When I returned to Washington, D.C., in June, I had to reacquaint myself with the life I had led for the last twenty-five years. It now seemed unalterably changed. Each encounter with a lawmaker, an evangelical ally, a lobbyist, became an invitation to do things differently. The “we”-versus-“them” dichotomy that drove everything for me—from fund-raising to evangelizing—no longer applied. Reading Bonhoeffer and walking through his life—and death—had introduced me to so much, including his concept of our shared humanity. He helped me to see that we are all in this together—religious, nonreligious, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or whatever other religious identity we adhere to—we are all creations of the same Creator. There is no “we” versus “them” because we are all “we.”
I began to see that the world was not divided between simply pro-life or pro-choice people: we were all pro-life, to one degree or another, and we were all pro-choice, to one degree or another. I knew plenty of people who championed the right of an unborn child to be born and yet who thought helping the kids in the Mexican garbage dumps somehow hurt Americans. I was also coming to know plenty of people who chose to abort children because they knew they couldn’t give them good lives—or because they feared, rightly or wrongly, that a pregnancy threatened their own lives in some way. Whether I agreed with any of these people or not wasn’t the point. What Bonhoeffer taught me was that Jesus fully affirmed the humanity of everyone he encountered.
This new insight opened all kinds of possibilities. Could it be that evangelicals like me might find points of agreement with Barack Obama and points of disagreement with George Bush? Could we face the possibility that people in the Democratic Party lived out some Christian values the Republican Party had yet to discover? Could we find common ground with Muslims that perhaps we did not share with some of our own fellow Christians? And if God could use me in His work to help others, riddled as I was with sin, and filled with faults, couldn’t He use anyone in His work? These were dangerous questions that challenged the most basic premises of the way we had organized the world.
I was working through some of them when, in September, I got a call from Pat Mahoney about a former missionary’s plans for a “Burn a Koran” day to commemorate 9/11. Anti-Muslim rhetoric had been increasing in evangelical circles and online, including on a website that was gaining popularity: Breitbart News. Randall Terry announced he would stand in front of the White House on the anniversary of September 11 and tear pages from the Koran; and Baptist pastor Terry Jones, of the ironically named Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, announced he would create his own “Ground Zero Mosque” by burning a tower of Korans. This would be his way of defying and insulting the Muslims he perceived to have celebrated the terror attacks of 2001. As the hours ticked on, publicity surrounding Jones was increasing and his intended conflagration was becoming more and more dangerous.
Pat and I were deeply distressed about Jones’s plans, and we had already decided to denounce him publicly, when a State Department official called to ask if there was anything I could do to get this guy to back down. The worldwide consequences, both to the diplomatic progress made between the U.S. and various Muslim-majority countries, and to humanitarian aid workers in places like Pakistan, could be devastating. My own concerns centered as much on the fragile relationships between ancient Christian communities and their Muslim neighbors in places like Iraq as on the welfare of expatriate Christian workers ministering in sensitive areas.
Pat and I decided to go to Gainesville and directly appeal to Pastor Jones. On September 9, I called the Dove World Outreach Center to explore the possibility of a meeting. I was told that if Pat and I came, the pastor might see us—if he had time—but there would be no guarantees. We arrived on the tenth and were met at the front door of the church by armed volunteers, one with a rifle and two with handguns strapped on their belts. It was my first real glimpse of passionate evangelicalism intertwined so grotesquely with extreme nationalism. The black-garbed, armed security assumed a paramilitary stance. They seemed unsure of whether to let us in. Finally, a woman stepped to the door, pointed to me, and said, “Just you.” I turned to Pat, confused, but followed their directions to enter. “I’ll be waiting out here,” Pat said, adding his typically mordant humor by saying, “If you survive.” Given how I was struggling just to control my anxiety, I couldn’t even manage a smile.
Once inside the church, armed escorts led me through hallways bedecked with American flags and other patriotic symbols. I was taken into Jones’s office, where two more armed guards stood at attention. I was seated silently at a desk, facing a wooden nameplate with “Pastor Terry” carved into it. Several minutes passed before a side door to the office popped open and Pastor Jones, with his graying mustache, wrinkled T-shirt, and shorts, sat down, plopped a large revolver on the metal desk, and asked with a tinge of sarcasm, “Brother, what do you want here?”
