DOES AMERICA NEEDA BARMEN DECLARATION?

WILLIAM STRINGFELLOW
of a question such as do we need a new Barmen Declarationf or do Americans now need a Barmen Declaration? at once discloses how history is com prehended. T h e very way the issue is fram ed furnishes tem ptation to suppose th at history repeats itself in an eventful m anner, so th at the current American political circumstances are beheld as constituting a recurrence of those in Germ any 40 years ago and are, in turn, thought to w arrant a response analogous to that of the Barm en Confession. T o succumb to this tem ptation stereotypes history. It reduces history to redundancy. I t represents a modified predestinarianism th at deprives creatures both persons and principalities of responsibility for decisions. and actions at the same time th at it narrows and ridicules the m ilitant judgm ent of God in history. As a conception of history it is categorically unbiblical and, furtherm ore, it is dull. For all of that, the present American crisis is sufficiently bewildering to entice many citizens to treat history in just such a simplistic, im itative m anner. In this vein, N ixon is com pared w ith H itler; Am erika is nam ed fascist; W atergate is equated w ith the Reichstag fire. I reject this view of history as false, misleading, escapist. I esteem history as ambiguous, versatile, dynamic. I do n o t im ply th at there are no appropriate comparisons to be ventured or no significant similarities to be noticed. B u t I find that history repeats itself as parable rather than analogue, and that the edifying similarities are topical rath er than eventful, having to do w ith perennial issues embodied in changing circumstances from time to time instead of w ith any factual duplication transposed from one time to another. As a practical m atter, this means th at for some American church people today to recall Barmen an d to inquire as to its relevance requires attention as m uch to situational differences and analytical

h e c o n s id e r a tio n

distinctions as to any apparent similarities. O rto p u t this concern in other words we must not address the question of the need for a new Barm en in a way that relieves us of making the decisions we m ust make. It w ould be a grandiose paradox to recall the Barmen Confession in a way that abets default on our p art in America now. U nder this rubric I offer these remarks concerning both the political situation and the church situation in the U nited States today in referance to the precedent of the Barm en Confession. The Political Situation O ne im portant distinction between Germany in 1934 and America now is th at Germany then was arising as a nation from the calamity of defeat in W orld W ar I. She was a natio n regaining her vanity after the most profound hum iliation of her history. She was on the ascendancy (again); indeed, Germ any in 1934 was a nation on the verge of blitzkrieg, conquest, plunder. A nd her hope, fantastic as it may now seem, outreached the glory of trium ph in war over enemies who had once subjugated her m illenial pretensions of world domination. T h e contrast w ith contemporary America is startling. America is now rapidly losing world preeminence. T h e nation is in decline in virtually every sense in which such m atters are commonly calculated morally, m onetarily, culturally, ideationally, m ilitarily, productively, environmentally. H er power her superpower proves preposterous and ineffectual and is more mocked than feared elsewhere in the world. H e r vanity is confounded; the pop ular myths about her destiny are ridiculed and doubted; her citizens are sullen, bemused, despairing, vulnerable. In 1934 Germans were becoming excited and enthralled w ith the Nazi am bition for their country, and they were being mobilized in th at cause. Americans have lately become demoralized, distracted, apprehensive as to any cause especially that of the nation except, perhaps, the purchase or pursuit of individual safety and survival in the most m undane Christianity and Crisis

WILLIAM STRINGFELLOW, a Contributing Editor, is author of the recently published "An Ethic for Christians and O ther Aliens in a Strange Land" and other books. Well-known as a lay theologian, he lectures w idely across the country.

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connotations of those terms. More concretely, in com paring the Nazi totalitrianism and the totalitarianism that threatens America, there is in the latter official propaganda and heavy deception, b u t there is not the pervasive ideological ambience that m arked the G erm an scene in the thirties. Americans have never been regarded as ideologically sophisticated anyway, b ut now technology has practically displaced the political function of ideology. In contrast to the Nazi reality, political authority in America has little need to launch indoctrination or practice m uch ideological m anipulation because the available means, furnished by technology, of transm itting inform ation have transfixing capabilities to paralyze hum an comprehension. Even the tru th can be dispatched in the American technocracy with such acceleration and redundancy that it estops hum an beings from hearing or understanding it. Or, as another instance, how can the right of privacy be safeguarded and honored in a society where technology has m ade surveillance, both pri* vate and public, cheap and accessible to virtually any institution or person? Does not the technical capability for ubiquitous surveillance of citizens in itself render a constitutional right of privacy quaint?

Transplanting the Property Ethic R elated to the displacement of ideology by technology has been the transplantation in America of the long entrenched commercial ethic into politics. N ot only surveillance but secrecy, m anipulation, fabrication, fraud, espionage all fam iliar in business practice for generations have now become politically commonplace. R ationalizing such tactics is a reverence for property as the rudim entary value in society, taking precedence over hum an life and justifying any expedient abuse of hum an beings. I t is the transfer into politics of this ethicthat property bears intrinsic w orth and that hum an beings have m oral significance only insofar as it may be im puted to them because of their relationship to propertythat occasions remarks like th at of Jo h n Mitchell, erstwhile A ttorney General of the U nited States, that in the W atergate scandal he was innocent of offense since he had not stolen any property. In m uch the same way R ichard N ixon apparently oblivious to constitutional misdemeanors th at involved specific aggressions against persons an d that, in principle, m ean contem pt for all December 24, 973

persons living u nd er the American Governm ent has assured citizens that he is not a crook b u t has earned whatever property he possesses. In short, the political im plem entation of the property ethic in a late technocratic society spawns totalitarianism in America in the seventies, as distinguished from the joinder of ideology and national vanity that characterized Germ any in the thirties. T h e assault upon hum an sanity and conscience would seem no less in the American circumstances than in those in Germany, however, and where some sense of hum an outrage does survive, some similarities between America today and Germ any then begin to emerge. T h ere are relatively few dissenters and resisters, for one thing, and where they speak and act they suffer defam ation and persecution. In recent years in the U nited States, it is not only political prosecutions, trials and im prisonments that docum ent this fact b u t the less visible economic coercions, such as those exerted against students and faculty following the Kent State infanticide, which chiefly accomplished the quietism the campuses have suffered ever since. T h ere is a kind of psychological dividend for the regime, w hether Nazi or American, in this state of affairs. For every person politically prosecuted or conformed by coercion, there are numberless others, geometrically accrued, who are sufficiently intim idated by the fate of the more conspicuous victims to acquiesce. T his is, precisely speaking, the secret of such success as totalitarianism anywhere, at anytime, attains. N ot to be, any longer, overlooked is the issue of the pathology of political leaders. In retrospect m uch significance has been attributed to it in the Nazi emergence in Germany, b u t it is more the problem to consider this aspect contemporaneously. If C hristiansif no one else were now earnest about the pathology of R ichard N ixon as President, I venture, w ithout pretensions toward psychobiography, that they would be attentive to m atters peculiarly w ithin the pastoral care and competence of the Christian witness. T h a t is to say, they w ould be concerned with how guilt becomes arrogant m otivation, with how delusive power victimizes a person, w ith the futility of flagellation, w ith the reality of tru th and the redem ptive power that adheres in telling the truth, w ith healing, w ith exorcism, with confession, with forgiveness and, indeed, with Gods own judgm ent of persons and nations. For Germans and Americans, at the center of the profound social changs they both have suffered or suffer is the m atter of law and authority. If this issue takes m any forms, it nevertheless can be suecinctly stated: It is the problem of authority usurping the law, of authority merging w ith the law, of 275

