footnotes than leading congregations. These retreats into theology come with many advantages—less institutional upheaval, the preservation of relationships, and
a consolidation of authority in a time of increasing religious decline and illiteracy. The vague peace of a retreat into theology, however, might be better described as procrastinated conflict between what is quiet and easy and, ultimately, what is right concerning the full humanity of people who suffer.
A corollary of this retreat by clergy is that the people of these churches become less likely to retreat into theology and more likely to retreat into purity as portrayed in their media of choice. In a world of vast information, charged divisions, and diverse instability, people want to feel that the identities they claim are the ones helping hold what is good together rather than picking at the seams of the world. This is, ultimately, a retreat into purity—perhaps the overlapping counterpart to a retreat into theology. It is the conviction that “I didn’t vote for this” or “I don’t agree with everything my candidate says.” It is the right and good taken in the abstract that is detached from real world events that implicate preferred candidates, parties, actions, and outcomes.
One additional reflection I would like to add. I think there is another “retreat” common across society and therefore present within the modern church: the reliance on righteous anger to do the heavy lifting of goodness and rightness in one’s life. Anger and outrage are all too common as methods, strategies, and business models rather than simply as emotions. This reliance on anger directed at the “right” targets gives the feeling of motion without actually going anywhere. Anger in the modern world is too often a naming of what is wrong from a distance—both with respect to what is wrong and with respect to those who suffer because of those wrongs. Put differently, anger can be an intoxicating form of mourning that refuses to accept and grieve the world we have built.
With this, I return to the closing idea of my original reflection—the church and all who desire to heal the hurt of those who suffer should be more invested in being present with the suffering than sharing their discontent online or with their clergy. In the years since I wrote my first FASPE reflection,
I have had to walk the road I wrote about.
I have grieved with families that have lost people they love. I’ve worked to address conflict along the lines of racial tensions, sexual identity, and church trauma. I have, in ways big and small, sat with the grief, unease, and suffering of people. Each of us who seek a better world must have courage to do the same without reaching for indifference, retreating into the fleeting comfort of theology or purity, or relying on anger to do the heavy lifting of making things better. We must find a way to be fully present with those who suffer without othering those whose suffering challenges us. In this, we might do good work within imperfect systems to perfect a world we’re too often told cannot be bettered.
Reflection (2016)
I applied to FASPE in the midst of the deep uncertainty and insecurity that comes with pursuing ordination in a church that is tearing itself apart. The United Methodist Church is locked in a decades-long insular, theological struggle over same-sex marriage and the ordination of openly gay clergy. Recent significant shifts in the political landscape have entrenched the partisan ideologies of
a failed leadership and intensified our inability or unwillingness to work together amidst difference. The opportunity to study the reaction of German clergy to the cultural shifts surrounding Adolf Hitler’s rise to power seemed like an intriguing vantage point from which to grapple with my own questions and concerns about the United Methodist Church. While it would be absurd to draw conclusions that assume Nazi Germany and the Holocaust are equivalent to conflicts in the United Methodist Church today, I found that the example of German clergy proved helpful in exploring my thoughts. This brief reflection will consider some of the broader issues German clergy faced and explore how they chose to act.
A comparative view of both the broader dilemmas and individual decisions, in my mind, allows for a useful comparison between these vastly different circumstances without devolving into empty tropes or comparative suffering.
Before unpacking examples from the past and comparing them to my experiences with the modern church, I would like to say a few words about comparison itself. Being at Auschwitz was like nothing I have ever seen or experienced. The pain and the weight of that place and its lingering presence in my life have tempted me to think of and portray Auschwitz as something unique, totally without comparison. But Auschwitz is not and should not be considered unique for (at least) two reasons. First, although the term “genocide” was coined in the wake of the mass murder of European Jews, the concept, the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” can be observed across continents, peoples, and centuries.1 To make Auschwitz totally unique is to dismiss the ways in which the drive to annihilate has shaped the course of human history. Second, and perhaps at the forefront of my current reflection, is that if what took place at Auschwitz were truly unique, then it would have little to offer us beyond statistics and nausea. It is not any facile or illusory singularity of Auschwitz that causes us existential uncertainty and pain but rather the complex and visceral ability to transcend its and our own particularities. Put more plainly, I cannot hold what people did to one another at Auschwitz as fully singular because it was in that place that I recognized my own capacity to commit and contribute to terrible evil.
A final note on comparison that may be useful concerns the place of hope within comparative memory. There were, of course, those who resisted the rise of Hitler and the actions of the Nazi state through publications, sermons, protests, and sheltering Jews as well as other “undesirables.” Many who did so risked imprisonment or death. These stories of both small and great acts of resistance are familiar and beloved because they inspire hope in the goodness of people. While I believe that there is some degree of mythology inseparable from memory, those acts of resistance, both the historical and the invented, must not be confused with nor substituted for the whole of what happened. These bright spots and the hope they may inspire should not obscure the fact that many clergy were either supportive of or submissive to the Nazi regime. Their responses to the plight of Jews and other targets of the regime ranged from indifference to willful personal benefit. It is important that both the positive and negative have a place in our collective memory. These moments of human goodness and hope might rather be thought of as stars in the night sky—only visible because of the vast darkness that surrounds them.
I want to focus on two specific responses by pre-war German clergy: their failure to speak out and act against injustice and their retreat into a theology disconnected from suffering. German Protestant and Catholic clergy guided their churches using one or both of these responses. While today’s context is quite different, these means of self-preservation, broadly defined, are still alive and well in modern churches. It is important to note that, historically, anti-Jewish policies and activity increased almost immediately after Hitler became German chancellor in 1933. One of the earliest state-sanctioned expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment were organized boycotts of Jewish businesses, with the first commencing only two months into Hitler’s chancellorship. Supplementing the economic effect of the boycotts, the political and ideological climate intensified the exploitation and abuse. The police, for example, barred the entrances to Jewish businesses. Widespread vandalism saw windows broken, stores robbed, and merchandise destroyed. Everyday Germans took to the streets to intimidate Jews and contribute to a growing movement driven by “imagining a world without Jews.”
Understandably, these early policies and events emboldened those who harbored anti-Jewish sentiments and spurred an increase in and the normalization of anti-Jewish discrimination and violence.
The German Protestant and Catholic churches and their clergy generally reacted with
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