After Ten Years: A Reckoning Made in December 2025

by Ryan Andrew Newson

   In 1943, following a decade of resistance to fascism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sketched out an essay that was eventually published under this very title, in which he sought to make sense of what had become of Christianity and Germany under the Nazi movement. 

   I would like to take the opportunity of being invited to write this essay to similarly reflect on where we are in the United States, following 10 years of Donald Trump as a presidential figure. It was about 10 years ago—June 16, 2015—that Trump announced he was running for president, ushering in (or accelerating) the political and ideological forces we now face. Personally, I can never think of Trump’s announcement without also thinking of the horrible events of the following day, when Dylann Roof entered Mother Emanuel AME Church and murdered nine Black congregants. The past 10 years have in many ways felt like being stuck in an ever-widening gyre, though the swirl of reaction began well before the summer of 2015.

   What do I mean? The popularization of Christian nationalism (what Dorothee Sölle called Christofascism) or cruel, violent, racist immigration enforcement; the rise of ICE as a paramilitary force whose budget rivals that of many country’s entire military; continued Islamophobia; conspiratorial thinking and the erosion of shared consensus reality; the demonization of LGBTQ people (especially but not limited to trans folks); the continued gutting and privatization of almost every public good created in the mid-20th century; ongoing imperial war, not least the genocide in Gaza; I could go on. For the most part, the Democratic establishment has either actively participated in these developments (on Palestine, for instance) or offered tepid forms of “resistance,” seeking some way back to the “normal” that got us here in the first place. At the time of my writing, Trump and others in his orbit are openly flirting with violating the 22nd amendment, running for a third term in 2028. I cannot help but be reminded of Carl Schmitt’s invocation of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution to expand executive authority during states of emergency.

   I mention all this because, as a Christian ethicist, I agree with H. Richard Niebuhr that before you can answer the question, “What are we to do?” we must answer the prior question, “What is going on?” In our current political climate, which is increasingly allergic to the truth, this may not be easy and may come with a cost. Authoritarianism thrives on self-surveillance and obfuscation. And yet I am not being hyperbolic when I say that the only question I am interested in right now is how to counter these forces. The MAGA movement did not emerge ex nihilo in 2015, but it has accelerated forces within the United States that are completely misaligned with truth, wisdom, faithfulness to Jesus, and the movement to liberate the oppressed which Jesus inaugurated (Luke 4).

   And so, in this essay, I write for those of us who know the reality we are facing, and who seek strategies for living and moving faithfully in this context. How can Christians and Christian congregations be “of any use” in the pursuit of liberation from all that binds and oppresses? If we are, what we shall need (Bonhoeffer writes) “is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward people.” And this is the question, it seems to me: our usefulness in pursuit of liberation. Otherwise, we are but salt that has lost its saltiness—and thus, fit for being trampled under foot.

Appeals to Dialogue and Civility

   To begin, a common and tempting response to these political crises is to lament a lack of dialogue across difference (perhaps with an appeal to social media), and a lack of “civility” when such encounters do occur. To be sure, I deeply value listening as a theological and political practice and have written about this value at length. But I also have written about how appeals to qualities like “civility” are of limited value. That is, “civility” (however defined) is not an inherent good, but can be either good or bad depending on who is invoking it, when and for what reason.

   Even so, many are attracted to the idea of discussion as a panacea for what ails us, committed to aesthetic values like niceness and calmness to such a degree that they have a difficult time seeing when discussion must end. If we are discussing strategic matters about how to best empower the poor in our community, then indeed, listening and something like “civility” is good. But if the matter up for discussion is, “Are immigrants people?,” then to even entertain the question is to concede something that ought not be conceded.

   Despite so much evidence to the contrary, many cling to the desire to fact-check or “talk” our way out of this, or pretend that the problem is “polarization,” as though there are not things from which we should be polarized. I am not here recommending anything positive, but rather pleading with people to let go of a commitment to dialogue as alone capable of getting us out of this predicament. It will not. Commitments to being moderate or neutral in this time and place are not only delusional; they side with the encroaching reactionary forms of government and Christianity, whether one realizes that or not.

   And anyway, there is no virtue in being calm and collected in a moment in which people are being kidnapped off the streets by masked agents of the state, in violation of moral and constitutional law. To echo Thomas Aquinas, one can sin by not being angry when one should be—when one ought to be upset with injustices occurring in the world but is not, out of some misplaced commitment to apatheia or neutrality.

Tell the Truth

   Given the forces of dis- and misinformation coming from the Trump administration and exacerbated by social media, one positive and urgent task for Christians in this context is to tell the truth. Bombing boats in the Caribbean purportedly carrying drugs into the United States is not a just exercise of war; it is a war crime, and bombing people floating on the debris is outright murder. As an example.