authority displacing the law, of authority become a law u n to itself, of unaccountable authority, of the very premise of governm ent become the exercise of authority per se, of authority abolishing law and of coercion substituting for order, and of all persons m ade vulnerable to political aggression. In this connection Nazism is sometimes represented as a revolution for the G erm an nation. W hether, analytically, th at be the case or not, America has been enduring a counterrevolution for the past quarter-century that the N ixon A dm inistration has epitomized b u t did not instigate. It is a counterrevolution with respect to the social ethic of the American Revolution, in which the governing institutions have been usurped or set aside by the power of extraconstitutional agencies (like the CIA, the W hite House plumbers, the Pentagon, the secret police operations, the industrial-technocratic complex) th at have come to function as a secret, second governm ent beyond the reach of public control. It is this th at renders the contemporary Am erican political situation chaotic. If there be a sense in which it can be said that H itler saved Germ any from anarchy, it m ust also be said that N ixon feigns to rule where anarchy has become predom inant political reality. The Church Situation T h e churchm en who gathered at Barm en m ade their confession of the Gospel as an exposure of and rebuke to the doctrinal monstrosities of Nazism's so-called positive Christianity." In America we have nothing so definitive or so self-conscious as positive C hristianity" was in Germ any in 1934. T h e Am erican civil religion has grown an d has become diffuse and vague. It represents a loose and jum bled collection of memories and myths and other notions perm eating the national ethos, and it lacks the coherence and formality that the Nazi version of positive Christianity" had. Yet this does not imply th at the civil religion here is less pernicious or any less hostile to the Gospel. O ne monstrous doctrine, for example, of American civil religion is the false and uncritical identification of the Am erican churches with incum bent political authority and, beyond that, with the national vanity claiming a uniq ue or divinely nam ed destiny for America. Associated w ith this grossly unbiblical view is the re d u n d an t assertion of America's m oral superiority, as am ong the nations, commonly said to be verified by war and weapons capbilities, productivity and consumerism. A nd this m oral pretension, in turn, requires an endless supply of scapegoats and other victims to explain away whatever goes wrong or otherwise detracts from the supposed national preem inence. T h u s we are im plicated in constant denials of corporate responsibility in society, as in casting upo n Lt. Calley the burden of common guilt for the genocide of the Indochina war. If there are Am erican Christians inclined to u tte r a new Barm en Declaration, a place to begin is
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w ith doctrinal monstrosities such as these, which rem ain virtually unchallenged am ong the American churches. A nother issue at Barm en sharply contrasts w ith American circumstances. T h e Nazis not only had sponsored a widespread propagation of their positive C hristianity b u t had also engaged in b lu n t ecclesiastical interference, directly subverting the governm ent of the Germ an churches. T h e effort was organized under a Reichbishop whom the Nazis foisted upon the churches, and by the time of the synod at Barm en more than 800 pastors had been ousted from their pulpits by the regime's church adm inistration. H ere there is no sim ilar ecclesiastical m eddling perchance because the churches in America are more innocuous nor does there need to be. Instead, there is an elaborate American comity by which political dom ination of the churches is sanetioned by the status of church property holdings. T hus, tax exem ption for the churches inhibits a critical political witness by the churches. T hus, a Presidential assurance of aid to church-related schools can insure the silence of the ecclesiastical hierarchy on certain public issues. In short, the dependence of the Am erican churches upon property renders the churches so utterly vulnerable to political m anipulation as to obviate a more direct ecclesiastical interference. For all of this, if it is concluded th at something like a Barm en Confession is appropriate now in America and, it m ust be said, confession of faith is always proposthere remains a question of how such a confession could happen. W ho is there to confess? At Barm en the churches at least had a unity and cohesion sufficient to convene a synod that could speak out. T h e inherited churches here exist in such disarray, such disunity, such incoherenee as to supply the inference that they have, as yet, no capability of confession. A nother Barm en Declaration may be timely, bu t we cannot overlook the fact that the very idea of such a confession is unA m erican disruptive of that basic comity thought necessary to the nation's religious and ecclesiastical pluralism . N or can we gainsay the depth with which it is em bedded in the American m entality that anything like a confession of faith is a m atter of resolute privacy (which is the reason the content confessed typically affirms Jesus saves bu t not Jesus Christ is L ord) . O n the other hand, a doub t lingers as to w hether the so-called social activists from the nation's churches are able to distinguish between some mere political manifes to and a historic confession of the Gospel. Perhaps the answer to the question about any new Barm en Declaration is to be found in another way altogether. Perhaps the question is answered in what actually happened to those who signed the Barm en Confession. Every one of them was executed, exiled or imprisoned. W hen American churchpeople are ready for such consequences we will be enabled to confess the faith. Ironically, if we are not able to confess we will certainly suffer the same consequences ignominiously. Christianity and Crisis

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