I thought of Bonhoeffer and summoned within me the will to respect this man and hope that he might return the sentiment before things went awry. I explained that I had come because his intended actions would place many of our fellow Christians in grave danger; that it would set back decades of work by missionaries around the world, certainly closing off Muslims from ever listening to the gospel. I tried to appeal to the Christian within him, who should have wanted to convert those who could still be saved. He said very little, shook his head disapprovingly, then abruptly stood up, took his gun, thanked me for visiting, and muttered that he would pray about it. His bodyguards then led me out of the building. Was this a resolution? I couldn’t be sure. But I somehow felt that of all the things that could have happened—of all the reactions that could have escalated the already difficult situation—this at least left the door open a crack for a peaceful resolution.
The story about this preacher and his plans to set Korans on fire had attracted a great deal of media attention, so Pat and I held a news conference on the front lawn of the church, a few paces from where the pyre was to be built. I told reporters I was hopeful the pastor would do the right thing and call off his dangerous stunt, but my meeting with him had been inconclusive. Then we headed for the airport to return home. On the way, we heard the news Jones had “suspended” his plans to burn the Korans the next morning, but, given his strange and unpredictable personality, we didn’t trust him. I called to ask Jones to surrender to me the 225 Korans he had collected as a show of good faith. To my surprise, he agreed. Because I had to be back in D.C. for meetings the next day, Pat remained to claim the books from Jones and take them into safekeeping. As I headed for my gate at the airport, Pat rented a car; he later filled it with the holy books and drove them to a UPS Store, where they were packed and shipped to our ministry center in Washington.
In my office display cabinet, I have the small paperback Koran that topped the pile to be burned that day. Scrawled angrily in permanent black marker across its cover and along its edge are the words “Burn This Book!” I often glance at it. It is almost as if the book cover itself contains a straight trajectory from my father’s World War II scrapbook to the experience I had in Germany studying Bonhoeffer, right up to my encounter with Pastor Jones. Burning books had historically been the actions of fascists and thugs, and to see a sacred text with that hateful message, written under the orders of a man purporting to be a follower of Christ, was chilling. It brought to mind the ominous events that presaged the Nazi atrocities, and that they could, indeed, happen on our own shores. Even though Jones and his planned Koran burning proved one of only a few such incidents, the warning was clear: no nation, no culture, no people is immune to such extreme acts of contempt by one group for another. “Man’s inhumanity to man” could happen at any time and in any place. That book in my display case would be a reminder to me of the importance of the sentiment that is fittingly inscribed at the entrance of the National Archives in Washington: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
* * *
By the fall of 2010, I was watching a big realignment in the evangelical world. My longtime patron, D. James Kennedy, as well as Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich, had all passed away; Chuck Colson would die within two years of Obama taking office. Jim Dobson would step down from Focus on the Family, and Beverly LaHaye was no longer at Concerned Women for America. All around me, during Obama’s first years, people were lamenting that we might have lost the war for traditional values.
Although I was going through a personal and very private philosophical realignment, my job was still to champion the issues that remained at the center of evangelical social concerns: ending abortion, preventing the legalization of gay marriage, and protecting the right of churches and religious organizations to remain insulated from government intrusion. The 2010 midterm elections and rise of the Tea Party proved there was still a robust and effective group of voters who cared about these things. Tea Partiers were overwhelmingly white evangelical Protestants and most of them fully supported the Christian conservative movement. In other words, they were a huge group of potential allies to our cause. Because I didn’t know what else to do, I reached out and established strong relationships with them.
As all this change in the evangelical landscape was happening, I had to continue with my studies. I had a dissertation to write and my time was running out. During a visit to Toronto to address the Canadian chapter of the Evangelical Church Alliance, Peter met up with me to discuss my progress. He was an academic good cop/bad cop all in one, asking bluntly if I intended to master mid-twentieth-century German. If not, Peter cautioned, I couldn’t write on Bonhoeffer.
