Will The Real Dietrich Bonhoeffer Stand Up?

I've noted before the strange incidents of Tucker Derangement Syndrome among many conservatives. The latest example is a piece shared by Sarah Hoyt from the Powerline Blog entitled "A word from Tucker Carlson" by Scott Johnson which was critical of Tucker's Carlson's video "Tucker Carlson on the Israel First Meltdown and the Future of the America First Movement" in which Carlson pointed out how certain conservatives on the left have started referring to those who are "America First" instead of "Israel First" as being, to quote Mark Levin, "Marxist, Islamist, America hating,  Jew hating thugs than anything else." We've seen the violence that has resulted from Leftist labeling people they hate as "Nazis" or "fascist"--it was only a short time ago that Charlie Kirk was assassinated--so you would think that conservative pundits would think twice about applying those labels to other conservatives. 

    But others have a different perspective. Johnson writes:

Mediaite’s Isaac Schorr notes that in the latest episode of Tucker Carlson’s show, which was dedicated to denouncing Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro, Carlson observed that Dietrich Bonhoeffer lost his way resisting Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. “Once you start calling people Nazis,” Carlson remarked, “we really have no choice but to start shooting them. To be Dietrich Bonhoeffer and sort of reach the end of reason, or even Christianity. Bonhoeffer decided Christianity’s not even-, he was a Lutheran pastor. Christianity is not enough, we have to kill the guy [Adolf Hitler]. I’m not judging Bonhoeffer, who was a great man in some ways, but that’s inevitable once we decide that people are Nazis.”

 Schorr's piece ("‘Utter Stupidity’: Conservatives Appalled by Tucker Carlson’s Latest Target") doesn't add much other than to say that Bonhoeffer was arrested for helping a group of German Jews escape to Switzerland and "[i]t is a matter of historical debate what role, exactly, Bonhoeffer played in the famous, failed plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944." But it is Bonheoffer's role in the 20 July plot and Operation Valkyrie that is key to understanding Tucker's comments.

    Bonhoeffer, for those who don't know, was a Lutheran pastor of some note and influence not only in Germany before and during WWII, but internationally as well.  It appears that he was vehemently anti-Nazi from the time Hitler began his rise to power. He later joined the German underground--the Abwehr--and was an important agent for that group. Which of course brings us to the plot to kill Hitler and execute a coup. 

    In November 2024, The Christian Century published a review that was quite critical of a movie being made of Bonhoeffer. The review was entitled "The new Bonhoeffer movie isn’t just bad. It’s dangerous." The author's criticism of the Bonhoeffer movie was that it drew upon an admiration of Bonhoeffer which "stems less from his theology than from his decision to join a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler—a decision that ultimately led to his execution in the Flossenbürg concentration camp."

This has given rise to the dubious concept of the “Bonhoeffer moment,” a term some use to describe a historical situation in which nonviolence is no longer tenable for a Christian and something like his act of attempted tyrannicide becomes necessary. Bonhoeffer moments are imagined as moments of extraordinary moral clarity, when good and evil are laid bare and previously unjustifiable acts become justified. 

This seems to the concept that Tucker was speaking out against. That is, Tucker was arguing that when you start calling people "Nazis" someone listening to those words can reach their own Bonhoeffer moment and decide to take matters into their own hand--as did Charlie Kirk's assassin. It is in this step, Tucker recognized, that you risk leaving your Christianity behind.

    And, ironically enough, Bohnhoeffer would have agreed. Back to the Christian Century review, the author continues:

     But Bonhoeffer himself refused to see the plot to assassinate Hitler as morally justified. He insisted that what he was doing, while necessary, was at the same time a grave moral wrong for which he must repent and beg God’s forgiveness. In the hundreds of pages he wrote during his years in the conspiracy, Bonhoeffer adamantly warned that any sense of moral clarity we might feel is always an illusion. If we trick ourselves into thinking that we have full knowledge of good and evil, that we clearly see right and wrong, then we never have to question the moral purity of our actions. Because we are on the side of good against evil, we think that our actions—and our violence—must therefore be good. 

 * * *

     The real Bonhoeffer wrote that he felt lost in a “huge masquerade of evil” in which “evil appears in the form of light.” He lamented the uselessness of Christian ethics, which relies on “the abstract notion of an isolated individual who, wielding an absolute criterion of what is good in and of itself, chooses continually and exclusively between this clearly recognized good and an evil recognized with equal clarity.”

     So, we have Tucker warning against following the tactic used by Antifa and others on the Left to label their opponents as "Nazis" with the hope someone will take the hint and kill them, and others like Sarah Hoyt, Scott Johnson, and Isaac Schorr that, given their vehement criticism of Tucker Carlson on this point, must be fine with it. 

    But perhaps I'm reading too much into it. John Slaughter recently published a piece called "Conservatism: The Sick Man of America," where he argues:

    Conservatism now finds itself wedged between the left and a resurgent right, and like any cornered animal it lashes out with full intensity. We have already seen this in its readiness to destroy anyone even mildly skeptical of the Israel lobby. Conservatives have fervently used opposition to Isreal as a way to discredit emerging right-wing voices, partly because they are tied to Israel ideologically and financially, but also because it provides a useful pretext to rid themselves of right-wing voices.  

    The left, notably, has its own internal split over Israel–Palestine, yet it does not use that this as a tool to destroy its coalition. Conservatism does…because at the end of the day it is closer to the left than to the right. It accepts the progressive project and merely wishes to slow it, and so it views an actual right as the true threat. It also knows that if a real right ever took power, the professional conservative class be exiled. A genuine right would reverse the revolution: it would say “no more,” it would define who belongs and who does not, it would close the gates, it would revitalize heritage Americans. Conservatism cannot permit that, so it will strike the right long before it risks open conflict with the left.

From this perspective, the attacks on Tucker Carlson are part of a larger fight by Conservatism Inc. to maintain its grip on power.