Standing Firm

Resisting authoritarianism: lessons from the twentieth century

I spent this last semester immersed in writings from twentieth-century authoritarian contexts. Given the opportunity to teach a class to honors students, I decided to teach a course on “Reading for Resistance.” My goal was to read (or re-read) key historical works that I thought might help illuminate our own time, and the choices that are before us, and I to invite students to read them with me.

Each of my students completed a final project for the class. (I shared one of them here—and yes, you’re welcome to use it in your own liturgical contexts!) I told my students that just like they had a final project due at the end of the class, I had an end-of the semester assignment to complete as well. I had agreed to give the commencement address at Knox College, part of the Toronto School of Theology, and although I didn’t know exactly what I would speak on, I knew I wanted to share some of the wisdom from the past with graduates embarking on careers in ministry.

The entire ceremony is available on YouTube, and I’ve cued up my own portion below if you’d like to watch.

If you’d prefer to read, I’ll include the bulk of it below:

I want to think with you about what will it mean to think deeply and live authentically as a follower of Jesus in the days ahead, and what it might look like to lead courageously in the precariously shifting spiritual and social landscapes of our own time.

First, a disclaimer: I’m not a pastor, or a theologian, or a faith leader. I’m a historian. As a historian, I specialize in tracking those shifting spiritual and social landscapes.

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of good to report on that front right now.

There are the obvious challenges: the rise of right-wing authoritarianism globally, war and genocide, the geopolitical instability brought about by my own country’s “crusade” mentality, the effects of which are felt keenly on this side of the border. Underneath this we have growing polarization, which entails festering distrust, the erosion of any sense of the common good, the demonization of fellow image bearers, and the kind of rhetoric that history shows is often a precursor to violence.

Not only do we have Christian churches staying silent in the midst of this, but we have churches and faith leaders actively stoking all of this. We have churches grasping for power and seeking to protect their privilege. We see theological screeds against empathy, against loving one’s neighbors. We hear spiritual language that dehumanizes, that calls violence righteous and compassion weakness. Inside churches, too, we see sexual abuse and spiritual abuse and cultures of coverup and complicity.

In addition, we have growing wealth disparity and the consolidation of economic power, the economic and humanistic disruption of AI, screens replacing reality, social isolation becoming the norm, and our collective mental health in a tailspin. Add to this the fact that we are in the midst of a climate crisis of our own making; we have failed and continue to fail to steward the gifts God has given us. The costs are immense.

These are the shifting spiritual and social landscapes that you as faith leaders will be navigating as you leave here…

If we deny the severity of our circumstances, we will be ill-equipped to respond faithfully.

Historians may not be known for our optimism, but we do spend quite a bit of time thinking about virtue….Empathy, honesty, humility, and diligence are integral to the profession. As is wisdom. Or, in old-fashioned terms, “prudence.”

This one is my favorite. Essentially, wisdom takes us beyond the mere desire to do good, but adds to that desire the tools to accomplish that good. In practical life, wisdom entails both pursuing ends proper to human life—seeking human flourishing and shalom—and making right judgments about how to do so. In other words, it means understanding how to live well, AND how the world works, so that the means we select are in fact conducive to our true ends.

Which is to say, we cannot bury our heads in the sand. We need to understand the world we live in if we want to lead courageously and live faithfully.

Understanding how the world works entails all sorts of knowledge. There is a theological dimension; as a Calvinist, I want to suggest that thinking deeply about sin would serve us well right now. There is also a psychological dimension. When I finished my last book, and while writing my current book, I felt at a certain point that I was running up against the limits of the historical profession. I could describe, but ultimately I was at a loss to fully explain the dynamics I was tracing. I felt the need to pass the baton to psychologists, in particular.

But standing here today as a historian, I’ll focus today on some of the lessons history has to offer. Despite what you may have heard, history doesn’t actually repeat itself—not fully. But it does illuminate patterns, and being able to recognize those patterns is essential to discerning the dynamics of our own time, and to responding wisely to them.

Last week, I was just a few blocks from here, speaking at an event to honor a former professor of mine, Doris Bergen, a scholar of Religion and the Holocaust.

Before the event, in conversation with two other participants, I mentioned how much I’ve been thinking about a letter Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in late 1942, “After 10 years.” It turns out they were doing the same. (One, the former director of religion programming at the US Holocaust Museum, had actually written a book on the letter, and the other was currently writing an article on it.)

A few months back, when I was asked for the title of this talk, I panicked. I hadn’t yet written the talk and I was in the midst of final book edits. But a title was needed, and I suddenly knew what I wanted to speak about: “Standing Firm and Living with a Greatness of Heart”—these words are taken from Bonhoeffer’s letter.

What does it mean to stand firm in the midst of shifting landscapes?

How do we live with a greatness of heart, as followers of Jesus?

What can we learn from Bonhoeffer that might help us see our own context more clearly, and discern what it is that we are to do?

At the time Bonhoeffer was writing, he was grappling with Christian responsibility in the face of great evil, with the complicity of fellow Christians, with what God was calling him to do. Within months of writing this letter, he would be jailed. And, ultimately, executed.

In writing the letter, he was acutely aware that, in the previous 10 years, German social and spiritual landscapes had shifted dramatically:

“Have there ever been people in history who in their time, like us, had so little ground under their feet, people to whom every possible alternative open to them at the time appeared equally unbearable, senseless, and contrary to life?”

Bonheoffer wrote about “the huge masquerade of evil” that had “thrown all ethical concepts into confusion….That evil should appear in the form of light, good deeds, historical necessity, social justice is absolutely bewildering for one coming from the world of ethical concepts that we have received,” he wrote. “For the Christian who lives by the Bible, it is the very confirmation of the abysmal wickedness of evil.”

