Many Western Christians Are Going the Way of the Reich Church

"Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now. Christians should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Throughout most of my twenties, I despised Christians. While I had grown up attending church, the hypocrisy and judgment they lauded over others seemed utterly contrary to the life of Jesus I had read about in Sunday School. From what I could infer, Jesus appeared to have a heart for the margins — and I liked that, given that I myself was an outsider. I was your resident Eddie Munson from the hit show Stranger Things, ostracized for long hair, a love of metal, and clothing that didn't fit the norm.

Toward the end of my twenties, I found myself inside a church at the behest of my atheist friend, ironically. The church I began attending had a soft spot for cynics, skeptics, and the marginalized. They ran a food pantry that fed over 1,000 families and emphasized compassion, humility, and temperance. They funded hospitals and orphanages in India and Haiti, and the pastor of the campus I attended was a former meth addict and felon. In our local area, they took care of refugees and helped them find employment and housing. One summer, we spent our evenings downtown caring for the homeless — providing haircuts, medical care, and live music — which eventually morphed into holding church and feeding the homeless once a month in a parking lot under a bridge. I became a Christian not just because of these actions, but because of their love and care for me, too.

I didn't know any better at the time and assumed most churches operated like the one I attended — and that I had simply grown up in a couple of bad ones. I was proud of my faith and shared it openly (and I still do), not realizing just how many people had experiences like the ones I endured growing up. But soon, the rose-tinted lens fell away, and I saw that the environments I had grown up in were not only thriving but often had the loudest voices.

Appalled, I would say things like, "They're misrepresenting Jesus," or, "They don't know what they're talking about — that's Pharisaical behavior." Over time, the loudest voices grew louder because those steeped in gentleness and humility were drowned out. Church-planting groups like the Association of Related Churches (which has been embroiled in scandal) pushed a grow-at-all-costs model, and the larger the church became, the easier it was for the average parishioner to turn into a faceless name in the crowd. Then came 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, and suddenly the faithful were primed to have their brains melted by an algorithm serving up whatever flavor of policy, politics, or outrage they clicked on. Churches dwindled, and Christian influencers took the place of pastors, deacons, or wise church friends. "Christian" became a label synonymous with political affiliation.

In Christianity, there is a concept known as discipleship. It is one of Christ's greatest directives, known as the Great Commission. In it, he commands his followers to create men and women who follow his teachings and embody his posture of humility. Of all the things the church does poorly — or outright refuses to do — it is this. American churches are fantastic at creating converts, fans, and followers, but disciples who look, act, and sound like Jesus? That's a stretch. And largely because discipleship takes time, effort, energy, and patience. It's easier to have someone pray a prayer and then continue on their merry way while church staff chalk up another victory (or so they think) for the Kingdom of Heaven.

Realistically, most Christians lack a distinctly Christian worldview, according to the Barna Group's research on American Christianity. Barna discovered that two-thirds of Americans identify as Christian, a figure consistent with U.S. Census data. However, among those Christians surveyed, 92 percent actually adhere to something known as syncretism. George Barna — the founder of the Barna Group — defines syncretism as "the blending of elements from multiple worldviews into a customized individual philosophy of life." In effect, many are taking their personal politics, philosophies, ideologies, and dogma, tossing them into a blender, and creating their own theology and belief system — often antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. So who, then, is actually teaching Christians? That's easy: an algorithm.

Consider that the average American spends 10 hours per day online consuming reels and information that shape beliefs and behaviors. Then they attend church once a week for an hour. Who is really doing the discipling? Jesus — or a computer algorithm?

History shows us that this kind of moral drift does not happen overnight. It happens slowly, quietly, and with good intentions. When discipleship is replaced by spectacle, when formation gives way to influence, and when faith becomes a vehicle for power rather than a check against it, the church does not merely lose credibility — it becomes vulnerable to being used. This is not a new phenomenon. Nearly a century ago, the German Protestant Church followed a strikingly similar path, trading spiritual authority for cultural relevance and national power. And what emerged was not resistance to authoritarianism, but its blessing. That story should trouble us — because we're beginning to recognize the pattern.

Bonhoeffer, Godwin's Law, and Historical Honesty

There's an internet adage known as Godwin's Law that states the longer an internet argument progresses, the probability that someone will invoke Hitler or the Nazis into the discussion will inevitably happen.

It's a fair point given that anything that most people despise in the modern era will result in being compared to the Third Reich or Hitler. I've never been one of those guys fascinated by World War II, despite my grandfather having been a paratrooper during the war. Instead, when I became a Christian I started reading a Lutheran pastor and theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I first read his seminal work, The Cost of Discipleship, and was floored by the concepts within which led me to read every single one of his works, including his letters from prison. Bonhoeffer landed in jail—and was subsequently executed—because he was an anti-Nazi dissident who worked to overthrow the Third Reich and started the Confessing Church.

The Confessing Church became a small resistance movement that rejected state control and insisted that Christ — not the nation, not the Führer — was the head of the church. Bonhoeffer warned that when the church confuses moral clarity with political expediency, it forfeits its witness entirely. Studying Bonhoeffer's life and witness fascinated me and he quickly became one of my heroes. But to study his life honestly also requires understanding why he began his resistance and what had happened to the German Church writ large — which is where, I suppose, Godwin's Law enters this article, not by design, but by history.