I was crushed. I knew Peter was right, but I didn’t know what other subject I could tackle so late in the process. I wanted to master Bonhoeffer as best I could and fully incorporate his insights into my own work. I knew my ministry, along with scores of other much larger and influential groups, was flirting with a kind of Christian nationalism that portended the collapse of our theological integrity and the disappearance of the human compassion that once characterized evangelicalism. From the founding of Harvard and Yale to the abolitionist movement and the humanitarian work of the Salvation Army, evangelicals once contributed energetically to the betterment of society. Since the 1980s, though, our message had become overwhelmingly political and more narrow and self-interested, the opposite of the gospel’s.
My disappointing conversation with Peter about my dissertation left me stumped. If not Bonhoeffer, then what? Peter, fortunately, offered a compelling alternative. What if I looked at what made Bonhoeffer what he was—specifically what was happening in the German churches at the time? I understood his idea immediately. This was a manageable undertaking that intersected with my concerns over the nationalist drift among our evangelical churches. I took his advice and turned the direction of my research to what is known as “the German Church Crisis.”
I did a whirlwind tour of the country to meet with experts on German churches during the Nazi era. One of them was United Methodist minister Steve Martin—not the comedian but a filmmaker—who had produced a series of short documentaries on the Kirchenkampf, or struggle of the churches during Nazism. I noted that the official state-sanctioned denomination of the period was the Evangelische Kirche, or “Evangelical Church.” It wasn’t exactly what “evangelical” was in the United States, but very close. Many of the churches that were part of my network shared strong and deep common roots with the German churches of the Reformation.
It was out of the Evangelische Kirche that another, ultraconservative, racialized, and highly politicized movement grew, the Deutsche Christen, or “German Christians.” I dove deep into this part of evangelical history and was appalled by what I found: one of the most famous of evangelical theologians of that day was Paul Althaus, a man who celebrated Hitler’s rise to power as “a gift and miracle from God.” A pastoral letter read from all the evangelical churches of Bavaria included this encomium for the new Nazi government: “With thanks and joy the church perceives how the new state protects against blasphemy, represses immorality, upholds discipline and orderliness with a stronger hand. It calls for fear of God, holds marriage holy, wants to know that youth are spiritually educated, and it brings the role of the fathers once again into honor . . .”
Sitting at a table in the musty basement library at Faith Seminary in Tacoma, I pored over documents from the era, deeply disturbed by their familiar ring. The American evangelical churches had never endorsed anything as ghastly as the mass-murderous Nazi regime, but there was a thread running through its story that had a recognizable color and texture. As I pulled on that thread, it led to a conclusion: the American churches I had kept company with shared a common genetic disease with the German evangelical churches of the 1930s. We, like our forebears, had traded the supreme lordship of Jesus Christ for the demigods of political and social potentates. For the Germans, that demigod was Adolf Hitler and his henchmen, including the despicable Bishop Ludwig Müller, who gave Hitler all the religious cover he needed. For Americans, the same Faustian pact had been consummated with any number of political personalities, and most certainly with the Republican Party. We also had our Müllers who provided a spiritual veneer for the party and its leadership, making it more palatable to the pastors in our pulpits.
This was not the conclusion I had expected to reach in my doctoral work. I had set out to simply examine a brave and moral spiritual leader who dared to challenge one of the most dangerously anti-Christian and anti-human political juggernauts in history. Instead, I had located the troubled heart of my own church and my own party. As I read more on the German crisis and consulted with a wide variety of experts on the history of evangelicalism, Christian ethics, and the politicization of American churches, I developed an informal thesis: American evangelicals were on the brink of a moral disaster, as our pastors and other leaders lacked the theological tools to protect them from being cynically exploited by politically motivated actors.
The similarity with the Nazification of the German evangelical churches—and specifically its pastors—was breathtaking. I had already been in churches where the American flag had replaced the cross as the most prominent symbol in the sanctuary, something eerily reminiscent of when the German Christians draped their altars with their patriotic symbol, the swastika. In other churches, I had heard patriotic songs being sung in place of biblically themed worship choruses and theologically rich hymns, and even one where the pastor told me he was careful to always preach in a “Ronald Reagan suit” with crisply pressed shirts and Ronald Reagan cuff links. “He was always my role model,” the pastor explained. I remember thinking, Shouldn’t our role model be Jesus?