All around him, Bonhoeffer saw failure.

The failure of “the reasonable ones”—”those who think, with the best of intentions and in their naïve misreading of reality, that with a bit of reason they can patch up a structure that has come out of joint….” Unable to see clearly, “they want to do justice on every side, only to be crushed by the colliding forces without having accomplished anything at all.” In the end, these “reasonable ones” were “condemned to unproductiveness;” they withdrew in resignation or helplessly fell victim to the stronger.

Bonhoeffer observed, too, the failure of those who mistakenly thought they could “meet the power of evil with the purity of a principle,” only to quickly grow tired and suffer defeat.

He watched those who prioritized duty end up, in the end, doing “their duty to the devil.” He saw others retreat to the “sanctuary of private virtuousness” while closing their eyes and mouths to the injustice all around.

Then there were those who talked of going down heroically in the face of unavoidable defeat, who were in fact not heroic at all because they “dare[d] not look into the future”: “The ultimately responsible question is not how I extricate myself heroically from a situation but [how] a coming generation is to go on living. Only from such a historically responsible question will fruitful solutions arise, however humiliating they may be for the moment.”

Bonhoeffer saw, too, the danger of being driven to contempt for others, but he recognized that through “contempt for humanity we fall victim precisely to our opponents’ chief errors….God did not hold humans in contempt but became human for [our] sake.”

He wrote of the difficulty of living and acting “in air poisoned by mistrust.” And yet, in the midst of that poisoned air, he and others like him found community—he learned to place his life in the hands of others, to trust without reserve.

In the midst of threats and fear and betrayal, when hope felt absent, he perceived a “new sense of nobility being born” arising from sacrifice, courage, and a clear sense of what one owed to oneself, and to others…

This past semester, I taught this letter to my own students, along with several other writings from the twentieth century from writers like Vaclav Havel, Howard Thurman, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and from contemporary scholars of authoritarianism like Timothy Snyder, and theologian Hanna Reichel. At the end of the semester, one student told me that this was hands down the darkest class she’d had in her four years at Calvin but also most hopeful.

And so I want to close today by sharing with you some of the wisdom gleaned from these writers that speaks powerfully to our own day: not only to the threat of rising authoritarianism, but also to the dehumanizing potential of technology and seduction of capitalism, the allure of power, and the temptation to call evil good, and our own selfishness, righteous. I hope that you, too, can find hope in the midst of darkness.

Stand firm. Stand firmly where Jesus stands: with those on the margins.

“Protect the weak. For Christians, this is not about self-preservation... It is about following Jesus, who went to the outcasts, and died as one. It is a commitment to remain with those who suffer and to embrace the suffering that might come with it” (Reichel, 48).

Remember: “The church’s primary calling is not to survive but to be faithful….It is better for the church to be persecuted than to betray its calling” (Reichel, 108).

Practice empathy. Empathy is like a muscle; it grows when you use it.

Love your neighbor.

Love your enemies. Hatred, Howard Thurman reminds us, destroys the core of the life of the hater, and “hatred cannot be controlled once it is set in motion.” Hatred dries up “the springs of creative thought in the life of the hater…there remains no creative residue in his mind and spirit to give to great ideas…great concepts.” (Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, 76-78)

Speak truth, and live in that truth. Do not within a lie. Vaclav Havel saw clearly how ideologies offer a false view of the world, the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality, while making it easier for people to part with all of these things. (Havel, The Power of the Powerless, 16)

Stand firm; do not give up space. Withdrawing into spaces that are safely like-minded is not gathering strength; it is retreat. “Any space you give up will be used in ways you can no longer influence. Any space you give up might disappear altogether (Reichel, 50). So, stand fast.

Use whatever power and privilege you have. The question is not: How do you keep your hands clean or stay “morally pure”? “The question is: What is the best possible use of the power entrusted to you?” (Reichel, 55-59).

Do not bury your talents. Spend them.

Yet be suspicious of those who crave power while claiming to do good: as Reinhold Niebuhr reminded us in the 1930s, “The man of power is always to a certain degree an anti-Christ,” and those wielding power for good could not extricate themselves from this reality. Anyone genuinely pursuing absolute honesty and love would either lose their power or divest themselves of it.

Speak truth boldly, but choose your battles wisely (Reichel, 64).

The longer you remain silent, the more difficult it becomes to speak. (Reichel, 69).

The best way to resist moral collapse is to refuse that very first step.

Know that “It is easier for you to speak up and stand out if you see others already doing so.” Find these people, and “run with them.”

Read books. Pay attention to language.

Seek unity but not uniformity.

Think thoughts that are more important to you than your lives. (Bonhoeffer/Reichel11).

Reclaim areas of peace inside yourself, and reflect it toward others. Protect the little pieces of God inside you; guard the little pieces of joy. (Etty/Reichel 77-78)

Place your hope not in what you see around you, but in Christ. And with that hope, invest in timelines beyond your own, in the generations that will go on living.

May God bless and keep you all.

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[1] Calvin University “Core Virtues.”

If you’d like to here me speak even more, there are two fun opportunities this week. As mentioned before, tomorrow evening (7pm ET) I’ll be participating in a live Buzz Books panel with my editor, Dan Gerstle, talking about Live Laugh Love.

And due to complicated schedules, The Convocation Unscripted is switching our monthly LIVE episode from tomorrow afternoon to Friday at 12:30. Join us over your lunch hour, and ask us anything!

As a little kid, by the way, I would often get comments on report cards that “Kristin is very talkative in class.” Who knew that that trait would end up serving me so well in my future endeavors. 😊