This op-ed by Pastor Matt, contributed on behalf of the Windham Interfaith Working Group, was published in the November 14^th issue of The Chronicle.

 Because the need is the greatest, because the last star of hope appears to have faded, because the weather of final destruction threatens to descend, in the final hour we are given a leader as a gift from God.

— Georg Buchwald, Protestant pastor and theologian, 1934.

Exactly one year to the day before the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre, I found myself at the site where the Gestapo and SS headquarters had stood in Berlin.  The “Topography of Terror” museum now occupies the site.  Stark in its physical design, the museum is even starker in the story it tells.

As a Protestant Christian pastor fascinated by the history of my tradition, I’d been drawn to Europe last fall by the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther sparking the Protestant Reformation.  Only after I arrived in Berlin did I learn about a special exhibit at the museum that would become one of the most important pieces of my Reformation 500 sojourn.

The exhibit chronicled the way in which the Nazi regime co-opted the legacy of Luther to amass power and implement genocide.  Some of this was based on Luther’s own words and deeds.  Some of it, though, came simply from the quest for an emblem of the fierce German strongman, a figurehead that could rally popular passions, and Luther fit the bill well.

The photographs were gut-wrenching.  A Protestant clergyman dressed in the same type of ritual garb as I wear each Sunday, flanked by a Nazi SA regiment, arm raised in the “heil Hitler” salute.  A banner hanging across the stage at a rally, flanked by Nazi flags, proclaiming “for the completion of the German Reformation in the spirit of Martin Luther!”  A poster advertising observances of Luther’s 450^th birthday, a swastika superimposed on the center of the Christian cross.

Luther did say reprehensible things about Jews.[1]  To deny or minimize that fact is simply dishonest.  As all of us lament the atrocity in Pittsburgh, we must face the ways our own intellectual and spiritual traditions have fed anti-Semitic atrocities through the centuries, to the present day.

The words by Georg Buchwald with which I began were among those featured in the exhibit.  Buchwald was a prominent pastor in Germany.  He saw around him a country drowning in economic troubles, reeling from a sense of defeat and lost identity.  Who was it, in such a time, that Buchwald claimed had been sent from God?  Adolf Hitler.

We’d like to think this could never happen in our country.  But I have walked into a store right here in Connecticut selling a Christian cross with an American flag superimposed on its center.  I have watched our own head of state endorse violence against people based on identity.  I have heard so-called Christian leaders speak of an elected official as nothing less than God’s gift for our time.

Such leaders do not speak for all of us, and a few German Protestant leaders resisted back in the day, too.  As one such pastor preached in 1936, “If we want to listen to the word of Jesus Christ, to follow it, and to be faithful students of Martin Luther, then as a Protestant community and as believing Christians we should call out to our German people: ‘Beware of false prophets!’”  Today, from many faith traditions, we call on the American people to beware the false prophets of populism, white nationalism, protectionism, and nativism.  And I hope we are effective enough that we don’t prove good old Winston Churchill right yet again.  After all, “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

[1] Luther was certainly not alone in his views, as anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic views were commonplace in his time.  Nevertheless, by the last decade of his life, his frustration that Jews were not converting to Christian faith even after it had been more clearly and evangelically stated (by freeing Christian faith from the errors and abuses of the medieval church) led Luther to a uniquely strong condemnation of them, since he considered them to be willfully persisting in what he considered lies and blasphemy.  In the most infamous section of his 1543 treatise Von den Jüden und iren Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies), his views lead him to encourage his Protestant readers to the following remedial actions:  to burn down Jewish synagogues and schools and warn people against them; to refuse to let Jews own houses among Christians; for Jewish religious writings to be taken away; for rabbis to be forbidden to preach; to offer no protection to Jews on highways; for usury to be prohibited and for all silver and gold to be removed, put aside for safekeeping, and given back to Jews who truly convert; and to give young, strong Jews flail, axe, spade, and spindle, and let them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow.