causes that warrant passionate commitment–just as Niemöller and Bonhöffer each would have taught us. Those of us that have such passionate commitments should never allow that passion to become an excuse to cease reasoning or to demonize those with whom we share disagreements.
Third, now, today, this moment, more than ever it is important for me to see each person I encounter as my sister or brother. Of course, we use such language euphemistically, but I mean it more literally. As a school superintendent and school board member before that, I often heard the most compassionate expressions of pity for students in my district who came from poverty- stricken backgrounds. For two generations, in my district, however, that compassion was almost never conjoined with effective action to improve educational outcomes. We just kept doing the same ineffective thing while repeating our well-meant concern. We saw our children: poor, poorly-educated, often ethnic minorities. While we saw them, we did not see them as ours. Only when I saw them as my children was I willing to take personal responsibility to try to change outcomes. It was critical to my personal development to see these children–so different from me in background, wealth, education, religion, ethnicity–as my own brothers and sisters, each of us children of the same parents.
Finally, Christelle, Martin and Dietrich have taught me, and held an example before my eyes, of personal introspection. Before I presume to judge or condemn another–including those of different political views or conclusions–I need to be sure my own heart is right. I don’t like to be judge or ridiculed, and I have felt the sting of judgment and ridicule. If I don’t like judgment and ridicule, I should be scrupulous to insure that I am not judgmental or a practitioner of ridicule. In particular, Christelle, Martin, and Dietrich all reflect a teaching of Christ: you have to love them that despise and hate you.
I hasten to add that such devotion does not preclude aggressive action when required. Bonhöffer, for example, worked as an agent for German military intelligence, knowing that such work imputed some guilt on him. It also provided a vehicle for opposing the regime. Bonhöffer knew that there were no good alternatives, only imperfect actions open to an ethical person. In our time, that dualism, loving those who hate me and being willing to take ethical, though imperfect action, is called for.
Unlike Christelle, I do count myself a classic “liberal.” Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund
Burke, John Adams all speak loudly to my mind. I accept the “invisible hand” and the “marketplace of ideas.” For me, the highest good of government is to protect and foster the individual liberty of its citizens. On this point, Christelle and I are often on different sides. However, it is precisely because we are different that my obligation to listen and learn from Christelle is heightened; and the more important the issue, the greater the duty to listen closely and question carefully.
Finally, at the end of each day, I can only reflect that a struggle for good starts and ends in my own heart. Christelle, Martin and Dietrich have made me a better person and have inspired me to be better yet. In dangerous times, I need to be my best. I think Christelle and I share the spirit of Psalm 139: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts:/ And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” Psalm 139:23- 24.
Across The Divide: A Dialogue 