I. A Stolen Prophet
What happens when the language of resistance gets hijacked by the very forces it was designed to resist?
It’s a question I find myself returning to again and again these days, as I watch words I once found liberating get weaponized in ways that would horrify the people who first spoke them. And perhaps no theft is more audacious, more theologically disorienting, than what has happened to the legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Here’s what I mean: Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for reshaping American government along authoritarian lines—invokes Bonhoeffer’s phrase “costly grace” as part of its justification. The architects of Christian nationalism have claimed the anti-Nazi theologian as one of their own.
This isn’t homage. It’s theft. It’s the kind of theological sleight-of-hand that would have made Bonhoeffer reach for his sharpest pen—because this is precisely the move he spent his life resisting. And if we’re going to understand why this appropriation is so perverse, we need to do something that too few American Christians have done: we need to actually read Discipleship in its historical context.
When we do, I think we’ll discover something unsettling. Those who claim Bonhoeffer’s mantle today are, in fact, the very people he was writing against.
II. The Book We Think We Know
For decades, American evangelicals have treated Discipleship (often published as The Cost of Discipleship) as a spiritual self-help book. It sits on shelves next to devotional classics, read as a call to personal commitment, private sacrifice, radical individual faith. It is in church libraries across the theological spectrum. Campus ministries assign it. Pastors quote the famous opening lines about cheap and costly grace in sermons about getting serious with God.
This reading isn’t exactly wrong. But it’s dangerously incomplete. It’s a bit like reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” as general advice about patience, or treating Frederick Douglass’s speeches as timeless reflections on human dignity without mentioning slavery. You can extract universal truths from these texts, but if you miss the specific evil they were addressing, you’ve missed the point.
Here’s what we miss when we read Bonhoeffer devotionally: He wrote Discipleship in 1937, under surveillance by the Nazi state, while leading an illegal seminary that the government had declared unlawful. His students weren’t signing up for a spiritual retreat—they were forfeiting careers, pensions, and legal status. They were accepting social rejection and constant surveillance. They were making a choice that could land them in prison or worse.
And “cheap grace” wasn’t an abstract theological category Bonhoeffer invented for Sunday school discussions. It was a precise diagnosis of what had gone wrong in the German church—a church that was blessing the Nazi state while its pastors kept their salaries and their respectability.
So let’s do what Bonhoeffer would want us to do. Let’s read carefully. Let’s read historically. And then let’s read prophetically.
III. Germany’s Church Struggle
To understand Discipleship, we need to understand what was happening in the German church between 1935 and 1937—the years of what Bonhoeffer called the Kirchenkampf, the “Church Struggle.”
By the mid-1930s, a movement called the “German Christians” (Deutsche Christen) had emerged within Protestantism. These weren’t fringe figures—they were pastors, theologians, and church leaders who genuinely believed that Adolf Hitler was God’s chosen instrument for the German people. They sought to align the church with Nazi ideology, creating what they called a “Volkskirche“—a “people’s church” defined by racial solidarity and national destiny rather than by the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The German Christians adopted the Aryan Paragraph, excluding anyone of Jewish descent from church leadership—including baptized Christians whose only “crime” was having Jewish grandparents. They removed the Old Testament from their Bibles because it was too Jewish. They preached sermons celebrating Hitler’s rise as divine providence. They hung swastikas in their sanctuaries.
But here’s what I find most haunting, and most relevant to our moment: the German Christians were not the majority. Most German Lutherans didn’t join that movement. Most considered themselves “neutral”—neither Nazi sympathizers nor active resisters. They wanted to preserve their churches, their institutions, their traditions. They sought stability through accommodation.
Bonhoeffer saw this “neutrality” for what it was: complicity. He warned that the “intact” churches—those not yet taken over by the German Christians—would eventually become the state’s “best allies” precisely because they prioritized institutional self-preservation over truth. They would bless the regime with their silence.
In response, Bonhoeffer helped lead the Confessing Church, a movement that declared, in the Barmen Declaration of 1934, that Jesus Christ—not Hitler—was Lord. In 1935, he assumed leadership of an underground seminary at Finkenwalde, training pastors for a church that refused to be absorbed by the state.
To outside observers, this looked like a retreat. Bonhoeffer was leaving the political fray of Berlin for a remote forest in Pomerania. But Bonhoeffer understood something crucial: the church had lost its ability to speak prophetically because it had lost its substance. Before the church could resist the state externally, it had to recover its identity as the church internally. He called this “the second battle of the church struggle”—a fight not against the state directly, but for the soul of the church itself.
Discipleship and Life Together—the two books that emerged from Finkenwalde—were training manuals for this second battle.
IV. Discipleship as Political Theology
Now we’re ready to read Discipleship as Bonhoeffer intended it to be read: not as devotional literature, but as what scholars call a Kampfschrift—a “resistance writing” or polemic. Every page is charged with the electricity of his moment.
