What Will Those Who Come after Us Say about Us?

What Will Those Who Come after Us Say about Us?

Today I had lunch with an esteemed colleague whose special area of scholarship is Karl Barth’s theology. We talked about how living and teaching in Germany when Hitler was coming to power and the “German Christian” movement was growing affected the Swiss theologian’s thinking. And we talked about how Bonhoeffer and other German theologians responded to the rise of Naziism and “German Christianity.” What explains why Barth and Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoller saw through Nazi ideology and “German Christianity” and stood up against it when so many other genuinely good Christian leaders and theologians succumbed to it and either stood on the sidelines or capitulated to this great evil? Luther scholar Paul Althaus and dialectical theologian Friedrich Gogarten and even Hamburg pastor-theologian Helmut Thielicke—all lacked the courage of Bonhoeffer and Niemoller and Catholic priest Maximilian Kolbe. And some even joined the Nazi party or signed pledges of loyalty to Hitler. (One source about all of this is Christian Faith in Dark Times by Jack Forstman [Westminster John Knox Press, 1992].) Why the difference?

Here I’m not going to attempt to answer the “Why the difference?” question. Rather, I want to raise the (to me) obvious question for us, today: What is happening in our own socio-political situations that fifty to one hundred years from now will cause those who come after us to ask what we did and did not do and why?

For those of us who live in the United States of America—we can look back into our own history and see events we now call horrible, stains on our collective conscience, that cause us to ask “Why?” Why did our ancestors, our spiritual and theological forebears, not speak up against the forces and pressures bringing them about? I live in a city where, in 1916, less than a century ago, a mob of white citizens lynched a black teenage boy who, it turned out, was innocent. They not only lynched him but also tortured and mutilated him before he died. Descriptions of the incident are sickening. And yet the people who participated and supported it thought they were doing something righteous. The following Sunday only one pastor spoke out against the lynching from his pulpit; most were silent. Many pastors joined the Ku Klux Klan in those days. And this wasn’t only in the South. I once knew a pastor who found his Michigan church’s KKK charter hidden inside the walls of the church during renovations. Most of the members’ names (from that time in the past) were on it.

Our American treatment of Native Americans, “American Indians,” is still something we do not want fully to face up to. In the name of “Manifest Destiny” our ancestors and forebears literally committed genocide on entire tribes. We love to point the finger at other countries and what they did in the past. But we don’t like to hear that Hitler used America’s Indian reservations as justification for his own treatment of Jews and other “undesirables” (as he called them) in concentration camps. Our treatment of Japanese-Americans during WW2 is a scar on our national conscience and reputation and yet we have not fully come to terms with that yet.

I suspect that in every generation there is something happening that later generations will decry as immoral and even evil and wonder why good people did not speak up more forcefully against it and often even supported it.

Ever since living in Munich, Germany, in the early 1980s I have been fascinated with the Nazi era including what led up to it and what happened afterwards. I have read literally scores of books on the subject and, when in Germany, talked with Germans who lived through it. I toured Dachau and visited the sites of Hitler’s failed rebellion in 1923 and his Bavarian house outside Berchtesgaden. I have watched numerous documentaries about the subject. But what that study has done for (or to) me is make me reflect on what I would have done had I lived there then and what I should be doing here now.

One thing I have learned is not to trust governments. I believe power corrupts and unaccountable power corrupts fast. I love America and am patriotic, but unlike many of my fellow citizens I make a strong distinction between “America” and American governments (in the sense of the people who govern). Loyalty to America does not require loyalty to its governments. Criticism of government is one of the great things about America. But especially during wars (and we seem to be involved a war most of the time) many Americans claim any criticism of government is tantamount to disloyalty to America. (When America invade Iraq and Afghanistan I saw a television interview with the late Pastor Chuck Smith, founder of the Calvary Chapel movement, in which he told a reporter that anyone who criticized the wars was a traitor. He was not alone in that opinion.)

One reason Hitler came to power, in spite of being an obvious thug, was the then German tendency to trust national leadership. If President Hindenburg supported Hitler as Chancellor, then it’s not the average citizen’s place to question it. And then, when Hitler, as Chancellor, declared himself “Führer” with absolute power, most Germans believed it was their duty to support him.

