In a previous article on GodfatherPolitics, I pointed out that leftist groups are attacking churches that address social issues that are near and dear to liberals. These groups monitor broadcasts, websites, and sermons of Christian leaders that address any topic that is critical of a leftist agenda. We’ve seen these types of tactics in Europe, England, and Canada. They’re coming to America, even though we have a set of iron-clad freedoms in the First Amendment. But if the Supreme Court can find a right to kill pre-born babies in the “shadows” of the Constitution, then no freedom is safe.
There is a long history of religious intimidation. Using Nazi Germany as an example for anything these days is often viewed as extremism. Even so, the comparisons are there, and we shouldn‘t be afraid to make them when we see them.
When German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) used his pulpit to expose Adolf Hitler’s radical politics, “He knew every word spoken was reported by Nazi spies and secret agents.”[1] Leo Stein describes in his book I Was in Hell with Niemoeller how the Gestapo gathered evidence against Niemoeller:
Now, the charge against Niemoeller was based entirely on his sermons, which the Gestapo agents had taken down stenographically. But in none of his sermons did Pastor Niemoeller exhort his congregation to overthrow the Nazi regime. He merely raised his voice against some of the Nazi policies, particularly the policy directed against the Church. He had even refrained from criticizing the Nazi government itself or any of its personnel. Under the former government his sermons would have been construed only as an exercise of the right of free speech. Now, however, written laws, no matter how explicitly they were worded, were subjected to the interpretation of the judges.[2]
In a June 27, 1937 sermon, Niemoeller made it clear to those in attendance had a sacred duty to speak out on the evils of the Nazi regime no matter what the consequences: “We have no more thought of using our own powers to escape the arm of the authorities than had the Apostles of old. No more are we ready to keep silent at man’s behest when God commands us to speak. For it is, and must remain, the case that we must obey God rather than man.”[3] A few days later, he was arrested. His crime? “Abuse of the pulpit.”
The “Special Courts” set up by the Nazis made claims against pastors who spoke out against Hitler’s policies. Niemoeller was not the only one singled out by the Gestapo. “Some 807 other pastors and leading laymen of the ‘Confessional Church’ were arrested in 1937, and hundreds more in the next couple of years.”[4] A group of Confessional Churches in Germany, founded by Pastor Niemoeller and other Protestant ministers, drew up a proclamation to confront the political changes taking place in Germany that threatened the people “with a deadly danger. The danger lies in a new religion,” the proclamation declared. “The church has by order of its Master to see to it that in our people Christ is given the honor that is proper to the Judge of the world . . . The First Commandment says ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ The new religion is a rejection of the First Commandment.”[5] Five hundred pastors who read the proclamation from their pulpits were arrested.
The First Amendment protects pastors who speak out on today’s moral issues: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The other four freedoms — speech, press, assembly, and petition—should not be separated from the first freedom. This amendment is so clear in its language, logic, and history that groups like Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the American Civil Liberties Union repeatedly misstate it or ignore its specific and easily understood language. If enough churches stood firm on these freedoms and called these organizations’ bluff by refusing to be intimidated and daring them to take them to court, the IRS’s bullying tactics would fail.
Writing his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in 1963, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., a liberal icon for so many on the political left, based his refusal to follow certain man-made laws on the claim that they were a violation of the permanent nature of the moral law. He further supported his argument by an appeal to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bible:
We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights.
A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.
Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks, before submitting to certain unjust laws of the Roman empire.
I’m grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle.
It was “through the Negro church” that the struggle for civil rights became a reality. How can moral wrongs ever be made right if the very people who are protesting these moral wrongs are silenced in terms of laws that were written and are being enforced by unelected bureaucrats? David L. Lewis, in his biography of King, sums up the argument: “Finally, [King] reminded his fellow ministers that the laws of Hitler’s Reich had been ‘legal.’”[6] If officials at the IRS were to apply their Gestapo tactics retroactively, they would have issued a press release commending the “Special Courts” in Germany for taking action against activist pastors who used their pulpits for “political purposes.”
William Shirer paints a depressing picture of the state of the Christian church in 1938. “Not many Germans lost much sleep over the arrests of a few thousand pastors and priests.”[7]
The time to stop the intimidation is now before we are silenced forever!
- Basil Miller, Martin Niemoeller: Hero of the Concentration Camp, 5th ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1942), 112. [↩]
- Leo Stein, I Was in Hell with Niemoeller (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1942), 175. [↩]
- Quoted in William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 239. [↩]
- Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 239. [↩]
- Quoted in Eugene Davidson, The Trials of the Germans: An Account of the Twenty-Two Defendants before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, [1966] 1997), 275. [↩]
- David L. Lewis, King: A Critical Biography (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1970), 190. [↩]
- Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 240. [↩]