‘This is our 1933,’ Jones warns

“This is our 1933,” Robert P. Jones told the FaithWorks “Compassion and Justice” conference Feb. 20 in Austin, Texas.

Jones, founder and president of Public Religion Research Institute, was a keynote speaker at the event held at Riverbend Church. FaithWorks, formerly known as Fellowship Southwest, sponsors the annual gathering.

Jones reviewed findings from the latest national polling conducted by his firm, Public Religion Research Institute, on Christian nationalism. Then he previewed some of the content of his forthcoming book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy.

For those concerned about the state of the nation and church due to influence of Donald Trump and MAGA, he attempted to answer the question, “How did we get here?”

The answer goes back not just to 2016 but to 1845, he said. That was the year the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in a disagreement about whether slaveholders should be appointed foreign missionaries. But that also was the year Frederick Douglass’ first autobiography was published.

As a student, Jones said, he was assigned to read Douglass’ autobiography. There he read: “The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be
heard at the same time.”

Douglass wrote this in the same year the SBC was formed in order to allow a slaveholder to be a missionary, Jones noted. “So when we ask the kind of incredulous question, ‘How did we get here?’ it starts to become just a little bit less incredulous when we realize the largest expression of Protestant Christianity has this in its DNA.”

What’s happening in America today is “a longstanding American and Christian identity crisis, and we have never been quite clear about who we are as Christians and who we are as Americans.”

Speaking plainly, the chickens are coming home to roost, he quipped. “We’ve never quite cleared out the foxes from the hen house.”

Regarding 1933, Jones drew a contrast between the German pastors Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller, who wrote the poem beginning, “First they came for the socialists … .”

Bonhoeffer is better known today but was the exception among Germany clergy because he saw the danger of Hitler early on, Jones explained. Niemöller was a Nazi at the beginning of the war. “He voted for Hitler and he supported the Nazi Party and until he didn’t, right? And so that’s a … much better model for us.”

After the war, Niemöller went with his wife to visit Dachau and they saw a marker explaining that from 1933 to 1945, 238,756 people were cremated there. His wife nearly fainted upon reading the marker, taken aback by the quarter-million people who died.

Niemöller, however, was shaken not by the number of deaths — he already knew that — but by the span of years in which the deaths happened. Those two beginning and end dates “were the wanted poster of the living God for Pastor Niemöller,” he said.

While he can account for his opposition to the killing from 1937 to 1945, that leaves the span from 1933 to 1937 for which he has no alibi, he said.

Returning home, the pastor read Matthew 25 with new eyes: “I was hungry and you gave me nothing. I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink. I was sick and in prison and you did not come to me.”

Niemöller said: “As a Christian, I could have known and I should have known in 1933 that each of these human brothers, may they be all communists or whatever, God and Jesus Christ were asking me whether I really want to serve.”

That same moment of moral clarity one day will haunt evangelical Christians who have supported the Trump regime and its cruelty, Jones said. “Our highest calling in these days is … the work of discipleship. The biggest action for white Christians, especially, is not to be found in the vocabulary of depolarization, common ground compromise, even civility, but truth and love and justice. We’ve got to build beloved community around those principles, and we don’t sacrifice them on the altar of unity.”

American Christians must learn to live out faith, not accommodate itself to an authoritarian regime, he said. “And we’re going to have to remember that Jesus meant it when he said, ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I’ve not come to bring peace but a sword.’”

“If true Christianity is going to mean anything in these days, it’s going to have to be divisive.”

He concluded: “If true Christianity is going to mean anything in these days, it’s going to have to be divisive. … Justice takes sides. So … we’re going to have to hold our fellowship accountable because just as the Germans did in backing Hitler and the Nazi Party as Niemöller did in 1933, they were fully aware of what they were joining.”

There comes a time when the old adage about not jumping to call people Nazis must be discarded because there are actual Nazis among us, he said. “We’re going to have to find a way to say if you tolerate Nazi salutes or the use of Nazi language …, outright admiration for Hitler and jokes about gas chambers, if you are backing the murder and abduction of people off the streets by masked agents who have no warrants or papers, if you are supporting the rendition of people to foreign prisons without due process, if you support the restoration of honor to the Confederacy and give medals of honor to the perpetrators of Native America genocide, if you are turning a blind eye to genocide in Gaza, if you favor whitewashing history of inconvenient truths, if you’re refusing to feed hungry children, if you favor the construction of concentration camps for immigrants or holding people, if you’re supporting the daily outrageous in the cruelties of the lawless MAGA regime, you have left the faith and you have abandoned democracy.”

The first duty of those who understand the challenge is not to seek reconciliation with those who support MAGA “but to call out more publicity and resist,” he said.

Niemöller asked himself over and over “what would’ve happened if in 1933 or 1934 — it must have been a possibility — 14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant congregations in Germany had defended the truth with our lives.”

That kind of moral courage could have saved the lives millions of people, Jones said. “I’m asking myself the same painful question about turning points of U.S. history. Again, this is not foreign to us. What would’ve happened if white Christian pastors and congregations had protested en mass when Congress removed Thomas Jefferson’s original language denouncing slavery — which called it a cruel war against human nature itself — from the Declaration of Independence. What would’ve happened if Christians had in 1830 opposed Andrew Jackson’s duplicitous Indian removal, … if white Baptists and Methodists in the South had in 1845 committed themselves to love rather than violence?”