The Full Bonhoeffer: Principles for Spiritual, Ethical, and Political Resistance

“What if he wins?” a close friend asked over dinner in October of 2024.

It hadn’t even occurred to me that another Trump presidency was a possibility. Surely America was better than this. Didn’t we all feel the fatigue of the lying and the dehumanizing insults? The polls showed how untrusted he is by most Americans. He’s a felon, an insurrectionist and an adjudicated rapist.

There was no realistic way he could win and I said so.

“But what if he does win?” my friends pressed.

“Then we go full Bonhoeffer,” I said.

After Trump’s first assassination attempt leading up to the election, I had thought immediately about Bonhoeffer. I come from a line of Christian pacifists (my father became a doctor by refusing to carry a gun in World War II, where they then made him a medic in the glider corps), so I’m not advocating for any form of violence. But Bonhoeffer’s participation in a plot to assassinate Hitler sprung to mind in that moment. I later contrasted Barth and Bonhoeffer in my call to fight against American fascism. I’ve written about how a Christ-centered civic engagement is the responsibility of every Christian, inspired by Bonhoeffer and others.

As we approach the new year, I’ve decided to take my call to go, “Full Bonhoeffer,” more seriously. What would it mean if going full Bonhoeffer was a kind of new year’s resolution?

It Starts Within

Bonhoeffer famously rejected two misjudgments of his era. The first was cheap grace. Cheap grace meant that a Christian could hold a set of beliefs without any cost, risk or commitment to action. You could in this way call yourself a Christian without following Christ. Christians who support cutting SNAP benefits, support violent deportations and family separations, support ICE acting without due process or warrants, support the end of USAID, fail to fight for health care, demonize strangers and really most of the current administration’s agenda or exhibiting cheap grace. Secondly, he disliked the propagandization of religion. Christians were selling the faith like a product or even weaponizing it to protect their own power structures. Sound familiar? This is white Christian nationalism in its core.

Bonhoeffer found a path out of cheap grace and propaganda in an ancient idea of disciplina arcani, or secret discipline. In the early church (2^nd to 5^th centuries), Christians were expected to keep the mysteries of the faith like baptism, the eucharist, the Lord’s Prayer and more secret from nonbelievers. This was not some cultish behavior. It was because they felt that these things could only be experienced from inside a life of commitment to Christ. They weren’t intellectual exercises. They couldn’t be propagandized and sold to people who didn’t want to follow Christ by living out cheap grace. Parading these things around in public cheapened them. Prayer and worship shouldn’t be public signals of your group loyalty, or proof that you “believe the right things.” Today, in America, the church is known for pushing these things all the way into public schools by insisting on public prayer and posting things like the ten commandments.

It’s hard to be a progressive Christian because my friends see these public displays from the cheap-grace nationalists and assume that my faith is equally empty. Bonhoeffer believed the world shouldn’t know us by our disciplines of prayer, meditation and means of grace. Certainly, those are keenly important to our practice of faith and union with God. But we shouldn’t turn them into propaganda posters like we have today. Instead, the world should know us because we deeply love our neighbor and we stand against all forms of injustice.

But the flip side of that coin is that we should indeed practice these disciplines, we just shouldn’t wear them like badges. We should go into the new year committed to the practices of our faith. Meditate daily on scripture, especially parts that call us to social justice, the prophets, the Psalms and the Sermon on the Mount. Practice prayer daily to sustain our connection to Christ and our commitment to radical faith. By keeping these disciplines private, and importantly not performative like you might see at a Charlie Kirk rally, we remember that following Christ is a costly call, not some kind of transaction for the afterlife or political power. Don’t chase sainthood, just be a saint by living like Christ in this broken world.

Stand Against Oppression

I’ve written at length on how I believe fascism has already landed in America. This is not hyperbole; this is a real threat. It may even be too late to save our system without radical changes to our constitution. I’ve been accused of being an alarmist by conservative friends and family, but if the spread of wild propaganda, the use of divisive rhetoric and the gradual erosion of our democratic norms doesn’t feel like 1930s Germany to you, please wake up.

