[1] Alarmed at the perceived creep of authoritarianism in the present U.S. Administration, especially at the enforcement tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, this declaration written by a California pastor and modeled on the Barmen Declaration of 1934 in Germany, aims to stiffen and clarify the Church’s public witness as a check against a creeping danger. Were it to be successful as a public witness of Christian conscience, it would work to restore the secular state to its divine institution to defend the innocent and to punish (only) evildoers so that that Christians can conscientiously submit to its temporal authority (Romans 13:1-7). Apart from public confessing of allegiance to Christ alone as saving Lord, the document argues that the Church’s witness in our growing political crisis may be discredited by “silence, complicity and false allegiance.” Thus, for its own integrity, the document summons the Church to a concrete and timely act of public confession (Matthew 10:32-3). It rightly resources this public confession of Christ alone in canonical Scripture’s witness: “The Bible stands as our sure and final source of authority… all truth claims must be tested against the Scriptures.”
[2] This is not a perfect document. In spite of welcome qualifications disowning any “conflation of the gospel of Jesus with national identity for the purpose of justifying partisan ideology,” there is in the nature of the case a manifest vulnerability that, as formulated, subscription may be insincerely undertaken, i.e. chiefly to instrumentalize the church’s confession of Christ alone to deliver a factional ally in a broad yet partisan resistance to the current administration. Certainly, Christians are free in Christ and as citizens may by Christian conscience feel compelled to join in such a partisan resistance alliance, but they may also for the same reasons support the current administration as a check against the alleged authoritarianism of the opposition. We cannot ignore the fact that the current president won the popular vote in 2024, in large part because of dismay at the overreach of the Biden administration with its selective enforcement of law and weaponization of the judiciary and intelligence agencies. This too manifested creeping authoritarianism.
[3] Invoking the confession of Christ alone as a churchly act is, in any case, a far more searching and grave undertaking. Not to strain gnats and swallow camels, however, the gravamen of the document rightly reiterates the historic opposition of the confession of Christ alone at Barmen against the emerging totalitarianism of Nazi Germany. The confession then pinpointed the cult of personality dressed with the fascist “leadership-principle,” which would involve taking an oath of personal allegiance to Hitler as the Leader of the German people, the “people” understood as a racial unity. This precedent of the Barmen Declaration identifies a similar danger in our current American situation.
[4] There is, however, a weakness inherited from Barmen. The document takes for granted “democratic norms” without any theological justification, and this absence amounts to question begging in the political division in the USA today, where both sides claim to be saving “our democracy” against the other side’s creeping authoritarianism. The Barmen Declaration was crippled as a check against Hitlerism by the fact that the Weimar Republic’s “democracy” had been broadly discredited by the extreme polarization that saw street battles between the Reds and the Browns up until the time of Hitler’s ascendancy. Hitler was legally and “democratically” installed in office on the vow to put an end to the “chaos of parliamentarianism.” That represents a similar secular danger that confronts us as the current American political drama at its existential extremity will force the suppression of opposition in order to secure its version of “our democracy.”
[5] Yet again, however, not to strain gnats, the document expressly recognizes that our Christian struggle is not “against persons but against spiritual powers and principalities.” Moreover, this struggle is ethically normed by the honoring of “all persons as bearers” of the image of God, “including those with whom we disagree,” entailing “robust affirmation of the rights of free speech and dissent.” These biblical mandates surely imply a genuine if undeveloped theological doctrine of the secular state and its temporal responsibility to God for human good in his creation. But the question here cannot be begged indefinitely.
[6] In spite of such reservations (or, rather summons to further development), I will subscribe to this as a call to faithful confessing which will in a principled way and with corresponding self-discipline require resistance to creeping authoritarianism from any and all directions. I have argued for many years now since I published my book, Before Auschwitz, about the danger of our current Weimarization in a religious culture in which Christianity in the USA is a mile wide and an inch deep, i.e. shallow. In this culture, denominational lines have become increasingly meaningless. But a summons to a lived and embodied witness to Christ alone as saving Lord has the potential to gather together all who will acknowledge no other Lord than Jesus crucified, risen and coming to complete creation’s redemption and fulfillment. In other words, I piously hope that this document will precipitate a church struggle even as it works to check creeping authoritarianism in our politics.
Paul R. Hinlicky is the emeritus Tise Professor of Lutheran Studies at Roanoke College, Salem, Virginia, a Docent of the Protestant Theological Faculty of Comenius University in Bratislava, and a Professor of Systematic Theology at the Institute of Lutheran Theology. He is the author of Paths Not Taken (2009), Luther and the Beloved Community (2010), Divine Complexity (2010), and with Brent Adkins, Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with Deleuze (2013). He is the editor of a series of books on Lutheran Dogmatics and Constructive Theology with Wipf and Stock Press.