Bonhoeffer's America: A Land without Reformation

By Joel Looper

In the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to Union Theological Seminary looking for a "cloud of witnesses." What he found instead disturbed, angered, and perplexed him. "There is no theology here," he wrote to a German colleague. The New York churches, if possible, were even worse: "They preach about virtually everything; only one thing is not addressed... namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life." Bonhoeffer acts for American Protestantism as an Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America, a cultural and political analysis of the new republic, appeared a century prior. But what the Berlin theologian found was, if possible, more significant than the observations of the French aristocrat: Protestantism in America was a "Protestantism without Reformation."

Bonhoeffer’s America explicates these criticisms, then turns to consider what they tell us about Bonhoeffer’s own theological commitments and whether, in fact, his judgments about America were accurate. Joel Looper first brings Bonhoeffer’s reformational and Barthian commitments into relief against the work of several Union theologians and the broader American theological milieu. He then turns to Bonhoeffer’s own genealogy of American Protestantism to explore why it developed as it did: steeped in dissenting influences, the American church became one that resisted critique by the word of God. American Protestantism is not Protestant, Bonhoeffer shows us, not like the churches that emerged from the Continental Reformation. This difference gave rise to the secularization of the American church.

Bonhoeffer’s claims against the church in the United States, Looper contends, hold strong, even after considering objections to this narrative—Bonhoeffer’s experience with Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and the possibility that Bonhoeffer, during his time in Tegel Prison, abandoned the theological commitments that undergirded his critique. Bonhoeffer’s America concludes that what Bonhoeffer saw in America, the twenty-first-century American church should strive to see for itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781481314534

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"Historians and theologians have known about the two trips that Dietrich Bonhoeffer made to the United States in the 1930s, but no one has examined what he said about American Christianity and American church life as insightfully as Joel Looper in this book. Bonhoeffer’s America is particularly compelling on why Bonhoeffer differed so fundamentally with Reinhold Niebuhr and how his worship with African American Baptists in New York City may have affected his impression of America. The book is excellent theological history that includes a sobering word for our own times."

—Mark A. Noll, author of A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada

"Joel Looper’s account of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1930s liberal Protestant America has some of the deep, engrossing appeal of Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America, written almost exactly a century earlier. Bonhoeffer—martyred by Hitler and so all-too-readily taken by Americans to be ‘on our side’—may have missed what an outsider would miss during his American sojourn, but he saw with incisive and sometimes harsh clarity what only an outsider could see. Looper captures the overall encounter with a perfect blend of candor, sympathy, and richly informed context."

—Jack Miles, author of Pulitzer Prize–winning God: A Biography and Religion as We Know It: An Origin Story

Joel Looper’s book—a careful study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s critique of American Protestantism—fills an important gap in Bonhoeffer studies. Unlike other inquiries into Bonhoeffer’s time in the United States, Looper pays particular attention to Bonhoeffer’s relationship with Union Theological Seminary professors Eugene Lyman, Harry F. Ward, and Reinhold Niebuhr. The results are fruitful; he entertains fundamental questions about the task of theology and considers the implications of Bonhoeffer’s political theology for the contemporary American church.

—Lori Brandt Hale, Professor of Religion, Augsburg University

"This is a book that has long needed to be written. Joel Looper has done a masterful job showing that Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology is not easily assimilated to American categories of whatever stripe, that in fact he often stands over against the theological assumptions in the United States. Bonhoeffer’s America should be at the heart of any conversation or study having to do with the continuing significance of Bonhoeffer for our times."

—Barry Harvey, Professor of Theology, Baylor University

Bonhoeffer’s America

A Land without Reformation

Joel Looper

Baylor University Press

© 2021 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

Cover and book design by Kasey McBeath

Cover images: Union Theological Seminary, photograph by Irving Underhill, c1910, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, digital ID cph.3b21900; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Waszkowo, Poland, August 1939, photograph courtesy of das Bundesarchiv, Germany, picture ID 146-1987-074-16

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For Anali

and

For Lockwood Community Church,

Dayspring Baptist Church,

and Hope Fellowship

Contents

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I. What Bonhoeffer Saw in America

1. There Is No Theology Here

Bonhoeffer and American Christianity

2. Coursework

Bonhoeffer at Union Theological Seminary

II. Renarrating the Story of American Protestantism

3. Protestantism without Reformation

An American Genealogy of Dissent

4. The Eclipse of the Word

An American Narrative of Secularization

III. Objections

5. A Gospel Community

Abyssinian Baptist Church, Harlem

6. The Word Still Reigns

Tegel Prison, Berlin

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Abbreviations

DBWE 1 Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998).

