Matthew recounts the story of a young, hoity-toity soft-nationalist German theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer who discovered the radical soul of antifascism by hanging out in a Black Baptist church in Harlem in 1930. He came to the US believing in the white Jesus of European empire, but left enthralled by the Black Jesus of the oppressed. Back in Germany, he played 78s of spirituals and gospel tunes for the students of his illegal seminaries as he and other members of the Confessing Church issued some of the earliest formal rebukes to the Reich. And then he joined a plot to assassinate Hitler.
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Hey everybody, this is a conspirituality bonus episode called Anti-Fascist Christianity, Bonehoffer Part 2, Part 1, dropped on Saturday on the main feed.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
This is conspirituality, as I mentioned, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
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So this is one of several episodes I'll be doing on anti-fascist Christianity that will kind of dovetail itself into the anti-fascist woodshed series.
It's where I collect a bunch of useful stories and resources for this terrible time.
Today, in part two on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life, I'm going to pick up the story in the midst of his Harlem awakening.
And I think the story is really important because it shows that if you're white and oblivious to where you come from and what that means, if you never really see the structure of empire around you and centering you, you can still learn.
You can begin to understand the powerlessness of other people.
You can begin to understand what struggle means.
You can use privilege to understand the margins that make you the center.
And I also think that this is an important story because while there's nothing new about American fascism, There's also nothing new about American anti-fascism.
And a lot of that is due to the strength and resilience of the Black Church.
So.
So picking up where we left off, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is at Union Theological Seminary.
He's 24 years old and he's starting to understand the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebohr, who's a theologian burnished by his labor battles against Henry Ford in Detroit.
And he's hanging out with all the social gospel kids.
But most importantly, he's embedded now in the liturgical life of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.
He's learning gospel music.
He's teaching Sunday school.
He's visiting the sick and elderly in their homes and he's listening to Pastor Adam Clayton Powell the Sr preach a newly alive gospel to him, flipping his understanding of Jesus from the ascended and conquering hero of empire to the struggling instrument of love and solidarity.
But these services at Abyssinian weren't enough for Bonhoeffer.
He wanted to see what Pastor Powell was talking about firsthand when he railed against the Jim Crow South.
So in January of 1931, this is over the Christmas break, he traveled by train through the Deep South, noting his observations on the stationary of the Peninsula and Occidental Steamship Company, Havana, Port Tampa, and Key West.
And then on the Easter break, he hit the road again, but this time with fellow students Erwin Sutz and Jean Lazare, driving a second-hand Oldsmobile through Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans, and then smaller towns in Mississippi and Alabama.
Bonhoeffer found the racial segregation on the railways, tramways, highways, and buses south of Washington an outrage.
Many Southern pastors were clearly racist pigs.
And he was appalled by the news of lynchings, including a January 1931 incident, so right around that time in Maryville, Missouri, where a black man was chained to a schoolhouse roof and burned to death.
He was also profoundly affected by the Scottsboro case in April of 1931, in which nine young black men were condemned to death for an alleged rape.
But also throughout their journeying through the South, Bonhoeffer and Lazare went to as many rural black churches as they could and soaked in the gospel spirit, by turns melancholic and exultant.
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