I was a new staff member when I heard some helpful advice through the church grapevine: My job security depended on the orientation of the blinds in my office windows. Church members wanted all the blinds in the building to be turned in the same direction to give the church building a uniform appearance.
Moreover, a previous occupant of my office had resisted blind uniformity and had experienced conflict over this window rebellion. If I wanted to be successful in the congregation, I was told, I’d do well to turn my office blinds to the desired orientation.
Andrew Garnett
I took this as useful information and duly turned my blinds as demanded. I wasn’t surprised by it — this was a church, after all. My entire life has been spent either attending or working in churches, so I knew what to expect. It is perfectly normal for some church members to focus more on the window treatments than the unhoused population sleeping on the church property. I suspect many who’ve worked in a church would also see this as par for the course.
Looking back, what was most surprising to me about that moment was how unsurprising it was. Jesus would have flipped tables in righteous indignation, and I don’t think he would have been the sole biblical figure to do so.
Quarreling over windows sounds like just the sort of thing that would have caused the Apostle Paul to fire off another angry letter, and I can easily imagine an Old Testament prophet pivoting slightly to say, “Thus says the Lord: I despise your blinds, and I take no delight in your building’s windows. But let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Where we’re failing
No, it wasn’t surprising to me at all. I’ve had the sense for a long time that many churches are failing — failing in the sense of not achieving their stated purpose. Every congregation I know says it exists to create people who are more like Jesus. We read the stories of Jesus and then try to motivate believers to be transformative agents of love, mercy and grace.
“If a company intended to manufacture computers but found cars were actually rolling off the assembly line, they’d retool the factory.”
Yet churches seem to produce many people who are supremely concerned not about love but about window blinds. I’ve wondered what churches are doing wrong to get such poor outcomes. Something in our processes, programs or culture must be amiss to get results so contrary to our stated goal. If a company intended to manufacture computers but found cars were actually rolling off the assembly line, they’d retool the factory. Something about that system is broken.
To be sure, we can’t manufacture a Christian life like we can a computer. I’ll grant that we shouldn’t expect churches to work a transformative miracle in every human life. Nor is it likely that every person will mature into a spiritual giant. But I still can’t shake the feeling that something is deeply amiss in the average church.
But for the last few years I’ve begun to suspect our spiritual foundations are shoddier than even I realized. Trust in American institutions has been slipping for a long time, and polling regularly finds large majorities of the population think the United States is on the wrong track. Now many are even sounding the alarm about parallels to fascist governments of World War II.
Our elected leaders say they will acquire territory like Greenland against the wishes of its citizens, seek to unilaterally overturn inconvenient sections of the Constitution, express a desire to ignore presidential term limits, authorize law enforcement to enter private property without search warrants, deport both U.S. citizens and noncitizens without trial or due process, sideline journalists they view unfavorably, and more.
“It’s hard to imagine Jesus championing the takeover of a territory against the wishes of its people.”
Sometimes these actions seem deliberately designed to dehumanize people, as when the White House posted an ASMR deportation video to X; typically ASMR content is used for relaxation, so presumably the White House assumed we’d find the tinkling of shackles to be soothing.
It’s hard to imagine Jesus championing the takeover of a territory against the wishes of its people or donning a pair of headphones and contentedly drifting off to sleep while listening to people being deprived of their right to due process. Yet majorities of Christians (and particularly large majorities of white Christians) support all of this.
I’ve been concerned for a long time that churches aren’t developing spiritually mature people, but even I am shocked at how badly we are doing. Not only are we failing to be part of the solution — apparently, church is a big part of the problem. Pew Research Center has found Christians who attend church most frequently tend to be the most supportive of these policies. In other words, our best chance of keeping the mindset of Jesus is to stay out of Jesus’ church.
History rhymes
Psychoanalyst Theodor Reik once wrote; “It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.” In our current political climate, it’s no surprise that allusions to 1930s Germany are rampant. We wonder if we are living in a “Bonhoeffer moment,” and I can’t count how many times I’ve seen on social media the “First They Came” poem of German pastor Martin Niemöller.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer icon by Kelly Latimore
It is good that we are listening for the rhymes of history — trying to learn its lessons and avoid past mistakes.
But we also would do well to consider what happens when sanity eventually returns to society. And I have no doubt we will return to better times. Martin Luther King Jr. was right: The arc of history is tortuously long, but it is bending toward justice. Better times will return, but we can expect the calm after the storm to be difficult. We can make a reasonable assumption about what our future may entail, because we know what happened to the German church after World War II.