DBWE 2 Act and Being: Transcendental Philosophy and Ontology in Systematic Theology, ed. Wayne Whitson Floyd Jr., trans. H. Martin Rumscheidt, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).

DBWE 3 Creation and Fall, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Douglas Stephen Bax, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 3 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004).

DBWE 4 Discipleship, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey, trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 4 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001).

DBWE 5 Life Together / Prayerbook of the Bible, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly, trans. Daniel W. Bloesch and James H. Burtness, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 5 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).

DBWE 6 Ethics, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 6 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006).

DBWE 8 Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Isabel Best, Lisa E. Dahill, Reinhard Krauss, Nancy Lukens, Barbara Rumscheidt, H. Martin Rumscheidt, and Douglas W. Stott, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 8 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010).

DBWE 10 Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928–1931, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Douglas W. Stott, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 10 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007).

DBWE 11 Ecumenical, Academic, and Pastoral Work: 1931–1932, ed. Victoria J. Barnett, Mark S. Brocker, and Michael B. Lukens, trans. Anne Schmidt-Lange, Isabel Best, Nicolas Humphrey, Marion Pauck, and Douglas W. Stott, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 11 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012).

DBWE 12 Berlin: 1932–1933, ed. Larry L. Rasmussen, trans. Isabel Best and David Higgins, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 12 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009)

DBWE 14 Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935–1937, ed. H. Gaylon Barker and Mark S. Brocker, trans. Douglas W. Stott, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 14 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013).

DBWE 15 Theological Education Underground: 1937–1940, ed. Victoria J. Barnett, trans. Victoria J. Barnett, Claudia D. Bergmann, Peter Frick, Scott A. Moore, and Douglas W. Stott, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 15 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012).

DBWE 16 Conspiracy and Imprisonment: 1940–1945, ed. Mark S. Brocker, trans. Lisa E. Dahill and Douglas W. Stott, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 16 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006).

Acknowledgments

Parts of chapter 3 were read as a paper entitled Renarrating the History and Etiology of American Protestantism with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 2016 at the American Academy of Religion meeting in San Antonio, Texas, then published by The Bonhoeffer Legacy under the same title. Parts of chapter 2 were read as a paper entitled Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Encounter with American Pragmatism: A Juxtaposition of Two Types of Theological Discourse in 2019 at the American Academy of Religion meeting in San Diego, California. I am grateful for these opportunities, which helped refine the argument of these chapters. This book originally grew out of questions raised in a reading group led by Barry Harvey at various locations in Waco, Texas and around Baylor University. Steve Reid, Jenny Howell, Ralph Wood, Carlos Colόn, and many others have been part of this group at various times, and I have been very grateful for their faithfulness, wit, and keen insight into Bonhoeffer’s writings and contemporary theology generally. Without Barry and this group, this project would never have been undertaken. The project crystalized as a dissertation at the University of Aberdeen under the supervision of Philip Ziegler, whose work on Bonhoeffer I first encountered in this Waco group. I am especially thankful for Phil’s patience, extraordinary perceptiveness as a reader, and his ability to provide careful guidance even over email and Skype.

Thanks to my parents, Shayne and Karen Looper, my father-in-law, Joe Gatlin, and Justin Lee, all of whom have read portions of the manuscript. Thanks to Gerson Matias-Ryan and Ilse Duarte, to all the Gatlins for your unflagging encouragement, and all the Loopers for your wisdom and steady presence. Thanks also to Hope Fellowship for being church. Most of all, thanks to Anali, who, even as she dealt with the anxiety and chaos of being an immigration lawyer in America during these years, has loved me well no matter what.

Introduction

The name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when handled a certain way, tends to lend legitimacy to the political claims of the one who writes or speaks it. Take Eric Metaxas, for example. On October 12, 2016, Metaxas invoked Bonhoeffer’s name in a Wall Street Journal article entitled Should Christians Vote for Trump?¹ The anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer also did things most Christians of his day were disgusted by, he wrote, implying that, though they thought Donald Trump morally bankrupt or unfit for the office of president, Protestants should vote for him anyway. As everyone knows, they took Metaxas’ advice.