Many people wonder how an entire nation of so-called Christians and the German Protestant Church could get behind Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party, and the murder of six million Jews. The truth is the German Protestant Church didn't collapse all at once. It drifted.

Long before Hitler rose to power, the church had been primed for compromise, because German Protestantism had been intertwined with national identity. What many fail to remember is that the German church had blessed emperors, wars, and cultural dominance. It was accustomed to proximity to power and uneasy with pluralism, democracy, and moral ambiguity. Once Germany lost World War I, the Weimar Republic ushered in economic instability and cultural upheaval in the form of liberalism. Instead of repentance after World War I, many church leaders were more concerned with the restoration of order, pride, and national strength.

Into that vacuum stepped the Nazi Party, offering clarity and a return to national greatness. Similar impulses appear whenever societies experience uncertainty, including in the American longing for a return to the perceived stability of the 1980s and 1990s — an impulse that helps explain why the slogan "Make America Great Again" resonated with so many Americans and evangelicals. In Germany, however, this yearning for order and identity did not remain confined to politics. It began to shape the life and theology of the church itself.

Soon, a movement known as the German Christians (Deutsche Christen) emerged within the church. They did not reject Christianity outright, but merely rebranded it. Jesus was reframed not as a Jewish Messiah but as an Aryan moral exemplar, and the Old Testament dismissed as inconveniently Jewish. Christianity became less about the Kingdom of God and more about the destiny of the German nation. Loyalty to the Führer was preached as obedience to divine order.

This shift was not imposed by force at first, but embraced.

If this sounds familiar once again, replace Deutsche Christen with Christian nationalism, add the rise of fiery sermons centered on politics and presidents, and the parallels become difficult to ignore. Many professing Christians now refuse to love their neighbors or enemies, and despite Scripture's repeated instruction not to oppress the foreigner and to love the refugee, they resort to mental and hermeneutical gymnastics to reshape the text to fit their narrative.

It has grown so severe that, in a 2023 interview with NPR, former Southern Baptist Convention Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission president Russell Moore sounded the alarm. Moore recounted how several pastors had expressed dismay over conversations with their congregants. After preaching directly from Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, parishioners would approach them afterward and ask, "Where did you get those liberal talking points?" When the pastors explained that they had been quoting Jesus verbatim, the response was not reflection but dismissal: "That doesn't work anymore. That's weak."

I cannot overstate how dangerous a moment this represents for the American church. When the words of Jesus himself are dismissed as naïve or ineffective the church has already begun to reorder its loyalties and rewrite the scriptures. History shows that this shift rarely announces itself as a crisis, because even the German Protestant Church followed suit prior to Word War II. Independent regional churches were folded into a centralized state church known as the Reich Church. Soon, pastors were pressured to swear loyalty to the regime and while the church retained its buildings, liturgy, and cultural influence — it surrendered its moral authority.

The Cost of Discipleship and Silence

Within recent years, I've been utterly grieved to see Christians I know (and even those I served alongside in church) fall into proverbial ditches of hatred, wrath, despair, legalism, political idolatry, or licentiousness. It's become so prevalent that a comment I often see online is, "There's no love quite like Christian hate." Part of me feels ashamed and hurt enough to want to deny that I'm even a Christian. The other part of me knows I cannot stay silent and, like Bonhoeffer, must call the Church to account and repentance.

One of my favorite miniseries from the 1990s is the DC comic Kingdom Come. The story imagines a world ruled by injustice, unchecked authority, and violence and the premise is deceptively simple: a new generation of heroes has lost its moral compass, becoming as reckless and destructive as the villains they once opposed. The old guard of heroes like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman retire, because the world abandons justice and mercy. In their absence, the new heroes that arise are more powerful, violent, less restrained, and while they claim to act for "good" they leave a wake of destruction in their path. In many ways, I wonder if this is the storyline currently playing out in the American Church.

Don't get me wrong — there are thousands of churches in America faithful to Jesus and his teachings, quietly making a difference in the lives of their communities and parishioners. Yet, as I stated earlier, it is difficult to know whether their congregants are being shaped by Jesus or an algorithm, especially when discipleship becomes an afterthought. What rises instead are the louder voices and a new generation of pastors and influencers who, while claiming to act for moral good, leave devastation behind — turning away from the very teachings Jesus asks of his followers, either because they are deemed too "woke" or because they are not severe enough, thus refusing to operate in forgiveness.

When I think of where we're headed, I am reminded of Jesus's words in Matthew 25, where he describes separating the sheep from the goats. Both claim to follow him, but only the sheep actually do what he says. At the end of the age, Jesus does not ask about citizenship status, moral résumés, or ideological or political alignment. He asks one question: How did you treat the hungry, the stranger, the prisoner, the vulnerable? Then he says something staggering — whatever you did to the least of these, __you did to me. Not surprisingly, those who refuse to love the margins he casts into an eternal lake of fire.

This is why the church must decide who it is.

Like Bonhoeffer in his day, pastors and church leaders must speak to what is happening within our churches and the frightening parallels — not to seize power, not to score political points, and not to baptize an ideology, but to disciple people in the way of Jesus. That way includes loving our neighbors and our enemies, welcoming the stranger, resisting cruelty, and refusing to confuse strength with faithfulness. If the church will not form its people in the cruciform life of Christ, something else will.

And history shows us exactly where that road leads.