We’re in this very situation in part because of the manipulation of information, a common trait in authoritarian regimes. Misinformation seems more common than fact on most social media platforms. This is how you end up with illiterate podcasters running your FBI, anti-vaxxers running the department of health and white supremacists running defense. It feels like the point is to undermine public confidence in our democratic processes. It’s a hoax! Stop the steal! Watch out because literally everything causes autism apparently.

Authoritarians then use that misinformation to divide us. They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats. If you have a group you can dehumanize, like immigrants, transgendered kids, religious minorities and political opponents then you can frame them as existential threats. They cease to be people. They become vermin in a very Hitlerian turn of phrase. There is real cruelty in the way these people are targeted, but the wider point is division and polarization because authoritarians cannot survive unity. In the same way, the Trump administration is undermining many institutions from delegitimizing court decisions and judges (which is exactly something a convicted felon can be expected to do), chipping away at checks and balances and attacking media and universities. They aren’t hiding these things; fascism is here right now.

For Bonhoeffer, one of the most corrosive tactics is the weaponization of faith. White Christian nationalists use religious language and symbols in inflammatory ways to consolidate their base and to justify oppressive and exclusionary policies. It’s a distortion of Christianity, has nothing to do with Christ’s message at all and confuses religious fealty with political loyalty. I don’t know how clearly I can say this, but Christ doesn’t care about your political geographic boundaries, let alone your tax cuts. But He does care about feeding the hungry.

Bonhoeffer was keenly aware of how authoritarianism can take root through propaganda and divisive language because he lived and died within the rise of authoritarianism in Nazi Germany. We should resolve to recognize and call out these threats in full-throated protest. Anything less is moral failure.

Active Resistance

This is a pick-up-your-cross moment in history. This isn’t just a political red or blue stance. This isn’t a question of how we pay for healthcare or how many roads we’ll pave or how many regulations we should put on the AI industry. People’s lives are literally at risk right now as is the entire democracy. Participating in active resistance is a moral imperative. We must fight the forces that perpetuate harm because that is what it means to follow Christ. March, protest, participate in civil disobedience, warn people of ICE raids, call your senators and speak out every chance you get.

Go out of your way to support marginalized groups. Stand with the vulnerable. Bonhoeffer lost his life in the process. That is costly grace. Work to protect immigrant communities, defend LGBTQ+ rights, support racial and religious minorities and protect speech. Don’t let the “all lives matter,” types silence you. You can use your privilege to elevate the voices of marginalized people. As a relatively insignificant blogger, I only reach a few thousand readers each year. But that’s more than zero. We all have platforms we can use. You can post and repost on social. You can speak up at your next Dungeons and Dragons session. You can stop hateful speech in its tracks through assertiveness.

Bonhoeffer said we need to become the spoke in the wheel to stop the machinery of an unjust state. He didn’t want the church to simply bandage victims and bury the dead. We are called to prevent harm.

Embracing Costly Grace

Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting you follow Bonhoeffer in joining political plots and later find yourself murdered by authoritarians. But I do want you to enter the new year thinking about living something deeper than passive belief. I get it, a big part of your Christianity might stem from privilege. Being a part of a widely accepted religious culture provides comfort, security, and acceptance. I don’t want you to lose those, but I want you to embrace the fact that faith involves risk. If not, how do we even call it faith?

If we stand up to protect Christianity and democracy from authoritarians, we will make sacrifices. But those sacrifices will likely be small compared to our siblings who are being silenced, detained, demonized and otherwise run out of town. Think about the privileges we can lose to stand up for others. The next time you think about standing up against injustice, think of those on the margins and not about your personal comfort. I don’t like marching and making signs. I’d rather be at home drinking coffee and playing chess. I don’t like confronting bigots in my everyday life, I’d rather ignore them. I don’t like explaining critical reasoning to people who can’t be bothered to Google their own religious history, I’d rather quit church all together, sit in a cave and pray silently. But the time has run out on these kinds of conveniences.

The systems that oppress and perpetuate harm must be met by love in action. That doesn’t mean you need to sign up for imprisonment, but it does mean being authentic in your churches, your workplace, online and with friends and family. Living our faith out loud doesn’t have to mean shouting it from rooftops or becoming insufferable at parties, but it does mean you can shrink from problems as they arise. Choose justice over convenience. Choose vocal allyship over silence. Choose action over apathy. Let this new year demonstrate the empathy and compassion of our faith through total honesty.