During World War II, most German Christians were relatively quiet in the face of Nazism. This wasn’t due to lack of information. Research has shown a considerable number of Germans had knowledge of atrocities during the war; the diary of Friedrich Kellner, for example, demonstrates that even Germans in a small town could hear stories about the murder of Jews in Poland.
Some German Christians vocally supported Nazi policies. Most German churches were not filled with ardent Nazis — but neither were churches vociferous opponents of Hitler. Most German Christians remained neutral. Christians who did speak out against Hitler usually made limited protests.
‘Most German Christians remained neutral.”
The Confessing Church, for example, was formed not to resist Nazi policies per se but rather to oppose government interference in church affairs. Nazism might be distasteful, but the Confessing Church’s primary goal was to keep its influence out of the church.
We look back now and are surprised by how few Germans actively resisted Nazism. But what’s equally intriguing is how many people did not see themselves as morally culpable for anything that happened.
After 1945, many soldiers wrote accounts of the war, and in a staggering example of cognitive dissonance they are almost invariably proud of their military service and have few regrets. They see the armed forces as having nothing to do with the atrocities of the time — a false viewpoint historians now call the “myth of the clean Wehrmacht.”
Likewise, many German Christians did not see themselves as culpable for what happened. A select few Christians believed there was enough blame to go around, that both the actions and inactions of each German had brought Hitler to power. British bishop George Bell claimed that, with war still raging, he heard Bonhoeffer remark, “Oh, we have to be punished. Christians do not wish to escape repentance or chaos, if God wills to bring it on us. We must endure this judgement as Christians.”
Need for repentance
The need for repentance in the German church probably explains at least part of Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison about how to restructure the church — the postwar church could only be the church when it existed for others, because it needed to make amends for its prewar past in which it had only thought of itself.
Yet Bonhoeffer was in the minority there. After the war, leaders at the Council of the Protestant Church in Germany gathered to write a statement of regret. It proved quite difficult to reach a consensus. No one seemed to agree on whether the church had anything to apologize for or whether — even if they were guilty of wrongdoing — it was wise to admit it.
One wanted to write a statement that focused not on the church but all citizens of Germany. Others argued that both sides in the war were just as culpable; the Soviet army in particular had done unspeakable things as it moved through Eastern Europe, so why should Germans apologize when the Soviets were unrepentant? Others said that to apologize for enabling Nazism was tantamount to collective guilt, as though a German widow at home was just as guilty as an SS man gassing children in a death camp.
Eventually, the council did agree to and sign the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. This statement admitted that German churches needed to repent, but it also argued that churches had fought against Nazism in their own way. The declaration avoided specifics and claimed the real problem was that the German church had not tried hard enough. It was an apology for “not standing to our beliefs more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently.”
The declaration reminds me of the moment in a job interview when the hiring manager asks about the candidate’s greatest weakness, and the candidate says he is guilty of overworking. Both the Stuttgart Declaration and the candidate’s answers are half-hearted at best, and neither tells the whole story. In the end, the Stuttgart Declaration was signed by the council, but most of the signatories chose not to publicize it themselves; some even requested that it not be publicly shared, which would seem to defeat the point of making a declarative statement.
Looking back at the German churches should not make us feel morally superior. On the contrary, I’m convinced it should make us feel worse, because we are on track to repeat the same mistakes.
“Few Christians of any theological perspective see anything to repent for.”
As a society, we have a collective sense that we are on the wrong track, yet few Christians of any theological perspective see anything to repent for. Liberals are convinced conservatives are the problem, and vice versa. Yet we’ve all created the culture we live in; we’ve all created the America of 2025. And whenever saner times return, I suspect none of us will want to admit we contributed to this destructive historical aberration.
It will be postwar Germany all over again.
Let’s admit our part
We have much work to do to avoid the errors of the past, but chief among them is to embrace the first step of the 12-step traditions: We have to admit we are part of the problem.
To speak more candidly, I am convinced I am a part of the problem. I have spent decades leading churches, which means I have spent decades creating the kinds of Christians who worry more about window blinds than they worry about seeing God’s kingdom come and God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
It does no good to argue, as the German Christians did, that I didn’t want this outcome and tried to avoid it. It’s true enough that I had good intentions and I wanted my churches to follow Jesus. I’ve never told them to worry about the blinds. But the results of my leadership all too often have been contrary to my intentions, and for that I will one day have to give an account to God.
If we want to do better after the cultural war is over, we have to be ready to admit we were guilty. I’m not even sure of all the ways we’ve gone wrong, but something about our way of doing church stands under God’s curse.
We never can hope to rebuild something better until we can face the truth that our way of programming, staffing, leading, doing, organizing and being the church is somehow part of the problem.
Andrew Garnett is a Virginia pastor and author of Christians and the Roman Army: Lessons for Today.