In Berlin, in May 1934, one hundred and thirty-nine delegates from the Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches of Germany gathered at the city of Barmen and signed a document. The document, drafted by the Reformed theologian Karl Barth, ran to six articles. The articles did not mention Adolf Hitler by name. But every Christian in Germany who read the Barmen Declaration in May 1934 understood that the document was a public, ecclesial, theological repudiation of the regime that had taken power the previous year and of the church faction, the Deutsche Christen, the German Christians, that had supported the regime. Karl Barth mailed the document personally to Adolf Hitler
The signers paid for what they had done. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943 and hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, two weeks before American forces liberated the camp. Martin Niemöller spent eight years in Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Bernhard Lichtenberg, the Catholic provost of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral in Berlin who had aligned with the Confessing Church and prayed publicly for Jews each evening from the cathedral pulpit, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 and died in transit to Dachau in November 1943.
The Confessing Church did not save Germany or prevented the camps, it was a minority within German Christianity, denounced by the majority of German pastors. What it did was speak. It did the thing the German majority church had refused to do and paid the cost the majority church refused to pay, and the majority church, in the long evening after 1945, had to live with the knowledge of what its silence had purchased.
The American church in 2026 is the German majority church in 1934. A culture is being remade and the American church has decided that the cost of speaking is too high.
Fence-sitting is not an absence of position, it is a position. It is the position the strong side wants the weak side to take, and the side that has captured the institutions of American cultural authority over the last sixty years has wanted, more than anything, the American church to take exactly that position. American Christianity now offers the culture almost nothing the culture has not already approved.
The German Christians of 1934 were ordinary pastors and ordinary churchgoers who had decided that the institutional survival of the German church mattered more than the prophetic content of the Christian message. They argued that opposing the regime would cost the church its remaining ability to do good in German society. They were not wrong about the cost. They were wrong about the math. The institutional church they were protecting did not survive. It was complicit in the crimes of the regime that was protecting it, and after the war it spent two generations doing penance for what it had failed to say when saying mattered. The American church is making the same calculation the German Christians made. It is going to discover, as the German Christians discovered, that the institutional survival it bought with its silence was a kind of death that had not yet announced itself.
The prophet Isaiah was not writing to pagans when he warned, Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness. He was writing to the covenant people, who had decided it was easier to stop calling things what they were than to bear the cost of accurate speech. The prophet Ezekiel, in chapter 22, recorded a divine indictment of the people of God: I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap on behalf of the land so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one. The gap is left empty by the people who should have stood in it. Judgment fell on Jerusalem because righteous men were silent.
The Christ of the Gospels was not a fence-sitter, the Jesus the Gospels describe walked into the temple and overturned the tables of the moneychangers, He called the Pharisees a brood of vipers in public, before crowds, with full understanding that the men he was insulting were watching for an opportunity to kill him. He called Herod, the political ruler of Galilee, that fox. When Pilate asserted authority over him, Jesus told the Roman governor to his face that he would have no power at all except that it had been given to him from above. These are not the words of a man committed to staying out of the public square. These are the words of a man who walked directly into it, knowing what it would cost him, and who paid the cost without flinching.
Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus that Christians are to expose the works of darkness, the Greek verb is elenchō, which means to refute, to convict, to bring into the open. It is the verb of a prosecutor in court. When Peter and John were brought before the Sanhedrin and ordered to stop preaching in the name of Jesus, they answered: We must obey God rather than human beings. They did not form a committee. They did not commission a study. They stood.
The Christian tradition’s great moments of public witness have, without exception, been moments of refusal to stay on the fence. William Wilberforce was converted to evangelical Christianity in 1785 at the age of twenty-six, while serving as a Member of the British Parliament. His conversion produced an eighteen-year campaign, conducted against the unanimous opposition of the British political and economic establishment, to abolish the slave trade. He introduced the first abolition bill in 1791. It failed. He introduced it again the next year. It failed. The Slave Trade Act finally passed in 1807. The Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833, three days before he died. Wilberforce was attacked in the press across his entire career, denounced as a betrayer of British economic interests, he did not care. He could not accept what his society was doing with the bodies of African human beings.
The civil rights movement Martin Luther King Jr. led was a movement of preachers. The mass meetings that sustained it were held in Black churches. The vocabulary of the speeches that defined the movement was the vocabulary of Amos and Isaiah and the Hebrew prophets, deployed by a Christian preacher who understood that the gospel had political implications and that those implications had to be preached in public. King paid the cost. He was jailed nineteen times. His home was bombed. He was stabbed in 1958 by a deranged assailant. He was finally murdered on a Memphis motel balcony on April 4, 1968. He was thirty-nine years old. He had spent fourteen years on the public stage and he had never, for a single day of those fourteen years, sat on the fence.
The American church today needs the courage the church has always required of itself when its moment came. The moment is now. The lies being told in the public square about Islamic jihad, Israel, and Western civilization are not lies that can be safely ignored while the church waits for a more convenient season. They are lies with consequences.
The false prophets of Jeremiah’s day were paid to tell the people what the people wanted to hear, which was that the situation was under control, that the cultural patterns the people had grown comfortable with would continue unchanged into the future. The situation was not under control. Jerusalem fell to Babylon and the people went into exile, and the false prophets who had assured them everything would be fine went with them, into an exile their cowardice had helped to produce.
If the church stays on the fence while these lies are told, the church will watch the end of Western civilization from inside its own sanctuaries. Islam conquers the public square. That is what it has done in every civilization it has entered, from seventh-century Damascus to twenty-first-century London, and it is what it will do in America if the institutions that should be defending the foundations of the West continue to behave as though their job is to be polite. The polite church will not be allowed to remain polite under Islamic political authority. It will be made to convert, to pay the jizya, or to disappear.
The American church is busy with the couples’ night programs, the Wednesday small groups, the staff retreats, the building campaigns, and the budget meetings to keep the lights on in the converted shopping centers that many large American congregations now occupy. The pastor is busy preparing his sermon series on personal growth. The elder board is busy reviewing the audiovisual contract. The church is busy, while the central story of Western civilization is being rewritten by those who have been waiting fourteen centuries for the Christian West to fail.
Abd Alfadi is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute
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Spot on. The Church of England has also lost its way, and would rather weave rainbow altar clothes than preach the Bible. Hence our parish churches, which the very well bestowed C of E refuses to support.
Much more important to pay reparation for slavery.
Thank you for this evocative piece.