   I can already hear the bad-faith response from my interlocutor: “Oh, but these truths are contested! How do you know who is really telling the truth or not?” The ironic reactionary appeal to relativism, and accidental postmodernism meant to mask a will to power. I am not speaking to such people here. I have very little hope that it is possible to convince sophists of this sort, but our commitment to truth-telling is not for them. I agree with Bonhoeffer that the problem that leads to support for fascism is not really a lack of information; it is a moral failure that leads one to see fascism as good and beautiful and true. What binds one to such projects is grievance; it is what Bonhoeffer calls “folly” or “stupidity.” He says, 

Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force. Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, as it makes people, at the least, uncomfortable. Against folly we have no defence. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reason is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved – indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So, the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied; in fact, he can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make him aggressive. A fool must therefore be treated more cautiously than a scoundrel; we shall never again try to convince a fool by reason, for it is both useless and dangerous.

   Why then this commitment to truth? Not to convince, but to keep ourselves tethered to reality. Authoritarianism thrives under the threat of violence (whether overt or through the threat of loss of employment, public shaming, and the like). Such mechanisms intimidate people into silence and self-policing. Remaining committed to telling the truth is vital for those seeking to lead prophetically in the days ahead. Telling the truth—like courage, like authenticity, like vulnerability—is contagious and, while it is not a sufficient response to fascism, it is certainly a necessary component of any commitment to justice and (eventually) reconciliation in the years ahead.

External Liberation Preceding Inward Liberation

   Given the nature of “folly,” Bonhoeffer does not think we can convince such people by reason. For Bonhoeffer, partisans of the Nazi regime seem almost to be possessed by an external force, merely repeating words, phrases and grievances fed to them by the regime. “One feels in fact, when talking to [the fool], that one is dealing, not with the man himself, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of him. He is under a spell, he is blinded, his very nature is being misused and exploited.” Analogies to contemporary defenders of MAGA are not hard to make.

   Hardly a comforting thought. And yet herein lies Bonhoeffer’s advice for how to deal with the fool as well, both then and today. The path is to attend to the structural rather than the personal. There is a tendency in our culture to think that the path to liberation must primarily and ultimately involve liberation of individual conscience. Convince enough individual people to change their minds and this will bubble into systemic change. But Bonhoeffer directly inverts this focus. In the great majority of cases, he writes, individual liberation is preceded by systemic liberation; one’s culture shifts, policy changes, and by top-down effect, individual conscience changes as well. This is a dialectic, of course: there is no structural change without individual participation, and no individual change without a structural shift. But structural causation seems too-often neglected in these discussions, and there is a lot of wisdom in Bonhoeffer’s drawing our attention there when it comes to navigating and countering such ideologies. Structural evil, after all, is real and outstrips any individual’s ability to counter it alone and, as such, structural evil calls for structural change.

   What this means practically for this moment is that pursuing policies that address the material realities of people’s lives—universal health care, rent freezes and increased renter power, wage increases, eliminating barriers to unionization—are fruitful paths to pursue in the world that is coming and even now is here. Trying to “convert” every individual who is variously attracted to the MAGA movement is certainly inefficient, as well as (probably) hopeless. Certainly, it has not proven to be a scalable solution. But seeking to change the conditions that produce people who are attracted to Trump in the first place, while also difficult to implement, is not impossible to imagine. We remain in need of people—teachers, preachers, community activists, people of all stripes—who pursue this path.

Resist in Solidarity

   Directly following from the commitment to seeking structural change is to seek, and hold fast, to fellow workers in the struggle. Liberation will not be achieved alone. “Without community there is no liberation,” to invoke Audre Lorde. Isolated, we are not as organized, we are more likely to give in to the temptation to despair, we are more likely to think we are alone, even when we are not. And so the simple (if difficult) act of organizing in one’s community is critical. Liberatory action is the antidote to despair. (It is also strong medicine against conspiratorial thinking).

   As Bonhoeffer puts it, “One cannot write about these things without a constant sense of gratitude for the fellowship of spirit and community of life that have been proved and preserved throughout these years.” A gift I have discovered over the last decade are the bonds of affection forged across and between anyone working for liberation. Trump has clarified who my enemies are in this moment, called as I am to love them. But I have also discovered deep friendships, and otherwise just fellow workers, that have made it such that no matter how distressed and depressed and angry I have been with the state of the world, I have not despaired.

   Such people, I hasten to add, need not be one’s closest friends and partners. Many, probably most, will fall into the category Alice Walker named when describing her relationship with June Jordan: “We were the kind of friends, instead, who understood that we were forever on the same side; the side of the poor, the economically, spiritually and politically oppressed, ‘the wretched of the earth.’ And on the side, too, of the revolutionaries, teachers and spiritual leaders who seek transformation of the world…  It seems a model of what can help us rebalance the world. Friendship with others: populations, peoples, countries, that is, in a sense, impersonal.”