“Cheap Grace” as Political Accusation
“Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church.” That famous opening line wasn’t a generic spiritual exhortation. It was a specific accusation against the German church of 1937.
What did Bonhoeffer mean by cheap grace? He meant grace understood as a theological “dispensation”—a doctrine that allows Christians to embrace national solidarity, racial ideology, and political accommodation without feeling obligated to obey Jesus’ concrete commands. Cheap grace is what happens when Christianity becomes a cultural identity rather than a costly discipleship. It’s the grace that whispers: You can be a good Christian and a good Nazi. You can love Jesus and look away from your Jewish neighbor. You can follow Christ and follow the Führer.
The German church had made its peace with Hitler because it had embraced cheap grace—grace that demanded nothing, challenged nothing, cost nothing. And Bonhoeffer was calling that out as heresy.
“Simple Obedience” vs. the Führer Principle
The Nazi state operated on what it called the “Führer principle,” which demanded total, unquestioning loyalty to Adolf Hitler as the supreme authority. Hitler wasn’t just a political leader; he was presented as a quasi-religious figure, the embodiment of the German soul, worthy of absolute allegiance.
Against this, Bonhoeffer placed the central demand of Discipleship: “simple obedience” to Jesus Christ.
This wasn’t a call to private spiritual devotion. It was a direct political counter-claim. Bonhoeffer argued that discipleship requires an exclusive attachment to Jesus that breaks all other immediate allegiances—including allegiances to nation, race, or leader. If you owe absolute obedience to Christ, you cannot offer ultimate allegiance to anyone else. Not to a party. Not to a movement. Not to a strongman who promises to make your country great again.
For Bonhoeffer, this wasn’t abstract theology. It was a matter of life and death. Several of his seminary students would later be arrested. Some would die. Bonhoeffer himself would be executed by the Nazis in 1945, just weeks before the war ended.
The Sermon on the Mount as Public Theology
Traditional German Lutheranism had developed an interpretation of the “two kingdoms” that conveniently relegated Jesus’ most challenging teachings—the Sermon on the Mount—to the private sphere. Love your enemies? That’s personal ethics. Turn the other cheek? That’s spiritual counsel. But the public sphere—politics, economics, warfare—was governed by different rules entirely. The state operated by its own logic, and the Sermon on the Mount didn’t apply there.
This “two spheres” thinking allowed German Christians to support state violence while maintaining personal piety. You could pray in the morning and bless the Nazi war machine in the afternoon. You could read Jesus’ words about loving enemies and then support policies that stripped Jews of citizenship.
Bonhoeffer rejected this completely. In Discipleship, he insisted there is one reality, ruled by Christ. The Sermon on the Mount isn’t an impossible ideal or a private aspiration—it’s a binding command for life in the world. Love of enemies, nonviolence, refusal to retaliate—these aren’t just personal virtues. They’re the politics of the Kingdom of God.
And that meant the church had every right—indeed, a duty—to judge state actions against the word of Christ.
The Church as Counter-Community
The Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung sought to “synchronize” all institutions under party control. Every organization—from labor unions to the news media to youth groups to churches—was to be absorbed into the totalitarian whole. There would be no independent spaces, no alternative communities, no competing loyalties.
Bonhoeffer’s response was to describe the church as a “space set apart”—a territory with its own authority, defined not by blood or nation but by baptism and the Holy Spirit. To be the church is to refuse absorption into the totalitarian project. The church exists as a counter-community, a place where different rules apply, where the categories of race and nation and political loyalty are secondary to identity in Christ.
This is why Finkenwalde mattered so much to Bonhoeffer. It wasn’t just a school. It was a living demonstration that another way of being human together was possible—a community formed by Christ rather than by the Volk.
Solidarity with Victims
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Bonhoeffer insisted that the church must stand with the victims of the state. “Whoever from now on attacks the least of these people attacks Christ,” he wrote.
This wasn’t even popular in the Confessing Church. Many of his fellow resisters wanted to defend Jewish Christians—baptized members of the church who happened to have Jewish ancestry. They were slower to defend Jews as such. But Bonhoeffer pushed further. He identified Christ with the suffering and the outcast. He developed what he later called the “view from below”—seeing history from the perspective of its victims rather than its victors.
This wasn’t abstract solidarity. His discipleship had hands and feet called to serve Christ found in the face of every Other.
V. The Perverse Appropriation
Now we can return to where we started: Project 2025’s invocation of “costly grace.”
The architects of Christian nationalism are quoting Bonhoeffer. They’re claiming his language. They suggest that their project exemplifies the kind of sacrificial Christian commitment that Bonhoeffer called for.
But what did Bonhoeffer actually mean by “costly grace”? He meant grace that calls us to obey Christ even when it costs us everything—security, status, national belonging. Costly grace is what his seminarians experienced when they joined an illegal church and lost their careers. Costly grace is what Bonhoeffer experienced when he left the safety of America to return to Germany, knowing he might not survive. Costly grace is what led him to the gallows at Flossenbürg.