I grew up in a home that supported Richard Nixon and refused to believe he was corrupt. Even when he resigned in disgrace my parents thought he was being persecuted and that it was some kind of liberal conspiracy. I was taught that it was wrong to criticize government leaders and if you thought they were doing wrong things it was best just to leave that to God and pray for them. We were taught that civil disobedience was always wrong no matter what the laws said or government did.

All that leads back to my question. What is happening now in America about which we are mostly silent that fifty or one hundred years hence will be thought to have been horrible? About what will our descendents and those who come after us ask why we were silent?

I will go out on thin ice and suggest some things.

First is “Gitmo”—our concentration camp in Cuba. Most of the people being held there indefinitely have not had trials. Many of them have been released after years of captivity because they were detained without good reason. One was only fourteen or fifteen when he was picked up in Afghanistan and transferred to Gitmo and held for a very long time without charges or a trial. Many Americans simply assume that if our government is holding people there it’s right. Why? Why trust our government? That’s not even American.

Second, our government’s use of “drones” to kill entire groups of people, often including innocent women and children, is a travesty. And especially our intention to use them to assassinate American citizens suspected of being involved in acts against American troops or conspiracies to harm America, is, in my opinion, unjust and morally disgusting. And the whole idea of “secret courts” is, in my opinion, unjust and un-American.

Third, our government’s support of abortion mills, “clinics” that exist primarily to provide abortions on demand and often only for convenience (not to save the mother’s life or preserve her health) even up to second and sometimes third trimesters, is morally sickening.

Fourth, the trend for states to put children on trial “as adults” is despicable. Recently one state has announced that it will try two twelve year old children as adults which means they will be subject to life sentences if convicted.

Fifth, and finally (for now), our prison system, especially in certain states, is morally sickening. Non-violent offenders are often locked up for life in hell holes where they are subject to violent abuse and degradation. (Yes, that happens. I was in a “jury pool” recently that was informed by the prosecutor that if the jury convicted the defendant, a black man, for the charged offense, possesssion of a controlled substance, he could be sentenced to life in prison. We were asked if that would affect our decision and I was not selected, partly, I’m sure, because I said yes.)

In one state, people are simply lost in the vast state prison system. I was informed by a former elected official who, in retirement, helped people look for their loved ones in the state prisons, that the state prison system includes lost people—people who have simply been swallowed up in the system and may never be released. Even the local press recently revealed that an inmate spent thirty years in prison after he should have been released simply because nobody informed him his conviction had been set aside and nobody was paying attention to him. We would like to think that’s a “one in a million” exception, but indications are it’s not. We have become so used to the idea that young men sent to prison will be raped by fellow inmates that we even joke about it or use it as a threat to get witnesses to testify against friends and loved ones. (Anyone who watches certain network television “crime dramas” has heard and seen this.)

One way to “get into” the question and possible answers is to consider how the rest of the world sees us. Many Americans don’t care and assume that if the rest of the world hates us it’s because we’re righteous and they’re not. That might be the case sometimes, but when I lived in Germany I became able to see our government and some aspects of our society through others’ eyes and they were not always wrong when they criticized. I remember one bus ride in which an outspoken German woman explained to me without apology how she and many Europeans “saw” America then (1980s). She said she and they saw us as warlike, as loving war, as overly militant, as bent on imperialism, on controlling the whole world. She pointed out that if a war between NATO, led by America, and the “Eastern Block” began, as many feared, where she lived was only one day’s tank drive away from a border along which thousands of Soviet troops and tanks were massed.

One incident stands out in my memory especially vividly. We were eating in a small restaurant in the center of a French village on the Rhine River—just across from Germany. Suddenly the building (a converted school house) began to shake. A loud rumbling sound grew outside. I thought it was an earthquake. But everyone rushed outside to watch a huge American tank rumble through the village tearing up the cobblestone streets as it went by. Afterwards, the villagers and visitors talked openly about the incident. They insisted that the tank had no military reason to drive through their village and that this sort of thing happened all the time. They told us that the U.S. military thought it could do anything and that the tank was simply on a “joy ride” through the villages and countryside—showing power and dominance. Well, I don’t know. Maybe they were wrong. But it was a worthwhile experience—to make me see America through others’ eyes. Poet Robert Burns put it well: “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us. To see oursels as ithers see us!”