Since Bonhoeffer’s name carries so much political weight and because, being an American Protestant myself, I am particularly concerned about how American Protestants represent the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, I felt compelled to take up the subject of Bonhoeffer’s encounter with American Protestantism. Bonhoeffer did not think much of American Protestantism. In fact, as will quickly become apparent in the first chapter, he was appalled by it. Yet the question of exactly what in American theology or church life so disturbed Bonhoeffer has not been taken up at any length in Anglophone scholarship, and, politically and ecclesially speaking, it seems to me a particularly relevant question at present.²

What left Bonhoeffer so unsettled, as is clear from the very title of his essay Protestantism without Reformation, was that he thought American Protestantism was not exactly Protestant.³ As far as he could tell, these American churches had not undergone a reformation by the word of God. Other than the time he spent at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, he only records having heard the gospel preached once in the United States.⁴ Instead, American preaching was pragmatic and instrumental, aimed at moral matters, national political issues, or the social problems of the day. Theology as Bonhoeffer knew it was almost nowhere to be found. The Americans saw the task of theology as something altogether different than it was understood in Europe. The idea of the universal church, the nature of dogma, the place of the local church community, the sermon’s raison d’être—all seemed absent or, at any rate, unrecognizable to the aristocratic Berliner.

One might assume youthful snobbery to be at the root of this diagnosis, and perhaps there is some truth in that thought. However, it is the thesis of this work that Bonhoeffer had very good reasons for leveling these criticisms against American Protestantism. After all, if Bonhoeffer was even mostly correct that the gospel was not being preached in American churches, then a true church politics could not develop in the United States. That is because such a politics arises only where Christians reason theologically on the basis of the gospel. American Protestants were not, as far as Bonhoeffer could tell, developing or living out such a politics. Instead, they had baptized what Tocqueville one hundred years earlier had called a democratic and republican national politics and forgotten that their allegiance was first and foremost to another city.⁵

Overview

In what follows, I will examine Bonhoeffer’s visits to America in 1930–1931 and 1939 and the work he produced during that period, work which, like Democracy in America, was not originally written for Americans, but for his circle of ecclesial and academic connections back in Germany. This examination will require a description of the theologies current at Union Theological Seminary during Bonhoeffer’s stint there, a discussion of his theological relationship with Reinhold Niebuhr, and a look at certain treatments of Bonhoeffer’s work which might obscure the nature of his theological concerns. In the process, I hope to shed light on certain debated passages in Bonhoeffer’s work and the trajectory of his work as a whole, but primarily I want to clarify the nature of his descriptions and critiques of the American church.

In chapter 1, I have laid out Bonhoeffer’s case against American Protestantism as it first appeared in a series of letters and reports written in 1930–1931. Several questions naturally arise after reading such harshly critical material. Who or what occasioned Bonhoeffer’s denunciations? Was his response reasonable and proportional to the ecclesial and theological situation? If so, how did American Protestantism become like this? Lastly, did Bonhoeffer ever abandon or modify his criticisms or the theological presuppositions that undergird them? The remaining chapters attempt to answer all of these questions.

Chapter 2 is devoted to Bonhoeffer’s experience of Union Theological Seminary and New York. I examine the work of the three Union professors with whom Bonhoeffer interacted most—Eugene Lyman, Harry F. Ward, and Reinhold Niebuhr—and situate their work within the broader stream of early twentieth-century American theology. In the course of this chapter a chasm appears between Bonhoeffer’s Lutheran and Barthian theological commitments and the religious, pragmatic, and humanist starting point assumed by these professors. Chapter 3 traces Bonhoeffer’s attempt to explain that chasm historically and, as it turns out, justifies (but does not prove) Bonhoeffer’s conclusions using contemporary historical research. Bonhoeffer was floored by the thesis of Thomas Cuming Hall’s The Religious Background of American Culture, a book he probably read during the first months of 1931, and Hall’s origin story for American culture helped him account for the peculiarities of his professors at Union and the New York churches.⁶

This story appears again in chapter 4, not this time as a narrative of schism and ecclesial fragmentation, but as a particularly American story of secularization. After relating some of the secularization narratives that have occupied theologians, sociologists, and others in recent decades, I show how Bonhoeffer’s story about Lollardy, English nonconformity, and early American political theology can be told as a secularization narrative, a narrative which illuminates aspects of secularization that might be missed by some of the more well-known narratives. Crucial to this story is the idiom Bonhoeffer employs to describe American secularization and compare it to the German variety: that of two-kingdoms teaching.