Admittedly, these were exaggerated manifestations of the problem. It mostly showed itself in subtle ways—in the idea that a Christian could only be Republican, or that tax increases violated the commandment against stealing. The kernel of the problem was that evangelicals were no longer deriving their value system from the Bible, historic Christian teaching, evangelical doctrine, or, most importantly, the words and actions of Jesus Christ, but instead from the pronouncements of political personalities and a particular political party. The cornerstone of evangelical belief had always been one’s personal profession of Jesus Christ as Lord: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” To make Jesus the Lord of one’s life means to make him the last word on whatever you believe and how you are to practice that belief. Our folks had gotten this all muddled with our allegiance to political platforms. The German Christians had traded Jesus Christ for Adolf Hitler and the church for the Nazi Party; we had done something similar with Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party. The consequences were different, but the error was the same.
After discussing my unwelcome revelation with my advisors, I took a leave of absence from Faith and Action and went to Seattle to write my dissertation, entitled “Bulwark Against Political Idolatry: The Necessity of a Theology of Church and State for American Evangelical Pastors.” I asserted that American evangelicals were vulnerable to committing the egregious sins of idolatry, substituting, to use Bonhoefferian terms, the penultimate for the ultimate. German evangelical churches committed the sin when they accepted the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler and their guiding values of “blood and soil,” or race and patriotism. These were the vehicles with which to interpret and understand their religion and their moral, ethical, and social standards. The result was a near-complete politicization of Christianity in Germany. Instead of being, as Karl Barth called the church, “the conscience of the state,” the German church had become the tool of the state, helping to pave the way for the moral catastrophe that was both the war and the Holocaust. In my work, I pointed to a similar danger of demoralization in the incremental politicization of American evangelicalism that I had both witnessed and enabled for nearly thirty years.
When my committee accepted my work and granted my doctorate, I was relieved to learn they wouldn’t be publishing my dissertation on any of the academic databases. I had written it as honestly as I have ever written anything in my life, but I was terrified my critique of my own community would be perceived as a career-ending act of betrayal. I may have had a better understanding of my people, but I was still afraid of them. They held enormous power over my life—financial, political, and emotional. As further proof of how far we had drifted from the gospel of grace and forgiveness, our community had a history of punishing political defectors, and my dissertation could be perceived as evidence that I was one. I could expect financial backers to pull away, pastors to stop inviting me to preach in their pulpits, and old allies to shun me.
Cheryl’s and my shared time of study was drawing to a close, and the intellectual, emotional, and even religious changes we each had experienced over those three years were momentous. As a married couple, we were closer than ever; our vows had been joyfully renewed by the experience. I fell in love with Cheryl all over again—and in a new way. For the first time since the early years of our marriage, I really saw—and appreciated—her not only as equal to me in many of the most important things, but in still other ways, such as how she exceeded my abilities—especially academically and in emotional intelligence. I no longer found these qualities about Cheryl threatening. Thirty-five years into our marriage, we were finding a new way of being with one another. It was exciting. Still, as we had changed together, I wondered how I would function in my old circumstances. Would I be attempting to fit into a wardrobe I had long ago outgrown?
In the summer of 2012, after Cheryl received her master’s degree, we returned to Washington, D.C., just in time for me to dive into another presidential campaign, this time for Mitt Romney, who had secured the nomination. In my own mind and heart, I had to recalibrate my approach to politics. Instead of demanding that Romney adopt the entirety of our evangelical suite of social policy demands as well as our religious jargon, as I had the first time around with him, I encouraged him to be authentic, and I wanted my people to judge him on that basis. This campaign was also a time for me to help my community mature to the point where they could honor his religious beliefs instead of demanding that he embrace ours. I campaigned for him, but even before the primaries began, in December 2011, I wrote a letter to Christians in Iowa that signaled how much I had changed. I urged them to reconsider religious beliefs as the most important factor in their choice of a 2012 presidential candidate: “We should pick our candidates for president in the same way we pick our doctors—on their skills, experience, reputation, and approach to our problems.” I went so far as to say, “Evangelical doctrine is not a litmus test” of whether a candidate will be a successful and effective president.
It may not have changed many minds, but for me, this was the first step into a new era.