   Resisting MAGA and building for a world after MAGA (and preparing for future iterations of similar phenomena) simply require finding fellow workers in the struggle. Appeals to a narrowly ecclesiocentric vision of working for the common good will not cut it.

Bread and Roses

   We fight for bread, yes—but roses too. The practice of any creative pursuit in days such as these may feel indulgent, like a luxury of the few or the checked out. But nothing could be further from the truth. Fascism abhors humanity—actual humanity with all our variances and beauties and weirdnesses, differences that fascism interprets as deviance. Thus, MAGA and Christian nationalists’ hyperfixation on and anxiety about LGBTQ folks and especially trans people.

   As such, all people, not least communities of faith, should foster spaces where the arts can be freely pursued. Not, I hasten to add, art for some didactic purpose, to convert or convince. I mean art as exploration. All fascist movements seek to subsume individuality into a wider whole, a machine that maximizes profit for the good of a constructed in-group—“blood” and “people.” What would it look like, then, for communities of faith to do the opposite of this: to be funders of, hubs of, and (in some cases) producers of art for art’s sake? Such would not be mere indulgence. It would preserve something crucial that pushes against fascist imaginaries, and may produce people who value the arts as they worked, organized, voted and resisted.

   Art alone cannot save us, of course. That’s not the point of art. Art doesn’t have a point. Like prayer, perhaps like creation itself, the process is the goal; the churn is the thing itself. But art has a way of creating community in a non-fascist way, and it reminds us of the world we are fighting for. Thus, weird or counter-intuitive though this may sound, resisting so-called AI-produced art and valuing actual human creativity is a vital part of navigating the world we are in faithfully. It should be a natural and intuitive outgrowth of Christian commitments.

Die on Every Hill

   These are only brief sketches of ideas about how to navigate our political climate, and I personally am open to any and all ideas about how to resist moving forward. I welcome any such ideas.

   Perhaps a closing image from Bonhoeffer, then, is one of endurance. Who stands fast? Bonhoeffer asks. Amidst the exhausting grind of working for liberation, who will endure? Bonhoeffer says it is the person who is willing to let go of all they thought they knew (reason, principles, conscience, freedom, virtue), and instead seek “obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God.” Perhaps the final temptation is to simply give up, or sacrifice some such struggle on the altar of expedience or effectiveness. Instead, Bonhoeffer tells us, the one who stands fast is the one who acts out of a sense of responsibility to God and neighbor; who refuses to leave any of one’s neighbors in the lurch.

   Over a decade ago, a friend of mine—Jacob Cook, now at Eastern Mennonite Seminary—was attending a panel where evangelical leaders were discussing LGBTQ justice and the church. During the panel discussion, one person, attempting to give a “moderate” position, said, “Look, I’m not gonna’ die on this hill.” Afterwards, Jake noted this line, and that it did not take seriously the stakes of what was being discussed: the dignity and belovedness of actual human beings who are ostracized, marginalized and demonized by the church and society alike. “No,” Jake said in response. “We die on every hill.”

   I’ve thought about this sentiment often in the years since. It is built on a profound trust that one’s death is not the end. It is built on the correct sensibility that the movements for liberation are not built on one person, and our job is to be faithful to the task before us. We do not need heroes, but people willing to be responsible for trying to shape how the next generation will live. And it is built on the conviction that we cannot sacrifice any person or group’s need for liberation on the altar of expediency. Not every fight is yours to fight specifically, but every fight needs fighting. Die on every hill. Have courage. Take heed. Live humanly. 

   None of us until all of us are free.

Ryan Newson is Associate Professor of Theology and Ethics at Campbell University. He is the author of several books, most recently The End of Civility (Baylor Press, 2023).

Notes / References

1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” in Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Touchstone, $1953$ 1997), 16–17.​
   https://archive.org/details/letterspapersfro00diet

2. Ryan Andrew Newson, Inhabiting the World: Identity, Politics, and Theology in Radical Baptist Perspective (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2018).​
   https://merceruniversitypress.com/inhabiting-the-world

3. Ryan Andrew Newson, The End of Civility: Christ and Prophetic Division (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2023).​
   https://www.baylorpress.com/9781481319323/the-end-of-civility

4. Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” 8.​

5. Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” 9.​

6. Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013).​
   https://fortresspress.com/store/product/9781451462673/Resisting-Structural-Evil

7. Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” 3.​

8. Alice Walker, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness (New York: The New Press, 2006), 4.​
   https://thenewpress.com/books/we-are-ones-we-have-been-waiting

9. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, 20th anniversary ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).​
   https://cup.columbia.edu/book/extraordinary-bodies/9780231170513

10. Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” 5.​

11. Bonhoeffer, “After Ten Years,” 7.

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