Chapters 5 and 6 ask whether later developments in Bonhoeffer’s writings themselves give us reason to qualify his claims. Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, an African American church where Bonhoeffer worshiped for much of his second semester at Union, is the primary subject of chapter 5, and it is there that Bonhoeffer claimed to have first heard the gospel in America. Here the question is posed: did Bonhoeffer’s experience at Abyssinian lead him to qualify his position on American Protestantism?

Chapter 6 addresses a different sort of objection. On April 5, 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo and eventually sent to Tegel prison in Berlin. There, it has been argued, a perhaps wiser and more experienced theologian found that he had the time and solitude necessary to traverse new ground. He acknowledged that the world was rapidly changing, came upon new theological formulations, and began to ask whether a religionless Christianity would become possible in the world that was being born around him. Did Bonhoeffer come to a place where he would have rejected the scathing remarks he had made about American Protestantism more than a decade before? If so, perhaps Americans and others can safely relegate these criticisms to out-of-the-way sections of their libraries.

As I mentioned above, I myself am a White American Protestant, one who has been a part of evangelical, Congregationalist, Baptist, and now Mennonite churches. As such, I have participated to some degree in the distinctly American sort of ecclesial fragmentation that so astonished Bonhoeffer. Any missteps made in the chapters just described likely result from my desire that our schisms be mended by acknowledging one Lord, one faith, one baptism, not by giving our allegiance to America as one nation under God or to one globalist marketplace. Others may disagree, but on my reading of Bonhoeffer, this is a desire that he shared.

The Scope and Aim of This Study

Part of my purpose in this work is to make several contributions to Bonhoeffer scholarship. To date, except Reggie Williams’ Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus and Larry Rasmussen’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer: His Significance for North Americans, I am not aware of a book-length treatment of Bonhoeffer’s time in the United States, and neither of those works is principally concerned with Bonhoeffer’s criticisms of American Protestantism or Bonhoeffer’s encounter with Union’s theologians.⁷ Several characteristics of this book result because I take on this task. For example, I have attempted throughout to clarify the positioning of Bonhoeffer’s theological commitments vis-à-vis those of Reinhold Niebuhr. Further and perhaps most importantly, no one has previously examined Bonhoeffer’s claims about the origin and etiology of American Protestantism or the coherence and plausibility of the narrative about American culture he got from Thomas Cuming Hall. I attempt to do this in chapters 3 and 4. My hope is that this work will open other lines of inquiry into Bonhoeffer’s time in the United States. I take it upon myself to suggest what some of those lines might be in the conclusion, but because it is necessary to delineate the limits of the present study here, I will mention a few of them in passing.

Because this book is first and foremost about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it has been necessary to limit my investigation to certain major themes in 1930s American Protestantism. Naturally, Bonhoeffer’s own experiences in the United States and his reading about American Protestantism provided that limit. Even then some material had to be left on the cutting-room floor, so when it became necessary to transgress this limit to investigate certain matters central to our topic, I had to be very selective indeed about what to include. Otherwise, the size of this book would have ballooned interminably. I chose to focus, for instance, primarily on the theology regnant in Union rather than in the University of Chicago Divinity School, Boston University, or other hubs of theological activity; though Bonhoeffer was exposed to these other American theologies, he attended Union and not these other schools. Further, I have not said much in the pages that follow about Bonhoeffer’s relationship with Henry Sloan Coffin, Union’s president at the time, or several other professors teaching at Union in 1930–1931, focusing only on Lyman, Ward, and Niebuhr because of their proximity to Bonhoeffer.⁸ I also elected not to investigate Bonhoeffer’s friendships with Paul Lehmann, Edwin Sutz, Frank Fischer, and Jean Lasserre at any length for several reasons. First, the biographies of Bonhoeffer, particularly Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory, do a good job of treating this subject.⁹ Second, the main lines of theological influence upon Bonhoeffer—and this is demonstrated below and in many other works on Bonhoeffer—clearly lay elsewhere, and extensive investigation of these relationships might distract from the theological battles he was having with his professors at Union. Finally, Bonhoeffer hardly wrote home at all about his new friends at Union, while he could hardly have made his disappointment with American theology and preaching clearer to those back in Germany. All these limitations are worth noting, but perhaps the most important regards my investigation into Bonhoeffer’s narrative concerning the history and etiology of American Protestantism. Though I have consulted contemporary scholarship and made historical and theological connections in order to tell a fuller and clearer story, I have provided nothing like a full account of the matter. I have only sought to show why Bonhoeffer believed what he did about the origins of the American churches and that from the perspective of contemporary scholarship his account is far from implausible.

