Dietrich Bonhoeffer: An Inspiring Example of Christian and American Values
Tucker Carlson was wrong in his attack on Bonhoeffer, falsely asserting that trying to kill Hitler was un-Christian.
The recent instances of antisemitism on the so-called “right,” associated with influencers like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, are a pernicious and disturbing phenomenon that must be clearly condemned and rejected by the MAGA movement. Fortunately, numerous prominent conservatives have taken a resolute stance against this troubling development. Those who are concerned that in-fighting could assist our enemies and weaken the efforts to save America and the West must draw a clear demarcation line between negotiable issues, such as economic theory on tariffs, and major deal-breakers, such as the adoption of fundamentally un-American ideas like antisemitism.
These ideas are all the more insidious when they are under the guise of “isolationism” or Christianity. “Isolationism” as opposed to “interventionism” is but a matter of academic debate with little practical significance. By protecting a strategic ally like Israel, America is protecting itself as well as Western civilization. As for Christianity, it is incompatible with antisemitism, as its most inspiring and heroic figures have demonstrated. Such was the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who was executed for his courageous acts against the Nazi regime.
Tucker Carlson’s show on Wednesday, November 12, caused a storm of well-deserved outrage regarding the host’s comment on Bonhoeffer.
In his latest video Tucker condemns famous German Lutheran dissident pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer for plotting to kill Adolf Hitler in WWII.
He says that the Bonhoeffer plot to kill Hitler was the result of abandoning Christianity. pic.twitter.com/YllnBIPpBc
— Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@DrewPavlou) November 13, 2025
Tucker criticized Bonhoeffer for abandoning Christianity by advocating violence. This is a misleading and dangerous claim, since Christians are not expected to remain passive when they are attacked. Protecting oneself and others with force is morally justified. The “just-war” doctrine permits the use of force to defend against evil and has a long Christian tradition associated with St. Augustine.
Bonhoeffer himself discusses the moral justification of his choice to actively resist the Nazis as early as 1933, in an essay titled “The Church and the Jewish Question.” Joseph A. Kohm, Vice President for Development of the C.S. Lewis Institute, remarks:
Bonhoeffer posits three reactions the Church must have regarding the State. First, the Church must act as a form of conscience toward the State, asking the State “whether its actions are legitimate and in accordance with its character as state.” Second, the Church, “has an unconditional obligation” toward any victims resulting from any illegitimate State activity. And finally, when the Church, “sees the state fail in its function of creating law and order,” the Church must not only “bandage the victims under the wheel” of the State, but they are “to jam a spoke in the wheel itself.” [emphasis added]
Bonhoeffer was instrumental in the so-called “Operation 7,” which succeeded in helping fourteen Jews escape from Germany to Sweden. He acted as a double agent to sabotage the Nazi government and was involved with family members and close associates who plotted Hitler’s assassination. Throughout his life and in death, he retained his unwavering commitment to the Christian faith, which illuminated the very essence of his being, both in his speeches and writings and in his deeds. This year marks the 80th anniversary of his execution, which happened on April 9, 1945, at the Flossenbürg concentration camp, less than a month before the end of the war.
Any attempts to smear Bonhoeffer’s legacy are not only historically incorrect but morally reprehensible. Let us not forget that “kindness to the cruel is cruelty to the kind.” Actively fighting evil is an inherently Christian and American sentiment, in line with the Declaration of Independence and the founding of our country. It is no coincidence that Benjamin Franklin suggested that the Great Seal of America bear the inscription: “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” which harkens back the Biblical verse: “We must obey God rather than men.”
[Featured image via Wikimedia Commons]
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Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
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Comments
I’m still waiting for this latest version of “Springtime for Hitler” to become humorous.
I hope Carlson keeps on doing this stupid nonsense. It will reveal him for the idiot he has become. Ultimately, it could lead to his own self-destruction as a pundit.
exactly
Religious truths are always wrong. The importance of MAGA is that anything can be defeated with zingers, including religious truths.
“Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality. Does not lucidity, the mind’s openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war? The state of war suspends morality; it divests the eternal institutions and obligations of their eternity and rescinds ad interim the unconditional imperatives. In advance its shadow falls over the actions of men. War is not only one of the ordeals–the greatest–of which morality lives; it renders morality derisory. The art of foreseeing war and of winning it by every means– politics–is henceforth enjoined as the very exercise of reason. Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy is to naivete. We do not need obscure fragments of Heraclitus to prove that being reveals itself as war to philosophical thought, that war does not only affect it as the most patent fact, but as the very patency, or the truth, of the real. In war reality rends the words and images that dissimulate it, to obtrude in its nudity and in its harshness. Harsh reality (this sounds like a pleonasm!), harsh object-lesson, at the very moment of its fulguration when the drapings of illusion burn war is produced as the pure experience of pure being. The ontological event that takes form in this black light is a casting into movement of beings hitherto anchored in their identity, a mobilization of absolutes, by an objective order from which there is no escape. The trial by force is the test of the real. But violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action. Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same.”
Levinas
Stop quoting Hunter Biden.
LOL
Sweet Sister Josephine!
Pretentious pseudo-intellectual retard desperate for affirmation says what?
Test, you still post here
Much to our disappointment
I like the way you think. Very cool 😎
And you’re always a sexless middlebrow clown who peaked as a freshman.
nothing could MORE christian then trying to protect the people from the lefty
Unfortunately, today’s Christians are confused as to whom they are supposed to smuggle, over which border, in what direction.
all across america judges are being threatened by criminals and b/c of the lax lefty lunatics who support criminals…this is becoming a huge influence on how america handles its problems….
its not un-christian to attack the enemies of freedom
in fact it IS un-christian to not attack the enemies of freedom
My opinion…If I were asked if I would travel back in history to kill Hitler on the possibility that time travel is possible then the logical answer is no, I would not.
Truth is absolute, possibilities are subject to skew.
Depends on your theory of how time travel works and effects history. The inflexible theory says you would fail. The self-healing theory says someone would replace him. The branching theory says he was already killed in an alternate timeline and all you can do is move yourself to another timeline.
That is why…I cannot alter timelines of others without disturbing mine. Two normally closed contacts cannot exist with a normally open condition, so the logic rung is AFI…always false instruction.
Some say that the critical factor that turned a harmless painter into a homicidal megalomaniac was the continuing series of encounters with travelers from the future all inexplicably bent on murdering him for no reason.
I’d go in a New Your minute
He was also defending Maduro. He’s nuts
He’s missing some yarn from his pom pom.
Qatari money will do that fir some people.
Why now? Carlson, Owens, Fuentes, groypers (a word I was happily ignorant of until 5 minutes ago).
Attacking Bonhoeffer? A pillar of anti-nazism. Sugarcoat lil mustache man? Is it just clickbait insanity, or something more sinister?
A few months after Kirk’s murder something smells scripted for these bad actors to suck out so much oxygen from maga world; similar to all things black lives matter did, and tra/nny madness did, and covid tyranny did to the larger world. Shazaam! It’s the new normal.
Deep sewer failed to assassinate Trump – twice. It’s lawfare has been thwarted. The border is closed. It’s rainbow jihad halted. Fat man and sissy boi governors calling Trump a poopyhead has not slowed his agenda. The adults are in charge. Economic and military sanity appear within reach. A lot of work still to be done, though.
“I know,” says deep sewer. Let’s unleash big name agents of chaos inside maga to blow it up from the inside out! Jewhate, nazism, groyperism. We’re getting team together.
Something smells scripted.
Yuval Noah Harari has entered the chat.
Bonhoeffer was definitely an exemplary man, as much as Carlson has become loathsome, but care should be taken in holding him up as a model for Christian living absent extraordinary circumstances. His natural and completely understandable revulsion at the complicity of German Christians, both corporately and individually, in the crimes of the Nazi regime make his critic of the Church one that is more often used with intent to destroy rather than reform.
but care should be taken in holding him up as a model for Christian living
He’s EXACTLY who should be held up as a model for Christian living
That’s odd – I would rather have thought that Christ Himself would be the model of Christian living…. Even Paul (who said “Imitate me, even as I imitate Christ”) would be an admirable model, though not of course at the same level of Jesus. But Bonhoeffer? He may have been a decent man, but I daresay he wouldn’t rank in the top ten of Christians to emulate.
Tucker Qatarlson is a particularly loathsome hateful person. He also has not very bright.
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,
Dear Tucker… we ran out of other cheeks to turn. Next move is a haymaker. So sad…. what tipped him over the edge? (if there ever was one)