Project 2025 offers the opposite. It offers a vision where Christians seize power to impose their will on others. Where “sacrifice” means accepting the discomfort of ruling over people who disagree with you. Where the church aligns itself with state power rather than standing apart from it.
Consider what Project 2025 actually proposes: aligning the church with state power, using Christianity to underwrite national identity, demanding loyalty to a political movement as the mark of faithfulness, and marginalizing the vulnerable—immigrants, LGBTQ+ persons, religious minorities—in the name of “biblical values.”
This is not costly grace. This is the precise structure of cheap grace that Bonhoeffer diagnosed in 1937.
The irony would make Bonhoeffer weep. I know it makes me weep. The people quoting him are playing the role of the German Christians in our American drama. They’re using theological language to baptize authoritarianism. They’re offering a Christianity that demands nothing from the powerful and everything from the vulnerable. They’re creating a Volkskirche for America—a people’s church defined by national identity and political allegiance rather than by costly obedience to Christ.
They are the German Christians quoting the Confessing Church. This is as obtuse as Caesar celebrating Jesus Christ and hoping no one notices that he is hanging on a Roman cross.
VI. The American Church Struggle
I want to be careful here. America in 2026 is not Germany in 1935. We are not living under a Nazi regime. Historical analogies can illuminate, but they can also distort if we press them too far.
But I think we are in a struggle for the soul of the American church. And the dynamics Bonhoeffer identified are alive and well among us.
We have a movement seeking to fuse Christian identity with national and political identity—a movement that treats support for a particular leader as the mark of authentic faith. We have demands for loyalty that rival the loyalty we owe to Christ. We have churches blessing power rather than standing with the powerless. We have a theology that offers spiritual comfort to those in power without demanding any costly obedience.
And we have a silent middle—Christians who aren’t quite comfortable with the direction things are going but who prioritize institutional stability, denominational unity, and not making waves. They’re the “intact churches” of our moment, and Bonhoeffer would have harsh words for them.
The questions we must ask ourselves are uncomfortable: Who are the “German Christians” in our context—those aligning the church with authoritarian nationalism? Who are the “neutral” churches—those seeking institutional survival through accommodation? And who are the voices calling us to a second battle—to recover the substance of the church before we can speak a prophetic word?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Many American Christians who invoke Bonhoeffer are functionally aligned with the forces he resisted. And many who have never read him—who may not even be Christian—are, by their solidarity with the marginalized and their refusal to bless empire, living out his vision more faithfully than those who quote him.
VII. What Costly Grace Looks Like Now
Bonhoeffer taught that the church’s truth depends on its form of existence. A church that has made peace with injustice cannot speak a prophetic word—it has lost the substance necessary to be heard. Only a community actually practicing discipleship—obedience to Christ, solidarity with victims, willingness to suffer—has the standing to resist.
So what would costly grace look like in America today?
It would mean refusing to let Christianity be a tool for political domination. It would mean standing with immigrants, with the LGBTQ+ community, with the poor—the “least of these” whom authoritarian Christianity would marginalize. It would mean being willing to lose status, influence, and institutional security for the sake of faithfulness. It would mean building communities of discipleship that are not chaplains to empire but witnesses to another Kin-dom.
Perhaps, like Bonhoeffer, we may find hope, not in the political fray itself, overwhelmed by crisis upon crisis, but in an alternative community bound by a higher allegiance. We may need to form communities that embody an alternative. The first battle is against the state’s overreach. The second battle is for the soul of the church itself. And Bonhoeffer insisted that we cannot win the first battle if we lose the second.
This is the work of what Bonhoeffer called “religionless Christianity”—a faith not performed for cultural respectability but lived in concrete obedience. It doesn’t ask “How can Christianity help us gain power?” but “What does following Jesus require of us, even if it costs us everything?”
VIII. Returning the Fire
We cannot allow Bonhoeffer’s words to be appropriated by those who embody everything he opposed. Reading him rightly is itself an act of resistance.
But Bonhoeffer doesn’t invite us to admire him from a distance. He invites us to ask the question he asked himself in 1935: What does obedience to Christ cost me—cost us—today? Who is Jesus Christ for us today?
If our Christianity costs us nothing—if it aligns perfectly with our political tribe, if it offers us comfort without demanding solidarity with the suffering, if it gives us power rather than calling us to serve—we may have found the “cheap grace” Bonhoeffer warned us about. We may be the German Christians of our generation, using the right words in the service of the wrong kingdom.
The good news is that costly grace is still available. It always is. It simply requires what it has always required: that we hear the call of Jesus, leave our nets, and follow.
Not into power. Into service.
Not into dominion. Into love.
Not into empire. Into the Kingdom.
“Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship
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