Additionally, the reader should note that nowhere, even in the chapter on Abyssinian, have I asked or attempted to answer whether the history of White supremacy in the United States shaped the formation of American liberal Protestantism. This is because Bonhoeffer himself never asked that question. Though the structural and interpersonal racism he witnessed in New York and elsewhere disturbed him and he learned much in the time he spent at Abyssinian, his observations and criticisms of the American church at large were directed elsewhere. On a related note, the reader will observe that I often follow Bonhoeffer in using terms like American Protestantism, which he used to generalize about White American Protestantism. Bonhoeffer typically had in mind White churches, White theologians, and largely White seminaries when he criticized American Protestantism, and he seems to have put Abyssinian and the Black churches in a somewhat separate category; that is, he often unconsciously excluded Black Protestants when he attempted to generalize about the American Protestant churches. In making the decision to retain this language, I (obviously) do not mean to imply that people of color should have been excluded from American Protestantism in the 1930s or that American Protestantism should be defined by White voices today. I retain it only because the White normativity implied in Bonhoeffer’s own perspective was more or less inevitable for those living at the time. Almost everyone back then other than a select few Black intellectuals would have seen the matter this way. One could criticize Bonhoeffer for this, of course, and the reader should occasionally remind herself of Bonhoeffer’s blinkered perspective on race. But this was 1930–1931, and dwelling on Bonhoeffer’s inability to share our twenty-first-century ways of thinking about racial injustice and systems of oppression seems unlikely to provide new insight. Instead, it may actually serve to distract us from his criticisms of White American Christianity that White American Christians today find most uncomfortable.

Such a distraction would be unfortunate, for Bonhoeffer’s perspicacity in other matters should at least pique our interest about what he had to say concerning the American church. Few of his contemporaries were as clear-eyed about Germany’s political, cultural, and theological crisis, which formed during the Weimar Republic and climaxed with the terrors of the Third Reich, and even fewer knew the American church as well as Bonhoeffer. Karl Barth, whose critique of theological liberalism so impressed Bonhoeffer as a young man, was perhaps equally bold, but Barth spent little time in America and never learned English well enough to see what Bonhoeffer saw in New York. Paul Tillich was an outspoken critic of the Nazi movement, but he fled Germany for Union Theological Seminary after losing his position in Frankfurt am Main in 1933. I know of no other theologian who both stayed the course, refusing to leave Germany even as the nation descended into chaos, and took such an interest in American theology and church life.

This is why Bonhoeffer’s critique of American theology merits a closer look. We will need to consider Bonhoeffer’s theological method and the state of American theology in the 1930s to find out if his acerbic critique was also a trenchant one. Again, that does not mean we have to accept every criticism of Union and American theology in Bonhoeffer’s corpus. Tocqueville, while revered by Americans, sometimes turned out to be wrong. So will Bonhoeffer. But we will have to sift the wheat from the chaff. We will have to discern where and to what degree the mirror of Bonhoeffer’s critique reflects reality. This book can only clear the ground for such a conversation.

I

What Bonhoeffer Saw in America

Chapter 1

There Is No Theology Here

Bonhoeffer and American Christianity

I have expressed enough to characterize Anglo-American civilization in its true colors. This civilization is the result (and this is something we must always bear in mind) of two quite distinct ingredients which anywhere else have often ended in war but which Americans have succeeded somehow to meld together in wondrous harmony; namely the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.¹

So said Alexis de Tocqueville in his political and social sketch of American life, Democracy in America, a massive and famous study penned for his fellow Frenchmen. Tocqueville and the magistrate Gustave de Beaumont had originally been commissioned by the French government to study the American prison system, but the resulting tome, a sweeping but incisive work which spanned the genres of political science, cultural commentary, and (anachronistically) sociology, was something altogether different. Even after the Great Terror and the Bourbon restoration in 1814, desire for democracy, for égalité, was everywhere in France, and Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the architects of the American Constitution were regarded almost as minor deities. Tocqueville could expect a good part of the French cultural elite to read his book. In fact, when it was published in 1835 it became one of the greatest literary successes France had seen in decades.

What Tocqueville may not have foreseen was the effect Democracy in America would have in America itself. Hannah Arendt, who lived most of her life in the United States, thought he was early America’s keenest and most thoughtful observer,² and Joseph Epstein wrote that his work has been crucial to Americans’ unending attempts to understand ourselves.³ Though the book’s popularity ebbed in the later nineteenth century, the twentieth century saw a resurgence of interest in Tocqueville in the United States. It is no wonder. One needs to look no further than the First Amendment to the Constitution to find Tocqueville’s two distinct elements which together make America what it is: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Americans have always thought of themselves as free and religious, even if the meaning of those words has been at the center of many of their most bitter ideological debates.

Of course, that does not mean that Democracy in America has been read the same way in every generation. For instance, the book’s dire warnings about the American tendency toward a tyranny of the majority have been taken far more seriously in some generations than in others.⁴ Then there are those few things about which Americans have thought that Tocqueville was simply wrong. Nevertheless, Democracy in America has always been a mirror in which Americans saw themselves, more useful precisely because Tocqueville himself was not an American. American fears and hatreds were not his, their collective habitus foreign to him. If the mirror of Tocqueville’s book were smudged or warped, Americans could spot it more easily because they were not accustomed to these distortions of their self-image. By contrast, books about America by Americans might tend toward the same old insights and the same old distortions.

Almost exactly one hundred years after Tocqueville arrived in America, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer stepped off a steamship in New York Harbor and found himself in the New World for the first time.⁵ Both men stayed in the United States for nine months, and both saw vast expanses of the North American continent. Both were impressed by the earnestness of American efforts at social improvement, and both were deeply disturbed by other developments in American political and religious life.

Bonhoeffer’s observations and analysis can provide the American church with just what Tocqueville provided the early Republic: a look in the mirror.⁶ If the mirror of Bonhoeffer’s work on the United States turns out to be warped and presents American Christians with a distorted picture of themselves, that would not render this project useless. It is unlikely that Bonhoeffer’s image of the American church will be warped in precisely the same way as an American theologian’s would be. Protestant theology in America developed in a radically different direction than it did in Germany (more on this later), and the theological presuppositions of denominations in the United States, as Bonhoeffer knew, were often sharply at odds with those of their continental cousins. Even the mistakes made by an American theologian would tend to be different than those of her Teutonic colleagues. For that reason, even Bonhoeffer’s errors might turn out to be informative.

So, then, an in-depth look at Bonhoeffer’s criticisms and observations of America and the American church will serve at least two functions: (1) it will show us a different Bonhoeffer than the portrayals that either concentrate on his anti-Nazi activities or set out to buttress a prefabricated theological principle with a minor aspect of his life or work, and (2) it provides American theologians with a view of their church very much at odds with the received tradition about American Protestantism. As we will see, Bonhoeffer found that view anything but encouraging.

Fiery Criticisms

Bonhoeffer had come to Union as a non-degree-seeking exchange student in the summer of 1930, having conceived the idea only in late 1929. His parents were entirely supportive. Karl Bonhoeffer, Dietrich’s father, was one of the leading psychiatrists in Germany at the time, and the family lived in the Berlin suburb of Grunewald, home to many of the Bildungsbürgertum, the city’s moneyed cultural elite. Finding the funds for the American trip—and, in fact, for the return trip Bonhoeffer was planning via India—was not a problem.

Church superintendent Max Diestel also encouraged Bonhoeffer’s year abroad for ecumenical reasons and wrote several letters on his behalf. Diestel would be the recipient of several letters and reports in which Bonhoeffer describes his experiences in America, texts that will figure significantly in this study.

Bonhoeffer himself, however, hesitated. Was he to become a student again and devote a whole year to whatever placement he received? his biographer and best friend Eberhard Bethge asked. He had heard about American ‘textbook methods,’ and he regarded American theology as nonexistent.⁷ Worse, in America, universities and seminaries required that students earn credits to qualify for more advanced classes. German students were used to far more academic freedom.

Diestel seems to have given Bonhoeffer a few books to read, among them W. A. Visser ’t Hooft’s The Background of the Social Gospel in America, which